What Hong Kong can learn from the China Rail Ministry’s online ticketing incident

In 2011, the China Rail Ministry created an online ticketing website 12306.cn for people to book train tickets. During this year’s Spring Festival, tens of millions of Chinese in Hong Kong and migrant workers across China visited the website to purchase train tickets. However, the massive traffic load for the ticketing website has caused increased dissatisfaction among users.

Although the system did not suffer from service outage, the website constantly returned a message saying ‘The system is busy with too many users’, as a huge number of Chinese tried to purchase the train tickets online simultaneously. Frustration grew when users were asked to fill out the ticket information every time they re-sent the request.

In this context, plug-in browsers (which speed up the online train ticketing process) for 12306 have grown in prominence as they provided easy navigation and allowed users to enjoy a higher chance of getting a ticket for a train ride home. Since the launch of plug-in browsers, traffic of 12306 has soared, selling up to 300,000 tickets an hour. However, this tool has also drawn criticism for disrupting purchases on the website and spreading chaos among anxious ticket buyers. Companies offering plug-in browsers have been pressured by the government to stop using them.

We believe what triggered this string of events was the fact that 12306.cn could not handle the heavy traffic load during the CNY peak season. When the website was built, it’s likely it was not provisioned to manage peak traffic loads.

As always, preparation is key when it comes to web hosting. Even when an IT function is able to correctly estimate the peak demand for services, and build a solution to fit, the result is rarely efficient. Most organizations experience some degree of seasonality, often with quite significant spikes in demand. In traditional IT environments, infrastructures have been built to handle such spikes in demand, however this often means the IT infrastructure is under-utilized. Cloud computing can help these organizations better plan and respond more quickly to demands on its infrastructure. The benefit of cloud computing is the flexibility to adapt to changing situations.

So, what can companies in Hong Kong do to ensure its cloud costs are manageable, while also being able to cope with huge spikes in traffic? It comes down to three fairly simple factors; three reasons an e-commerce site would crash under a heavy load.

Firstly, the site has to have adequate capacity to handle the influx of new visitors. Obviously that is difficult to provision with in-house infrastructure, which is why many e-commerce sites are now outsourcing their hosting to external providers and their cloud solutions. Because you're renting the capacity from a trusted partner, you can tap into it whenever you need to increase that capacity. An online store's main advantage over its bricks and mortar rivals is that it is open 24/7 and convenient. If you start closing down because you've chosen the wrong provider, you're eroding that competitive advantage. Whichever cloud provider a company choose to work with, they need to have enough scale to grow with them, both short and long term.

Secondly, you need to be closely monitoring what is happening in terms of your infrastructure, the site, its applications, and all the different layers. If you're not closely monitoring it, you won't be prepared for high traffic events and you'll inevitably be responding to it after the fact, when it fails, rather than scaling as you see the traffic start to spike. It's almost like preparing for a tornado to hit. During peak periods, China Rail Ministry should be monitoring activity on a daily basis.

Thirdly, you need to automate as much of your cloud management as you can. This basically means you enable the site to automatically scale up and down the amount of Cloud resource and capacity your application needs. Doing this, as well as ensuring you have adequate capacity, along with close monitoring, will avoid website crashes/delays during any seasonal period.

Stability and reliability of a site are the bread and butter of any e-commerce business given that any delay or long loading time could potentially cause significant damage to brand engagement and reputation, customer loyalty, and ultimately revenue. Companies in Hong Kong should ensure they are always well prepared for any seasonal peaks in traffic to provide the best user-experience to their valuable customers.