Many remember the days when buying a ticket for a music festival or world famous music artist used to be woefully painful. Many would find out the time the tickets go on sale and sit tentatively at their computers ready with card in hand for the rush. Some would get through, others would be met with errors and slow loading. Eventually a ticket may or may not have been brought before its sold out in 5 minutes.
The Tate Modern decided that it wished to host the ticket sales of a popular band called Kraftwerk, instead of passing on the responsibility to a third party seller such as Ticketmaster. The Tate Modern has a website has a website that vary rarely experiences a high level of traffic due to the nature of the art gallery business. However, when Kraftwerks tickets went on sale, the unexpected rush swept the Tate off their feet.
The company decided to try and relieve the pressure by urging customers to order tickets through their telephone booking service. However, soon enough that clogged up too. By 08:50 GMT, the ticket page on Tate’s website said: “Kraftwerk at Tate Modern has just gone on sale and we are experiencing a phenomenal demand for tickets which is affecting our web server.
It added: “We have extra staff on hand today but demand is extremely high.” At 17:15 GMT a Tate spokesperson told the BBC that “all tickets to Kraftwerk – The Catalogue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 have now sold out”.
“We appreciate that many people experienced difficulties in purchasing tickets today,” the press officer continued.
“This was due to the unprecedented levels of demy weren’t willing to go to a third party organisation and pay 20% on each ticket sold. The Tates IT department said that they were prepared for the sudden traffic surge, however it is clear that more needed to be done.
Perhaps a CDN would have been the sensible decision to allow the Tates website to and for such a unique series of performances.” After the ordeal, a spokesperson from the Tate defended the gallery by saying that the olympic site did the same, and that thewithstand the pressure.
CDNify offers a cheap and quick CDN set up to rocket your website into the digital war ground.