Scalable Ticketing / Festival Website

Question

I've noticed major music festivals (at least in Australia) and other events that experience a peak in traffic when tickets go on sale have huge problems keeping their websites running well. I've seen a few different techniques used to try combat this such as short sessions and virtual queues but they dont seem to have much effect.

If you were to design a website to sell a lot of tickets in a short amount of time how would you handle scalability? What technologies and programming techniques would you use?

My experience is in the Microsoft stack so answers that in that area will be most useful to me but I'd also like to hear how this sort of problem could be solved on other platforms.

Answer 1

I think the main problem is not that it's "hard" to make such a system scalable, it's that 99% of the time, those sites don't have much traffic. It's not much good buying 50 front end servers and 10 database servers if 99% of the time, they're all idle.

Personally, I'd use something like Amazon EC2 or even Microsoft's new Azure service so that they can run with minimal capacity most of the time, and then ramp up just before a big event goes on sale.