The James Logan Courier

Courier Staff Report

A surge of activity on The Courier's website triggered the suspension of the online high school newspaper's account Tuesday, leaving would-be readers without access to the site and its stories.

A technician at Visionhead Technologies, The Courier's hosting service, said "The system had suspended the account because it is using up too many resources."

"I noticed that I couldn't access the website at around 6 a.m.," said Patrick Hannigan, the newspaper's faculty advisor. " We started getting complaints from readers at around 7 a.m."

The website was back online by late afternoon.

"We couldn't access our maintenance portal, and so were unable to post stories normally, so we'll be unable to provide our full line of stories today," Hannigan said. "We apologize for that. We intend to return to normal operations tomorrow.

Readership has spiked at the online newspaper, said to be the only year-round daily high school news source in the world, in recent months, according to The Courier's web traffic analysis software. Readership this month is running at about 4,200 daily visitors, up from about 3,900 in April and about 4,000 in March. Daily visitors peaked at 6,362 visitors on May 6.

Still, Hannigan was perplexed as to why the site went down. "We're well within our bandwidth usage limits for the month, and recent software upgrades have cut the amount of spam traffic signficantly, so I'm not sure what's going on."

"We're going to look into it, though," he said.