Seetickets

[Penrhos]

Two words "Surge protection" - works wonders in offloading people hammering a website.

If See didn't have extra resources how come 202.218 came online straight after the crash.

It doesn't cost that much to bolt decent DDOS, load balancing & queue offload on the front-end. They're already using Akamai for content offloads.

[tinktink]

i dont understand how it sold out in 87 mins as for the first 23 mins see tickets were down ? well thats what it said on mine so you cant count the first 23 mins, i never got past the page " tickets will be on sale at 9am "

[Zero_Newnab]

You seem to completely miss my point, its not that they cant afford it, its because its not reasonably practicable.

Would you be happy to pay a £20 or £30 booking fee so ANY company could have the server space when Glastonbury tickets came out? I certainly wouldnt.

And secondly as Ive said I couldnt give a shit about the joke, Im glad they turned the unfair and ridiculous criticism into a joke.

[frostypaw]

You don't know if the customers are right - we don't know the details of how the switchover occurs and hence why the crash might have happened.

Either way it's fairly likely the vast majority of people suggesting ideas to see, probably alongside many swear words, are NOT it consultants and are not suggesting anything helpful or new - so lots of them probably aren't right. Must be maddening for them

[Zero_Newnab]

You don't know if the customers are right - we don't know the details of how the switchover occurs and hence why the crash might have happened.

Either way it's fairly likely the vast majority of people suggesting ideas to see, probably alongside many swear words, are NOT it consultants and are not suggesting anything helpful or new - so lots of them probably aren't right. Must be maddening for them

[maninkilt]

Two separate issues here that seem to be bluring

I think that the system this year was as good as could be, they are in one way victims of there own success, they sell the tickets in a shorter time year after year which is amazing but can leave us ( if we dont get one) with the feeling that we had no chance, just the luck of the draw Im afraid.

The comment made by one employee, a disgrace, how dare they mock the people who pay there wages. I this was in a shop I wouldn't shop there again but as this employee knows well we have no choice but to use them, we choose to go to Glastonbury and who sells the ticket is irrelevant in that choice. It was not refreshingly human it was arrogant.

[HoTWire]

Fixing this scaling issue is FUCKING SIMPLE*, and not even expensive. However I suspect Seetickets have (as a lot of companies do) a very short sighted technology infrastructure where it works 99% of the time at the scale they run at.

The galling thing in all this from a tech and scaling point of view is that they knew it was coming, usually your site falls over because you end up on the front page of reddit, or a viral link on facebook, or occasionally on the BBC. When you've known for months that you are going to get a very sudden influx of hundreds of thousands of visits at a very specific time for a very specific period it is almost unacceptable to a) have technical issues and not be able to handle the scale to the point where you are not even serving pages. There would be some SERIOUS questions being asked this morning if this were part of my tech team.

Nothing to be done now though. If SeeTickets read this, give me a shout I'll happily** build you a queueing system that removes the refresh need, and will scale to hundreds of thousands of visits

*source : it's what I do for a living, and if they want to pay me with two Glastonbury tickets I'll happily give them an hour or so of consulting

** in exchange for lots of money/tickets

[ICGenie]

It was true though. You just have to look on this forum to see how many amateur IT "experts" there are. And practically all of them are making wild assumptions in order to try to work out what may or may not have happened, what may or may not have affected people's chances. Regardless of if there were a few techie issues, it was still pure LUCK if you got tickets. Maybe some ISPs struggled to connect, if so, it's LUCK if yours was ok.

The tweet itself was poor customer service but it could have been much worse. I'm sure we all get frustrated when unqualified people try to tell us how to do our job, we just don't all get a chance to vent that frustration.

[keeno]

Has anyone thought maybe the client doesn't want a fully functioning queueing system? With the revenue this makes I'm sure they receive offers and promises from hundreds of ticketing companies. I honestly believe Glastonbury want an element of luck and effort to play a part in ticket sales. Glastonbury and seetickets would engage in many talks in preparation for this day, it's not something hey organise over bloody SMS! They are both successful companies, they know what they're doing! If it was a queue system, you'd get in the queue, see your place in the queue and vaguely know your chances of getting a ticket. They don't want that! I believe it's much fairer and results in a better, mixed, attendance if you rely on peoples persistence, determination and luck.

