As I predicted, the online ticket sales for the home games for the Colorado Rockies in the World Series did not go well. They were suspended after only a few hundred tickets were sold. The company that handles the Rockies infrastructure for online ticket sales is Paciolan.
I was not interested in tickets myself, but I watched many of my co-workers grow increasingly frustrated this morning as they tried to purchase tickets. I poked around Paciolan’s web site a little trying to get some idea of their architecture or technology, but did not find any useful information.
The situation they faced this morning is a hard problem to solve. They knew they were going to see a tremendous spike in traffic and load, that would only last an hour or two if things went well. What do you do in that situation? Does it make economic sense to have that much reserve capacity vs. the cost of having the system fail?
At this point, I have no idea what happened or who/what is to blame. I hope more details are released about what happened.
It\’d be nice if there was something like Amazon EC2, but for webhosting. Maybe some day…