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Phew!

Of courseGlastonbury 2007 there will be resales, but gosh, that was a bit close: up at 8AM and couldn’t get near the See Tickets site even an hour before this year’s Glastonbury tickets went on sale, then it was F5 all the way until I finally got through at about 10:45… and by 10:55 the main order page was saying that the regular tickets had sold out (although when I last checked they still had some of the 22,000 coach package tickets that were part of the deal agreed at the licensing hearing last week).

I won’t be totally comfortable about it until the confirmation email arrives, but that was about as close as it has ever been.

Interesting system they were running this year as well: they’d restricted the number of connections available to http://www.seetickets.com, which was mostly timing out or redirecting to a “Busy” page, but I noticed fairly early on that you could at least get the first page up quite easily if you tried https://www.seetickets.com (i.e., the secure site) although sadly attempting to get to the booking form itself via https just redirected you back to http.

So I mostly spent the two hours when I was trying to get my tickets watching Firefox tell me it was:
“Connecting to www.seetickets.com…”
“Waiting for www.seetickets.com…”
“Connecting to busy.seetickets.com…”
(and then it would timeout trying to retrieve the server busy page, which is perhaps somewhat ironic).

But once you were through to the actual booking form, you were basically guaranteed tickets, because it redirected onto the secure site, which was only serving pages to people who had been able to get a booking form up, rather than having to serve pages to everyone who was hitting F5 and hammering the server. I guess they have learnt their lesson from 2004: it might be deeply frustrating for anyone who can’t get near the site, but at least they then had the server capacity to process the transactions of the people who had got through.

[Well, I would say that, I got tickets…]