Again, I tried to get my tickets for SDCC, but the server was taken down after 2 hours of fail (much like on November 1st.)
This is because the people responsible for this are a bunch of morons who are unable to handle a simple problem.

The problem:
you have tens of thousands of people trying to use a web server at a single moment.

This is not really a new problem, and unless your web application is utterly retarded, getting a webserver to handle 5000+ requests per second is no problem even on a single quad-core server. Getting a virtual server (cloud computing) that could take tons more would be dirt cheap since it would only be needed for a short while (1 day).

The solution:
It would be relatively simple to fix this, Just open the site to registrations. Let users enter Name and email address. Then send them a  confirmation. Don’t do any of the “heavy” back-end stuff like charging credit cards which can take some time. Then when everyone have registered, just e-mail them (in the order in which they registered) a link to a page where they can pay for the ticket and enter all the details (address, etc..). That way the initial flood of requests can be dealt with very efficiently and the stuff that takes longer time can be spread out over several days/weeks.

Now maybe the existing registration software they chose this time does not support this, but jeez.. Letting people enter their info and connect this to a payment is not fraking brain surgery. Any programmer could do this in 1-3 days without a problem.

Or if you insist upon using a heavier system, at least use some sort of load balancing..  Let the main server accept connections, organize them in a queue and then gradually transfer the users to the server that actually handles registrations. I’m completely baffled that a huge event like SDCC is unable to find someone who is able to do such a simple task in this day and age.

The conclusion:
Someone stupid took on the job of handling the registrations (epicreg.com) when they clearly had no way of handling that many requests, and there is no excuse cause they know what happened on November 1st. What does it all mean in the end, nothing. What are we going to do? boycott Comic Con? yeah right… I’m pretty sure SDCC could get away with literally crapping on the visitors, without having problems selling all the tickets.