[jimmillen]

Has anyone thought maybe the client doesn't want a fully functioning queueing system? With the revenue this makes I'm sure they receive offers and promises from hundreds of ticketing companies. I honestly believe Glastonbury want an element of luck and effort to play a part in ticket sales. Glastonbury and seetickets would engage in many talks in preparation for this day, it's not something hey organise over bloody SMS! They are both successful companies, they know what they're doing! If it was a queue system, you'd get in the queue, see your place in the queue and vaguely know your chances of getting a ticket. They don't want that! I believe it's much fairer and results in a better, mixed, attendance if you rely on peoples persistence, determination and luck.

[tumbles]

People dive in and slate See but nobody dare mention the ISPs?

The servers are the end part.. nobody mentions that some ISPs simply cannot handle the traffic going to the servers and route it correctly...

[Englishdragon]

You clearly have no idea how easy (Yes, it would cost SOME money, but nothing compared to the profits they're making on the already inflated 'booking fee') it would be for them to account for an event they have a whole year to prepare for. They can spool up additional servers and turn them off after Glastonbury if they want to, there is no way in hell that it adds £20 or £30 to every booking fee. There are lots of things they could do, and they do not do them. There are hundreds, if not thousands of sites that manage to account for high traffic spikes, because they give a crap. SeeTickets don't care because they have no competition when it comes to Glasto tickets and because they'll definitely sell them all anyway.

Not only do you not understand that, you appear to have some sort of blind fanboy-style loyalty to a company, which is just dumb. You don't owe them anything, you know.

The tweet, as I said, isn't offensive. It is obviously someone who is stressed and pressured by the demands of the Twitter public - I get that, and I don't really begrudge him/her for saying it. But it's not funny, because in reality the customers are right, and the person at the social media desk should know that his/her company is dropping the ball and not pretend the customers are being unreasonable.

[tumbles]

I think the thing is, even if they had a ssytem that would cope with the load, 1 million into 120'000 just doesn't go. Period.

[Zero_Newnab]

Seriously, thats up there with the funniest post so far.

You claim I dont know how easy it would be but so far you have actually given zero suggestions on how they could have fixed it apart from saying "OH MY GOD THEY ARE SO TERRIBLE, THS COULD HAVE BEEN EASILY SORTED BUT THEY DECIDED NOT TO"

- How could they or any website on the same level prepare their servers for the kind of traffic they get for 30 minutes a year?

- What are these websites in the world you talk about that actually base their servers on getting x amount of traffic for 99.99999% of the year then get x times hundreds of thousands for the other 0.000001% of the year. Its like saying Meadowhall should quadruple the size of their car parks because on the Friday before Christmas you have to que up for hours to get in

Also you comment about fanboyism just shows how you A- still dont seem to understand my point, B - Just shows how childish your post is.

I have never been specific to Seetickets about this, NO TICKETING COMPANY IN THE WORLD WOULD BE ABLE TO HANDLE THE TRAFFIC THEY WOULD GET FOR GLASTONBURY, THATS KINDA BEEN THE POINT IVE BEEN MAKING MY FRIEND.

Seriously people seems to not be able to understand that it just boils down to luck, so many people log on to a website and only a percentage of them get through. Instead it makes people feel a lot better to just talk bollocks that they know absolutely nothing about. What sounds better to your friends

"I didnt get a ticket because the website was stopping people from connecting to the site, and because they didnt have enough servers and because their magic pixie wand didnt select me to get a ticket"

or

"I didnt get a ticket because too many people were trying and I wasnt one of the lucky ones"

[Englishdragon]

Wow. I don't know where to start with this one.

Suggestions? More servers (Which you don't seem to understand, don't need to be on 24/7/365), surge protection, load balancing, queue offloading - The same stuff that every other company does. In fact, most sites are able to cope with fairly significant traffic spikes even when they're not expecting them - SeeTickets KNOW it's coming and as such have pretty much no excuse. If you honestly believe that the million-or-so people who wanna get on the site compares to the top traffic of a wide variety of sites that manage this successfully, then there's no hope for you.

Naturally though, you can ignore all that and instead resort to calling me childish, making straw man arguments about what you think I said, dismissing it as 'funniest post so far', claiming I don't understand you (Which to me would appear quite rich, given your lack of basic understanding of the principles). You then go off on a tangential rant about how some people blame SeeTickets for not getting them tickets, or that it's not luck. Well, technically speaking it's not 'luck', more just basic probability.

I didn't get a ticket, and I don't blame SeeTickets for it. Demand far outstrips supply and I wasn't what you would call 'lucky'. What I DO blame them for (and what everyone should continue to blame them for) is their poor infrastructure.

