BLACK AND WHITE FRIDAY AROUND HERE IN SKISOUTHEAST LAND!!!

First Trax

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How do you judge a crazy-visited website? When you can’t deliver all the content!

We thought we had experienced about us much traffic in one day as we possibly could – last December when the first huge snowfall hit. That day we recorded more than 135,000 unique visitors to our ski, webcam and weather content. Overnight last night we had a number of television stations talking about us all at the same time (evidently) because sometime overnight the server didn’t crash – but our ability to deliver the websites did!

Last year we invested in one of the biggest, baddest servers you could possible have to deliver our four-pronged network that consists of SkiNorthCarolina.com, SkiSoutheast.com, HighCountryWebCams.com and HighCountryWeather.com. This morning we began to experience as many as 3100 connections per minute to hit the server…and it did it’s job as the quad core system was only burning about 3% of its resources. HOWEVER, we evidently didn’t have the resources optimally configured because nearly nearly two-thirds of the people trying to see the snow and check our weather and ski content – couldn’t.

The techies setup some fancy "web gardens" and now we’re delivering to 100% of our audience, but we’re seeing 60% of our resources being eaten up! According to our admin guys in Dallas, Texas at the cuurent rate of page delivery to all four major websites that we’re pushing – we’ll see more than 418,000 unique visitors – TODAY.

E-v-i-d-e-n-t-l-y we’re doing our job a little too well! Interesting enough we haven’t even kicked in our new Communications team that will be getting our name out to more media than ever before…which is scary!

So we’ve dubbed today as "Black Friday" around here as we’ve certainly missed out on nearly two-thirds of our traffic for the first half of today!

THE WHITE PART??? Snow, of course.

While we haven’t seen that FIRST HUGE SNOWFALL yet this season, evidently it doesn’t take a whole lot to get your juices flowing this season. It HAS been snowing most all day from Snowshoe down into the Appalachian Mountain, but for the most part this snow isn’t really sticking a lot – yet. I’m sure some areas have HAD perhaps two inches of snow, but you won’t find it unless you search around some corner where snow goes to die.

Thus far there’s a good dusting to an inch of snow here and there. That IS expected to change as you’ll see via our updated weather forecast.

For the most part we’re thinking most locations at the highest elevations may see 3-6" of snow by the time we get to Saturday evening. Snowshoe COULD see a bit more than that. Most of the NC mountains will see perhaps a bit less than the favorable ridgetop areas. The BIG NEWS is that Cat and Sugar are still making snow. The "race" is certainly ON and from what we can see Sugar has a bit of a "lead" in terms of getting open by Saturday morning.

We really don’t want to steal anyone’s thunder because neither Sugar nor Cat are tipping their hands as yet. HOWEVER we’d be VERY SURPRISED if Sugar is not open at 9am Saturday morning to the 3/4 station. Sugar actually LOOKS like they could open tonight (at least from the road), but the bottom of the mountain is pretty bare.

That’s it for now.

If you’re trying to hit HighCountryWebCams.com the server is peddling just as fast as it can to deliver, and we’ll be working to get that playing for what evidently will be an amazing amount of traffic.

We’ve scheduled a research meeting Monday to handle it…so bring it on people!

Be sure to check back often for more photos being posted as well as our video blog. If you have not yet visited our Ski Messageboard Forum you should do so.

We’ll be sharing TONS more input about our plans for this season, but for a little sneak peek visit:

www.HighCountryWebCams.com  
www.HighCountryWeather.com  
www.SkiSoutheast.com  

Send your comments, photos, videos and trip reports to: [email protected]

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