I am sure some of you out there have had occasion to use BikeReg or SkiReg in the past. This past weekend, they suffered some sort of data crash, and have been unable to retrieve the registration data for upcoming events. We time the Stowe Derby, a 800 person downhill Nordic event, and have been downloading registration data from SkiReg for the past month. I did a download Friday night and all was fine. Saturday was the packet stuffing & labels day and so at 6 am on Saturday I went on line to see if anything had trickled in overnight. The server was down, and when I called SkiReg I was told it was a small "maintainance" issue and they should be back up shortly. By 10 am I was told it would be soon, and then got an email saying probably fifteen more minutes. As the day wore on, the estimate kept getting longer, and by 5 they confessed that they would be unable to get me any more information before the race. We were able to piece together the last 12 "missing" hours and concluded that we had 32 participants in their database that we could not access. We did have the emails they send the promoter with each new registration, and so were able to pull off registration and the event with no further hiccups.
While they were very apologetic, the reality is that they lost the data at a most critical time. It is my understanding that they were to have a check out to the organizers this morning for the funds collected, but how they will actually come up with a verifiable amount, I have no idea.
If you go on line now, you just get this message "SkiReg.com is currently off-line for maintenance. We will be back online shortly." That same message has been up for 48 hours now.
If you currently use SkiReg or its sister BikeReg, you should look very carefully at their response to this dramatic failure. Not being able to access the database before your event will cause you some serious heartburn!
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