Enrolment Day: not one of our best days

As you would no doubt be aware, we experienced major problems and frustrations with our Booking System today.  We thank everyone for their patience and perseverance.  

Fortunately things improved by around 11:30 and by lunchtime we saw that over 1,000 bookings had been made.  We want to highlight that this was a widespread issue that affected us all, even the Enrolment Team waiting to book the Paper Enrolments - so we were all in the same proverbial boat.

If you haven't already booked a place in your chosen Course, please try again as we still have vacancies in many classes.  If your chosen Course is full, we recommend you place yourself on the Waitlist as there is usually a lot of movement in Courses during the first few weeks of the U3APP year.  

You can check the Course Guide on our website by clicking here - you'll be able to see which courses still have places available or you'll see the word 'WAITLIST' next to it.  Just make sure you're logged on before you try to book, then click on either the Course Name to book, or the word 'WAITLIST' if it's full.
 

Please check your enrolments 

As a result of the high load on the system, not all confirmation emails were sent. Please check the Your Courses and Events page to find out what Courses you are enrolled in, and any Courses you are Waitlisted for.  If you find you are neither Enrolled nor Waitlisted for a Course you wanted to get into, please Enrol or Waitlist yourself.

To check your Enrolments, go to the website and log in, then hover your mouse over the 'Membership' tab in the black bar at the top of the page, then click on 'Your Courses and Events' and you'll see a list of all the Courses you are either booked or Waitlisted for.   Please note, Paper Enrolment Waitlists won't show up yet, however all have been actioned in the order they were received, and will be on the website by tomorrow.

Enrolment issues: quick explanation

First please note that the issues with logging in and enrolling were the same for everyone, including the volunteers who were entering paper enrolments. So whether and when you were able to login and enrol was the luck of the draw.

We expected high traffic on the website on Enrolment Day and made arrangements to have greater than usual capacity on the day. Despite this, we exceeded the capacity. This created a catch-22 situation where the more people who kept trying, the more load we put on the system, and so it took until about 11:30 before things started to work close to normally. 

Technical explanation

Our website is hosted by SiteGround. We contacted them more than a month ago to discuss ways of making sure that we would get good response time on Enrolment Day. They recommended that we upgrade to a Cloud server for a month, which we did. They informed us that the resources available would also be scaled up if there were capacity issues. However unfortunately we did not understand that the up-scaling was something that had to be turned on. When we had issues on Enrolment Day we contacted SiteGround who turned on the up-scaling but with so many people repeatedly trying to access the system, it took some time to resolve the problem.