The site can be seen at http://www.classhunt.com
Full story:
I launched ClassHunt about a month ago. The campus newspaper covered and ~500 people are using it so far. Many are totally in love with it("ClassHunt is AWESOME! I give you serious props for creating this site. I've already told a couple of friends about it and one of them has had the same luck that I have. You're going to prevent a lot of headaches with this system! :)").
The technology behind is in python. It queries the uni's server for every department on campus and parses the course data. At first, I was querying every minute, so ~130 requests/minute. Now I am querying every 15minutes.
Few days ago I received an email that my server IP had been blocked. The lady from IT dept was very nice and willing to work with me to find a resolution. For now, we agreed to increase the interval to 15 minutes. Still they could not unblock because they were still having issues with the load and people higher up won't approve.
Having been a student here for a few years, what happens is towards the end and beginning of each semester, our course registration system starts crawling. This is because too many folks are checking grades and signing up for classes. It lasts 3-4 days. This is what seems to have happened this week as our school year came to an end. It seems like they are blaming my app for their years of issue with system overload.
I am confident it was not my app causing the problems. Nothing is bigger proof than the Chancellor's staff writing to me that they are still having problems even after blocking me.
Still, I don't want to get in a verbal war with them and rather just find a solution that works.
How should I respond to this letter from the school's CIO/Chancellor for IT?