Malaysiakini will remain free until Friday as the online website boosts its server infrastructure to cope with a tremendous increase in readership.

"With the stunning electoral results on Saturday, there has been a huge influx of readers and subscribers to the website," said Malaysiakini CEO Premesh Chandran.

"Our existing systems have not been able to cope and our technical team is working around the clock to make drastic improvements.”

Malaysiakini has received a sudden spike in subscribers over the past few days as the one-week free period was expected to end on Tuesday.

“We discovered that our servers are unable to cope with the additional log-ins and we decided to keep our site open to ensure Malaysiakini subscribers need not log in to access the site until we have sorted out the problem,” said Chandran.

Malaysiakini will however be switching back to a subscriber-only website on March 14.

Chandran urged those who plan to subscribe to do so now and not to wait until Friday. “This is to avoid possible congestion on Friday.”

New high-speed servers

Malaysiakini will be putting in three new high-speed servers and upgrading its bandwidth to 150mbps. This should support about 250,000 readers per day, which Malaysiakini expects on big-news days.

The news website will also be making other changes to improve its services to subscribers.

"Given high cost in bandwidth, we are not able to serve video to all, so Malaysiakini.tv will soon be available only to subscribers," said Chandran.

"However, non-subscribers will still be able to watch lower resolution Malaysiakini videos on YouTube as these will be posted there as well.”

The website went free for one week last Tuesday as the country was about to go to the polls.