Entertainment News!
Comic Con ticket sales website over capacity after flood of fans request hits ticketing agency —
[Jan. 6]
Who knew Comic Con tickets were going to be popular or hard to get? Try EVERYBODY — except, that is, Comic Con organizers or Ticket Leap, the site the organization chose to have sell tickets for them online. Last year, green celebrities Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie made a guest appearance at Comic Con to promote her new Angelina Jolie movie SALT and Brad Pitt’s new movie at the time Mastermind, a cartoon with voices of actor Will Ferrell (SNL) and actress Tina Fey (SNL, 30 Rock). This year, fans were super villain peeved when the Comic Con staff had been promoting their pending ticket sales happening on Twitter through @comiccon, and once the waiting was over and the floodgates opened, Ticket Leap (an online Comic Con and other entertainment events ticket seller service) found so many people hit their site that servers actually crashed.
For fans who know about Science Fictions and comic books, they might not always know the back end of website tech. If a site is on a shared server, very often more than 20 hits in one minute will cause a server to time out. Why? Because the host server will only allow so many hits per minute on a shared server. If a website is on a dedicated server, meaning that a website has a server that is only on call to provide users access to a website, then it can handle far more requests to the service per minute — in the hundreds never being a bother unless something is set up wrong by the host on the back end. However, in a real traffic surge — a larger system is required, as a small dedicated server can handle a lot of hits over a period of time during any hour but not a traffic surge in the thousands over the course of several minutes.
To have a ticket seller site requires tremendous resources from a server system. It looks on the surface like Ticket Leap should have planned in advance for the Comic Con ticket sales surge when they bid to win the contract and offered to increase their server resources for the first few weeks of the Comic Con ticket sales process.
While fans are mad they have had to wait, the lucky ones who were patient enough to stick with the process of reloading their computer screen with the hopes of making a steady connection and actually were able to buy tickets to Comic Con 2011 were elated.
Regarding the Comic Con 2011 history and ticket debacle, SF Gate reported the following:
Comic Con 2011 is coming again to San Diego July 21st through July 24th, and registration for single-and-up-to 4-day ticket “badges” went on sale this morning.
If you don’t know what “Comic Con” is, and wonder what the fuss is about, it’s a 42-year old comic book convention that got huge over the last 12-years with the merging of comic and movie efforts, then went into orbit over the last 5-years with the growth of digital media and it’s social media component. Last year, the event drew over 120,000 people, and it looks to break that number in 2011.
Comic Con reps announced the action on Twitter, then watched in horror as the online ticket sales service provider named TicketLeap.com, fell into a ditch. Overwhelmed with visitors trying to snap up badges. Eventually, #sdcc – or “San Diego Comic Con” – became a Twitter Topic Trend.