Sunday, October 04, 2009

Glastonbury tickets update

According to Emily Eavis and her stream of tweets, there's still Glastonbury tickets available - 0844 412 4635 on the telephone, or you could try the website. Although, as is now tradition, that's fallen over.

It's not even surprising that Twitter is full of stuff like this:

i have no idea if ive Glastonbury tkts, im 90% sure, but as the booked crashed, im just waiting for email confirmation now!

and this
Still no Glastonbury email. Might be time to go back to bed and stop worrying for a while

Year after year, the booking system fails to support the level of interest. Presumably since it doesn't mean nobody turns up, that's why they don't bother making it work, even though they must know the load levels they should be having to cope with?


3 comments:

Unknown said...

It's pretty much impossible. The internet really isn't designed to support that many people hitting one site.

I'm sure there's a very expensive way to do it, but is it worth it for 6 hours a year?

ManxStef said...

I don’t think it’s impossible. In fact, these days you can do it on a smaller budget than ever. How? This would be an absolutely ideal candidate for a cloud service like Amazon AWS or any of the other cloud providers.

The whole advantage of a cloud service is that it has a ridiculous level of scalability, so is able to handle a ridiculous load, and they only charge you for its use, so you don’t have to hire a rack of servers year-round for a one day spike.

Sure, they’d need someone to code up a ticketing system that’d run on EC2, but they can’t be so short of money that they couldn’t tender a company to do it, either for cash, in exchange for advertising, or a combination of both.

It looks like they managed to sort out the DNS side of things better this time by going with dnsmadeeasy, but the actual Glasto website itself still resolves to a single IP (83.138.56.40 - seems to belong to qmediastream.com), Now there’s a good idea, don’t bother to load-balance the initial entry point, that’s bound to work well and not fall over! Oh dear.

Maybe they’ll manage to get it sorted next year, but somehow I doubt it.

Unknown said...

It's not through the glasto website, it's through seeticket.com

To be fair, they crash for ever big event and not just Glastonbury. So they're at least consistently crap, with no special drop in quality for Eavis.

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