“performance issues are getting to the point where subscribers should be compensated for them.”
We received this feedback over the summer and I wanted to address it. Bookiebashing.net is a 24/7/365 service. We aim to provide a suite of trackers and tools that you can access at 2:45am on Christmas day morning (should you wish).
A key objective is to keep the odds as up to date and current as possible. We use a mixture of servers, scrapers, feeds and manual entry to do this.
The bookmakers do not want us reading their content. We are their adversary and they employ large, multi million pound IT teams who do their best to block us. (There is no higher compliment we could receive than the effort they put into doing this).
The bookies have various tactics up their sleeves; they change a bit of code here, a URL there, they block an IP address they guess is being used to access data. When this happens you may see a bookie like William Hill disappear from a tracker, or stale odds appear on the tracker, or occasionally the whole tracker may get blocked and we need to jump into action.
To fix it we may need to change an IP address, build a new virtual machine, change some code on a scraper – the solution varies depending on the problem.
Often we fix it in a few seconds and you won’t have known it happened.
Sometimes it takes a few minutes.
Occasionally it may take an hour or two (if the problem is particularly difficult, or perhaps life gets in the way – we may be attending a doctors appointment for one of the kids).
It is an impossible task to keep all of the odds up to date and current 24/7/365 and it is an unrealistic expectation. We apologise if we’ve led to an expectation where things will be up to date and current 24/7/365.
What we have done over time is continually invest, reinvest and build on backup solutions to keep downtime and stale odds at a minimum. This month we have recruited another IT specialist to help us out. This means we’ve doubled the size of our IT team from one to two (in comparison, the IT teams in other betting communities are 20+ strong).
Our number 1 priority in the background is to continually improve performance and stability and to minimise downtime and to minimise stale or missing odds. Occasionally things can slow down when an unexpected amount of data comes through (such as on recent Saturday mornings) and we are investing into making these intensive periods run smoother.
We will never be able to reach a point where nothing is stale and nothing is missing 24/7 because of the nature of this game. The bookies are always looking to block us. Regardless we will continue to do our best to stay live, stay current and stay on top of anything that drops out.
As for compensation for members for the performance of the site?
It is our assessment that the performance of the site is relatively good, that our uptime is excellent and that we provide enough content to cover the cost of a subscription many multiple times over.