More Early Bird tickets to be released?
Submitted by DrippingInsanity on Thu, 08/08/2013 - 9:55pm
I know you guys mentioned that you were only doing the early bird ticket deal once. But, with huge page problems (too many people trying to buy) on both attempts, I think it would be awesome to release another small batch of tickets. Instead of setting an exact time and day to sell the tickets, you could offer the tickets on a specific day and between certain hours. EX: The next and final 150 early bird tickets will be released on August 18th between the hours of 12pm-6pm EST. Tickets will be separated into smaller batches and will be available at various times between 12pm and 6pm. This is to combat against the server from overloading and will let more people to buy a ticket without all of the website errors. Just an idea...
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First, it would be up to the
First, it would be up to the fest organizers as to whether or not they want to do any additional early bird sales. Considering this one went a lot better than the first, I'd say it's not likely. Plenty of tickets will be available in October, and you won't have to get here in the first 15 minutes of the sale in order to buy them.
As for the website......We appreciate the suggestion regarding web traffic, unfortunately, another sale like what you mention would still be unfair for people who aren't sitting around reloading the site constantly waiting for the next "batch" to go up (people hitting reload constantly rather than being patient only makes things worse), and it certainly wouldn't change the number of people hitting the site trying to buy tickets. We had nearly 500 people attempt to purchase tickets for the second early bird sale, which leaves 350 disappointed people (that's how limited sales work), and another sale of this nature would bring a similar rush of people. This last sale went much more smoothly, people were able to actually purchase tickets (the first time we barely had 30 sales go through in over an hour). We would not have sold out in 30 minutes otherwise (even with slow load times on the website), and the fact of the matter is that there were only a limited number available in the first place.
The bottom line--there is only so much a website of this size can accomplish without needing ridiculously expensive, time-consuming upgrades--upgrades that we really only need a few days a year when there is a lot of traffic due to ticket sales. Our web admins work in web development, so trust us when we say we are doing our absolute best with the resources we have available (in our spare time). Servers and hosting are quite costly, and even the most expensive have their limitations. We are not a huge international commercial website like Amazon or E-bay, we are a website for a music fest, and having hundreds of people hitting the site all at once will slow things down for everyone. As much as we would love the internet to be perfect all the time, that just isn't the case.
Our suggestion for general admission ticket sales in October is just to be patient. A website will automatically time-out if load times are over 30 seconds (it doesn't mean the website is down, or that there are errors), so it's best to wait a couple minutes (go pee or get a beer) and then reload, rather than blast-beating the reload button. In the last sale, people whose pages timed out during the checkout process were still able to complete their checkout. After the initial rush, things died down and pages started loading again, and people got their tickets.
We are working on ways to make things go more smoothly in October, and we have a few ideas we may try out so that there isn't such a huge flood of people visiting the site all at once. Believe me, we WANT as many people as possible to get in on the action--it does us no good to have the website crashing--but we also are working within our means as best as we can. As time goes on, if we see a dire need for more improvements, and we have the resources to get them done, you can guarantee we will get them done!!