ECB relaunches club cricket portal

The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) is re-launching its play-cricket portal to cope with the increased demands on its servers from resurgent cricketing enthusiasts.

The aim of the re-launch is to ensure that its 60,000 plus registered users can access the site during peak periods without any inconsistencies in the service. The ECB is anticipating a dramatic increase in traffic, building on the current success of the England cricket team.

The ECB has teamed up with UK web hosting and domain name company NetBenefit to resolve any peak time access issues that would occur without a back end upgrade. NetBenefit will provide dedicated web hosting services for the ECB ensuring that the site will run more smoothly and not leave visitors frustrated.

“The nature of the site means that there are certain periods during the week when traffic levels peak with hundreds of users trying to access the site’s database-driven pages concurrently,” said Frank Kemp, the cricket operations manager for recreational cricket at the ECB. “We aim to have a strong and secure hosting solution.”

Play-cricket.com has blossomed into the official source of club cricket statistics in the UK. The site also acts as an administrative system for local clubs, enabling them to submit and regularly update information on fixtures, results and team profiles.

Enthusiasm for cricket is currently hitting new heights as a result of the success of the England team in the recent test series against the West Indies. The ECB is hoping for a further injection of interest at club level from England’s forthcoming involvement in the ICC Trophy.

England warm up for the ICC Trophy tomorrow with a short one-day series against India which can be followed ball-by-ball at the BBC’s Cricket site.