Since 1993, CricInfo has been working to provide users like you with comprehensive coverage of Cricket played all over the world. Starting with IRC and Gopher in the early days and the World Wide Web for over seven years, we have attempted to cover all cricket, all around the world, all the time, in a manner we feel no one else can match, all brought to you at no cost to you.

We are today the busiest single sport website in the world and our biggest challenge has been to keep pace with the growth in our user base and increasing usage of our site, to provide users like you with fast access to our site at all times. Invariably, we deliver over 10 million page views on match days, serving up to 20 million page views occasionally. As a result, on busy match days, our site often seems to be slow for many users.

There are many reasons for this. Some, such as the quality of the connection between you and your Internet Service Provider, or your Internet Service Provider and our servers, are beyond CricInfo’s control. But we are constantly looking to improve speed and efficiency in those areas where we can make a difference. We now operate multiple servers based in 8 countries, and we are continually refining and improving our servers. However, on big match days, the more servers we add and the faster our servers run, the more you like to use them. And it seems that many of you just can't get enough of the site when the big matches are on. Most of you may have experienced this at major news sites when a big story is breaking, only it happens at CricInfo every match day.

Both servers and bandwidth are quite expensive today and on peak match days, our bandwidth requirements (and associated costs) skyrocket. Without a means of covering these costs, it is very difficult to provide users with assured fast access to the site at all times. We have been trying very hard to do so, but have come to believe that the only way to provide users with assured fast access to CricInfo at all times is to charge users a nominal annual subscription fee to cover our costs.

Taking user feedback into account, we have put together "CricInfo Plus" - a new subscription service that will include all of the regular CricInfo.com fare, but on an exclusive network of servers reserved only for subscribers, in an effort to assure subscribers of fast, priority access to the site at all times.

Free access to CricInfo.com will continue to be available

Having said this, we would like to assure our users that this is not the end of free access to CricInfo. We do realise that for many users around the world, CricInfo is the only source for up to date cricket coverage. We will continue to provide those users who are unable to pay the nominal subscription fee for CricInfo Plus, with free access to CricInfo, by continuing to maintain and operate servers to provide free access to CricInfo’s web site, as we have done till date.

To use a cricketing analogy, all of us cricket fans have always had the choice of watching a cricket match at the ground by paying for the best seats at the ground or settling for other seats (paid or free) and watching the very same match. CricInfo will continue this tradition by providing users the choice of accessing either the network of exclusive CricInfo Plus servers assuring fast access to the site at all times, or the network of free-to-access servers.

To access CricInfo Plus for the first time, a login area is provided at the top right corner of this page.

• If you are already a registered CricInfo user, you can use your existing username and password along with your email address (the address at which you received the email inviting you for beta testing) to access the CricInfo Plus servers.
• If you are currently not a registered CricInfo user, please type your email address in the space provided and then go through the registration process to access the CricInfo Plus servers.

If you have any problems in accessing CricInfo Plus, please don’t hesitate to contact us at help@plus.cricinfo.com.

We look forward to hearing from you on your experience with CricInfo Plus. We will follow up with another mail to you in a week’s time to find out what each of you think about CricInfo Plus. In the meanwhile, please feel free to contact us at any time at help@plus.cricinfo.com with your comments and suggestions.

Thank you for your interest and your time.

– The CricInfo Team