Website Mechanical Problems!

Hello Devo Nation,

Levi Kurlander here, Director of Durango Devo! I wanted to write a personal note to address the website technical issues some of you experienced during our Spring ’24 registration launch last weekend.

For those of you who have been with us for a few years, you’ll not be surprised to hear that Devo had technical issues. Devo’s programs have grown faster than our technology, and since 2020, I have found myself struggling repeatedly to provide website services on the scale required to get our families registered smoothly and efficiently.

Devo has not yet done enough to improve the user experience on our website. As a result, your registration experience has been unpredictable and sometimes frustrating. For that, I offer my sincere apologies and want to tell you about the steps Devo is taking toward real and permanent improvements to our website.

First, on February 16th, we launched our brand new website with a cleaner, more modern layout, faster customer support, and a much-improved registration process.

Along with the new site, we upgraded hosting and server technology. We believed that these upgrades (nearly 4x the server capacity of our old site), combined with the new spread-out registration waves, would prevent a slow and cumbersome registration experience for our users. Unfortunately, we were wrong. On registration morning on the 24th, our website server resources became overwhelmed, and much like a traffic jam on the highway, many of you found yourselves stuck in the website traffic, unable to access registration.

I take full responsibility for that shortfall, and since last Saturday, have been working hard to address this issue. Here are the steps we are taking now to ensure our site is properly equipped for our next registration launch:
As an immediate stopgap measure, we have upgraded our hosting service to utilize the most advanced server product available through our current hosting company. This significantly boosts the number of people who can access our website at once.
For the longer term, we are upgrading to different server technology that is specifically designed to handle large numbers of requests for interactive and uncached pages— tech-speak for the big surges in simultaneous registrations we see on registration day.
We are planning live diagnostics and tests on our site to ensure that the server upgrades we implement will actually be sufficient to handle all of the traffic, and more, of a busy registration day. We will also address any problems with our website infrastructure during these diagnostics.
Lastly, we will do everything we can to shuffle coaching resources around to accommodate all would-be Devo riders. If you are on a waitlist for a program because of a technical issue on Saturday morning, please submit a Support Request at durangodevo.com to let us know. We look forward to hearing from you.
To make a long story short, improving our web services is still at the top of my priorities list, and we are looking into every available option to improve your future registration experiences with us. I regret that we haven’t been able to fix these website issues sooner and I apologize again for the inconvenience and frustration it has caused.

In the meantime, thank you for your patience and understanding! We are so grateful for your support.

Onward and upward!

Levi Kurlander
Executive Director
director@durangodevo.com
970-403-5187