Registration Website Update

Some users experienced problems during the first couple hours connecting to the Sharkathon.com website at the start of this year’s registration. We are bummed & regret that some of you had a frustrating time trying to ensure your place, and that the frustration was shared. In brief, approx five minutes before we opened registration the Sharkathon.com site suddenly had over 12,000 connections that we being generated from just a few IP addresses. In essence we were being visited by a Denial of Service attack, which did just that. Deny service to the website (no data was ever at risk, just clogging the pipes).

We worked very hard to quickly identify the sources of the attack and to implement measures to deny access. Being that the addresses showed to be coming from shared servers in China, we feel confident we are not unduly restricting access to any potential registrants for this year’s Sharkathon by permanently blocking.

The legitimate traffic did prevail and a great many of you have successfully registered, we thank you for your patience.

As a result of this incident Sharkathon.com website has implemented additional measures so that episodes such as today have little to no impact on site performance in the future.

Many of you have emailed us at info2009@sharkathon.com with issues and we are working through them one by one to ensure everyone is taken care of. Continue to send us feedback or issues, and we will quickly get back to you.

If you were one of the early registrants and encountered trouble please ensure you have successfully paid and have an email receipt showing so. If you tried to purchase your tickets however do not have a receipt showing paid email us with the Order Id and we will quickly help you complete the transaction.

Being that there are fewer of those that had trouble registering than not, we are happy that we have again successfully process hundreds of registrations on the first day and we are excited to have another great year with great fishing and of course great prizes. Raffle tickets are selling hot and you aren’t going to want to miss out on all the great items being raffled off so make sure you don’t forget your tickets! And you can always come back between now and the cutoff date to purchase additional raffle tickets.

 

2009 Sharkathon Staff