[biscuitninja]

They completely could prepare for a spike in traffic for just one day a year. I've worked on sites before that have bought in traffic surge protection for a short time scale - there's multiple services out there such as Akamai, Amazon Elastic balancing etc. SeeTickets could easily afford this. There's also hundreds of websites that prepare for spike behaviour on a daily basis (think traffic surges from Reddit etc).

TBH, this year it looks like their load balancing cr**ped out completely for the first 30mins or so and then recovered (at least for me it did, the site suddenly sped up after about 9.30) - so they did have it in place, just didn't scale it enough for the first spike by the looks of it.

They just won't, nothing to do with being in-house or outsourcing, or that it's 'not possible'. It's plain and simple - they still sell all the tickets without spending any more on load balancers/infrastructure, so why bother? Customer satisfaction, meh, they still have 120,000 tickets sold in 1hr30, so what's the problem for them?

[themuel]

Well I thought the tweet was hilarious. Well done them for staying calm enough under pressure to make a lighthearted joke. People love being offended, they'll soon be busy being offended by something else.

[I am Jon]

This thread seems to of descended into a bunch of "IT consultants" offering various ways Seetickets could fix their servers.

• Seetickets essentially have to deal with a massive DOS attack when glasto goes on sale. 200,000+ users each with dozens of browser tabs open all franticly pressing F5 before tickets even go on sale. That could easily add up to 1,000,000 simultaneous connections to their servers. I don’t think many sites would be able to deal with this. Maybe Facebook, Amazon, eBay, etc but they are international company’s worth way more than Seetickets.
• It may not simply be a case of having more or better servers. Assuming all the servers are in a single location (most likely as their business is mostly from the UK) this level of traffic could be too much for the network to deal with before it even gets directed to the servers. Just like the BT exchange seems to struggle with the landline number.
• Even with more web servers they would still need a database and payment system capable of keeping up with all the transactions.
• I’m not sure Seetickets earn more per glasto ticket than other tickets sales and it looks like they already go to a lot of trouble to deal with the registrations and sale day. Why would they want to invest so much more in new systems just for Glastonbury?
• If they had everything working "perfectly" it might sell out in less than 5 minutes which would still leave people angry. I think 60 mins is a good amount of time for the sale to last, long enough to feel like you at least had a chance and reward those who are persistent but not dragging on all day.

Edited October 7, 2013 by I am Jon

[DL50]

Wow i started this thread and to be honest, i get what people are saying about how they have such a hard task to accomodate such a high volume of traffic, im not that pissed off at seetickets any more just thought that tweet was a bit stupid of them

[scarletmist]

Actually its worth going back to the original See tweet and reading their post and the feedback they got.

We are experiencing technical issues this morning, we are working as fast as we can to resolve and will update as soon as possible.

no fucking shit

Technical issues? You mean that your decrepit servers can't handle the demand for Glasto tickets?

sort it out

or they should just upgrade their systems to incorporate serious load balancing and make a proper queuing system!

Well yes, but that would require spending money. Why would they want to do that?

haha, no, they probably just switch off their 'server' for the first 2 hours anyway...

If I was working for See and was on the receiving end if comments like this then I'd be tempted to come up with a smart-arse reply too.

[kevin0410]

I'm with the message from see tickets, however all this arguing about I.T solutions is futile. The fact remains there are 120000 tickets to sell and many, many more people that want to buy them.

Seetickets could have the best system in the world and all it would mean is that everyone trying, less 120000, will be disappointed after five minutes rather that after 87.

[JayBalls]

I thought it was pretty funny

sort of sarcastic prickish comment I would make

[Dubious Morals]

That tweet was a total PR disaster. Whoever sent it shouldn't be allowed near their social network accounts ever again. If I had missed out on tickets (like this time last year) I would have raged.

[GlastoSimon]

Out of interest, after the 30 minute breakdown at the beginning (which affected EVERYONE), what exactly did See do wrong?

Were many kicked out when booking the tickets? Not really sure I get the criticism given that tickets sold out in record time despite technical issues.

[JonC]

I thought the tweet was pretty funny but probably wrong given the customer is always right.

It's no mean feat to shift that many tickets in such a short space of time. I was cursing See when I hit submit on the payment page and it hung for several minutes before being timed out but unlike previous years it allowed me to go back a step, re-enter my details and try again, this time with success.