Hey everyone,
We wanted to take a moment to talk about the downtimes we experienced in the month of June. A lot has happened over the last month, and we know that most hasn’t necessarily been “visible” to you, our users.
We experienced a large increase in our user base, and we’ve been working through some growing pains. On June 14th, some of you may have noticed the website start to slow down during peak hours, especially during the chat giveaways.
Since then, we’ve completely upgraded our server architecture and hardware - this was completed on June 20th.
This upgrade has virtually eliminated the slowness issues we were experiencing, and ensures that we’ll be able to more seamlessly handle growth in the future. The server upgrade was a big project (with a lot of moving parts) and was the cause of some of the additional downtime to a portion of our users this past weekend. We do our best to anticipate these types of issues and to let you know when we plan downtime. Unfortunately, on June 29th we missed updating the forums for that period. While some of our users may not have been affected, we would like to apologize to those that were.
In addition to the scaling / user growth side of things, as we’re getting more popular, we’re also having to deal with more frequent DDOS attacks. One of the largest was experienced by our host, and international routing channels were actually switched over due to the size of this attack. We were not the only book that felt this, as several very large FIAT books in Costa Rica were also affected during the same period.
Again, for everyone affected, we absolutely share your frustration. Nothing is worse for us than the website going down. We’re always working to bring it back up, as well as keeping you notified here and on Twitter as quickly as possible.
While we may not have seen the last of these growing pains, we do want to thank everyone that has stood by us during the issues last month. The larger we can grow the community and the more mainstream bitcoin becomes, the better it is not only for us, but for you as a bitcoin user as well.
We’d like to take this opportunity to announce a new feature on Nitrogen: “bet coupons”. Coupons are free bets that you can make on your Nitrogen account. They cost you nothing, and you get to keep whatever you win: no rollovers, no further betting requirements. We’ll be giving free bets away over the coming weeks on Twitter, the forum and in our chat room as we perfect them based on your feedback!
As a first trial of these coupons, we’ll be awarding some to the frequent users who bet with us during the month of June. If, during June 11 - July 1 you made at least 20 wagers on Nitrogen, then we’ve already credited your account with a free bet coupon. The value of the coupon is based on your average bet size during that period, up to a maximum of 0.1 BTC.
If you missed the 20 bet requirement, please check your account anyway. We’ve randomly selected and credited 500 additional accounts with a free coupon wager of 0.001. You don’t need a balance in your account to use the coupon, it’s just a free bet!
Thanks again for your patience; we’re incredibly lucky to have such loyal and fantastic bettors!
The Nitrogen Sports Team
nice thanks! just put my free bet on machida
