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Will's Web Watch: Glastonbury and lessons in uptime
There must be a better way...

By Will Sturgeon

Published: Monday 02 April 2007

Why in this day and age does buying tickets online mean staring at error messages on overloaded websites? Will Sturgeon is sure there's a better way.

There are many things I like doing on a Sunday morning. Drinking coffee, reading the papers, watching the early morning repeat of Match of the Day.

One thing I certainly wouldn't rank up there with 'fun ways to spend a Sunday morning' is sitting staring at a constant 'Page not found' error message and listening to an engaged tone on the phone. That was this Sunday's entertainment as I joined the 400,000 or so people trying to get tickets for the Glastonbury festival.

Tickets went on sale at 9:00 though the website appeared to have gone down some time before then.

At one point early on in the torment I assumed this could in fact have been an elaborate April Fool's joke. Tell people they can log on at 9:00 on a Sunday morning to buy tickets and then ensure there is no website for them to access.

What larks.

But it seems this was just a case of good old-fashioned inability to prepare for the inevitable. The fact the phonelines were chocker is understandable - but in 2007, after years of companies selling tickets for major events online, I'm constantly amazed by a common failure to learn from past experience and ensure the website is accessible to everybody.

What's up, partner?

In this case it was Glastonbury's partner SeeTickets.com that failed to see the demand coming - or certainly failed to plan effectively for it. What's more, getting through this morning to find somebody at SeeTickets who could tell me what went wrong has proved about as tricky as getting through on Sunday. The Glastonbury website, which contained links and phone numbers to the SeeTickets services, also came crashing down to earth before 9:00. The absence of a simple text-only version for the hours between, say 7:00 and 11:00 probably didn't help.

Unlike the open sale of tickets in past years, pre-registration for this year's festival meant 'organisers' - and I use the word loosely - were well aware what level of demand there would be for the website in the first few minutes after 9:00. Yet in line with so many online sales in the past they failed dismally to offer a working website to consumers. For an hour and a half I saw nothing but error messages and heard nothing but engaged tones.

Fortunately for me I managed to secure two tickets thanks to the ingenuity of a friend-of-a-friend-(of-a-friend) who was one of the lucky ones who had managed to get online. She then sat at her computer buying tickets for pretty much everybody she knew and many people she didn't from a very extended circle of friends, acquaintances and random strangers.

I mention that I got tickets not to boast but so you know the above isn't just sour grapes. However, having come so close to missing out I can sympathise with the 200,000-plus people who like me saw nothing but error messages during a frustrating morning before the news eventually broke that all tickets had sold out.

A better way?

The fact tickets sold so quickly shows other people did manage to get on to the website. In fact, according to web monitoring company Hitwise, the SeeTickets.com website rocketed from the 262nd most popular website on Saturday to 90th on Sunday - with 24 per cent of its traffic linking direct from the Glastonbury website.

As such, I suspect I - like many other people - had been a victim of some fairly crude load-balancing.

Obviously if 400,000 people are vying to buy 130,000 or so tickets, there is going to be a lot of people disappointed but it would be easier to be pragmatic about that if the process had at least been managed more effectively.

Surely far more fair would have been to make the pre-registration process an entry into a ballot, similar to the way supposedly far more commercial ventures such as the Fifa World Cup allocate tickets applied for online. The registration process can then be kept open for weeks, meaning no major bottlenecks and no huge spike in demand during a tiny window of opportunity - and nobody left trying in vain to access the website.

This would have ruled out the inevitable mismanagement of the online sale and would probably have been more in line with the values Glastonbury espouses, given it could have prevented a considerable surge in power consumption on Sunday morning. After two fruitless hours of trying to get through, my better-half and I had three mobile phones which needed recharging, and two laptops and a broadband router which had also been put through their paces.

It was interesting to finally get my Glastonbury confirmation email through this morning and be presented with the opportunity to visit a webpage to find out more about what organisers are doing to limit global warming. I would check it out but I don't think I could stand the wait.