Hey lifters,

Firstly, apologies to those of you who took time out of your day to purchase tickets to the May Open or University Championships and weren’t able to. That’s our fault and we apologise for wasting your time.

What happened?

We had previously experienced performance problems with the site during the Leinster Open ticket sales however we upgraded the site’s resources (within the limited constraints of out current host) and things had gone much smoother during the Munster Open, Ulster Open, and ABS Open sales (admittedly, with slightly lower demand to varying degrees). We perhaps got a little over-confident, or short-sighted, when we planned sales for both competitions to happen simultaneously at 13:00 today.

Shortly before 13:00 today, many lifters started hitting the site preparing to purchase tickets for the May Open or University Championships which caused us to saturate the resources allocated to the site on our current shared hosting plan. As a result, we had difficulty getting the cached “Out of Stock” product pages refreshed with the “In Stock” pages and almost nobody could properly get pages to load in order to add the competition entries to their cart and check out.

What are we doing to fix it?

We’re going to do two things over the weekend (in between the small matter of the Munster Open) in order to rectify this:

1. Work with some friends of ours who have built and run a ticketing startup (similar to Eventbrite) to see if that might be a good option for future sales
2. Migrate the site away from the current host to a more powerful provider offering better bang for our (your!) buck

As a result of this, there may be a few brief periods over the weekend where the site is unavailable or inaccessible but it shouldn’t be for too long.

We’re also not going to put two competitions up for sale at the same time in future. We’ll stick to launching one competition at a time for everybody’s sake.

When can I buy tickets?

Tickets will go on sale at the following times:

University Championships: Monday, February 6th, at 13:00 Irish time

May Open 2017: Tuesday, February 7th, at 13:00 Irish time

Feedback is welcome over in the IrishPF Discussion Group on Facebook!

Thanks,
Rob