The Sundance Film Festival Website Goes Down the Day Ticket Sales Are Made Available

Companies, both large and small, understand the importance of maintaining an operational website, especially on days when the public is going to be flocking to the site's pages. While maintenance and some downtime issues are inevitable, ensuring that your site is ready for the traffic it will receive on busy days is a non-negotiable part of successfully operating a site. Unfortunately, the Sundance Film Festival's website wasn't ready on the day the site was opened for ticket sales to the public.

Can There Be Such a Thing as Too Much Traffic?

The goal of a website is to drive traffic and profits. So how can any amount of traffic be too much traffic? When the amount of traffic your site is experiencing causes your site to go down due to insufficient bandwidth. That's exactly what happened to the Sundance Film Festival's website today, rendering the site useless for the members of the public who wanted to purchase tickets for available shows. Needless to say, the online community was abuzz about the website's issues. Twitter member WesleyTech stated, "Sundance Film Festival website down. You would think that these orgs would learn how to capacity plan after multiple years." Another Twitter member, SamHendel, stated, "The @sundancefest online ticket sales opened at noon and the website is impossible to get on. Excited to go to Sundance, but come on!!" Needless to say, it is apparent that the site's outage did indeed have an impact on the public's perception.

How to Prevent the Same Thing from Happening to Your Site

At Alertra, we discuss the importance of website monitoring to ensure that you're the first to know when your site goes down. We have also discussed, however, measures that you should put into place to ensure that your site doesn’t encounter any unnecessary downtime, and downtime due to high volumes of traffic is always unnecessary downtime. To ensure that your site doesn't go down due to an overwhelming amount of traffic, you need to prepare for the traffic ahead of time. Try to estimate (on the high side) the most traffic that your site would receive on your busiest day of the year and ensure that your hosting plan can accommodate that amount of traffic. If you notice that the numbers are exceeding the amount you estimated, upgrade before the site goes down. If the plan you are currently on can't keep up with your forecasts, it's best to upgrade sooner rather than later. The last thing you want to have happen is see your site go offline because the hosting plan you selected couldn't keep up with the success of your site.