When San Diego Comic Con sold a thousand tickets online in a test last December, they received half a million hits as people tried desperately to buy tickets.

Yesterday, they got thirty three million hits.

And that is the reason that TicketLeap were unable to cope. Despite having the ability to increase servers based on load, and using Amazon's web servers that use web servers to do just that, this was seemingly just too much for anyone to cope with.

Nevertheless, the site did stay up, albeit via an "unavailable" screen and tickets were priocessed, albeit slowly, to achieve a full sell out in hours.

The show is awaiting a full report to see if there are any solutions for next year. There is a very high level of frustration in the offices, with a recognition that the people who missed out on tickets despite pressing F5 for hours are even more frustrated.

A San Diego Comic Con representative told me "There has to be a better way. There just has to be."

Suggestions are welcome. It's not that long until tickets will be sold for Comic Con 2012…

Image from Sean Groom