20 MAY 2014
Just a reminder that sale goes live today at 9 am PST. Hopefully you already created your account and are ready to roll.
If you've never done a parking sale before - yes, it's competitive. Yes, people do get shut out. However, Ace Parking has listened to past complaints and made a strong effort to improve the system. Not only can you create your account in advance, speeding up the process, they're using AWS to cope with the traffic demand. And this year parking will be like parking in pretty much any public lot - you just put your permit on your dashboard. You're not obligated to enter your vehicle information and then use that vehicle.
Again, here's the Ace FAQ - recommended reading before the sale.
Good luck.
Keeps kicking me out and it's 9:20 am
ReplyDeleteI wasn't in the sale but the 2 people I knew who were didn't get in.
DeleteI think you give Ace too much credit for using AWS. You have to be willing to pay money to Amazon to make your AWS site elastic so that it can cope with demand spikes. I think Ace probably has an AWS account just above "freemium" tier, lol.
ReplyDeleteI don't need parking but I tried to buy some for a friend and was reminded of the myth of Sisyphus: fill your cart with parking spaces but as you're paying, the site empties your cart because you took too long because the server was so slow. I can laugh because I don't need parking but this reminded me a lot of how booking a hotel used to be before SDCC switched to the "we'll email your reservation to you" design.
Yeah, the similarities are there. And you're probably right about AWS. It doesn't seem like it went as smoothly as predicted.
DeleteCongrats on CCon for keeping this a secret. As a paid registrant I've been waiting for an email for weeks. I can't believe it was announced on Friday to no one, then opened today at 9:00 a.m. It's 2:30 pm and the site can't be reached.
ReplyDeleteIt just went live again - try now, although odds are still the system will be down. I wouldn't be surprised if they call it today and reschedule for another day.
DeleteAs for emailing - CCI probably feels that since Ace sells the spaces, they're off the hook. But it is another example of how haphazard Con communication is. Sometimes an email is sent, sometimes news is announced on that Toucan blog, and sometimes there's a tiny note buried on the website. Or nothing at all.