Online tickets for U2 concert in Zagreb = fail

U2 is (aside from Lepa Brena) – the most anticipated concert of the year in Croatia. Marketing campaign was pretty strong (so I guess organizers invested some money) and commercials strongly advertised online ticket sale which started just couple of minutes ago (at 00:01AM).

Unfortunately for U2 fans, online ticket sales maybe did start, but they sure did end pretty fast. But not because web shop run out of tickets, but because web shop and organizers of the concert ran out of professionalism.

Look guys, if you decided to run so strong advertising campaign across couple of countries which loudly and clearly says: “Ticket sales start online on Friday at 00:01”, I suppose one who does all that, would also build a website which can sustain such number of customers?

Well, I guess not.

Exactly the same thing happened some time ago when Croatian Football Association launched online reservation of world cup tickets (if I can recall correctly). I am not big sports fan but many of my friends are and they were very pissed.

Servers are so dirty cheap, and downtime costs a lot of money (nerves, reputation…), Especially if downtime happens a minute you launch your service. My personal preference/advice regarding server configuration in time of special events or service launch is – tend to over engineer your network! EC2, EBS, S3 (Amazon Web services) and other cloud computing solutions do their job pretty good in situations like this.

Otherwise you get this beauty…