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Avanti website
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All accredited National Rail retailers allow you to reserve a seat. Only the Trainsplit site allows you to use a seat selector for Avanti services as far as I can tell.
Edit: someone made a dedicated thread to discuss this issue, so please use that from now on: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/why-has-avanti-west-coast-got-rid-of-the-seat-selector.196410/
WatcherZero
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Website appears to be down, im being redirected to an error page on SWR website.
alistairlees
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This is the website right now (picture shows plain text page with "We're sorry, we can't take you to our website right now" and links to "Buy Tickets" and six other URLs. No logo / brand / colour or other content etc.
It's just massively overloaded. I don't think they expected the surge in demand they'll be seeing today - or at least, not to this extend. The site is still working fine, they've just replaced the homepage with something that will load a whole lot faster (your screenshot) which, in the circumstances, is absolutely the right thing to do.
For discussion regarding Avanti's decision to not offer a seat selector, and for discussion regarding an alternative seat selector provided by a third party, please use: Why has Avanti West Coast got rid of the seat selector?
alistairlees
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No, that's entirely incorrect. All the URLs point to sites hosted by other organisations. For example, the buytickets.avantiwestcoast.co.uk is managed by Trainline, and hosted by them. Same goes for season tickets, and tickets by mobile. "Contact Us" is hosted by Service Now. I think that the Delay Repay is externally hosted too.
Put simply, there is no Avanti West Coast brand / content website running, apart from this simplified home page. Well, there are no links to it anyway.
Though yes, it is because they can't cope with the volume. There will be a lot of traffic from the BBC News website, as well as other sites. Though in this case it was fairly predictable.
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Could this be a DNS issue relating to the switching of servers? I can't believe there's really that much demand, and these days hosting companies should be able to scale (to cope with massive disruption where demand will be high).
CentralTrainer
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I don’t think it would. DNS propagation takes around 24 hours or so - but they would have had all this in place well before launch day
Howardh
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Creating an account - wouldn't accept my Virgin password yet couldn't create an account with my email addy as *already had an account* so reset password with the same one (!) and now I have an Avanti account.
All of those external services are still part of the Avanti website. The fact that they're hosted in different places isn't really relevant from a customer point of view is it. Most parts of the Avanti website are working, just not the 'homepage' content, is the point. There's no value to the 'normal person' in understanding the hosting setup / technicalities, it's totally irrelevant.
No, it's demand.
AlexNL
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Well, it's a new operator so a lot of people will be interested. Especially on a high profile route such as the WCML, people will want to see how Avanti plan to build on the VT legacy. Apart from that, you can count on lots of bots (e.g. search engine crawlers) being interested in the new website - and not all bots are programmed equally well.
Some search engine crawlers are notorious for absolutely hammering a website with requests, effectively bringing it to its knees. It would not surprise me in the slightest if this is what's happening to Avanti right now.
I was still up when the website launched (at 02:00 GMT) and even at that time of night it was quite slow. It worked, but it was slow. The site itself looked and felt a lot like the other FirstGroup operated sites (SWR, GWR and TPE). Same layout and a very comparable look and feel.
Some search engine crawlers are notorious for absolutely hammering a website with requests, effectively bringing it to its knees. It would not surprise me in the slightest if this is what's happening to Avanti right now.
I was still up when the website launched (at 02:00 GMT) and even at that time of night it was quite slow. It worked, but it was slow. The site itself looked and felt a lot like the other FirstGroup operated sites (SWR, GWR and TPE). Same layout and a very comparable look and feel.
DJH1971
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Given two of the three highlighted stories on Google when you search for Avanti West Coast are now negative ones, their Marketing people can't be too impressed if their IT people have failed to stress test the systems (or indeed offer at least as much functionality as their predecessor).
Goldfish62
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[deleted]
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Bletchleyite
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In the circumstances (also see how BBC News goes text only when something serious happens). But the circumstances should not have arisen. Demand today is probably nowhere near as high as in a period of severe disruption, for instance.
Bletchleyite
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It's not like putting websites up is something advanced. There is no excuse for this.
Clearly done on the cheap.
To be fair to aunty, upgrades supposedly mean that BBC News shouldn't now do that unless something properly exceptional happens (Cat 1 Royal death, basically).
I do wonder what the level of demand was for Avanti today...
It runs on Sitecore and is hosted on AWS.
Incidentally, the "Sorry" page is actually hosted on a different server to that of the main Avanti website. Presumably there is a fault which has caused them to swing things back over to the server they were running the "teaser" page from.
Although it's not good that someone has fallen over, it's good that there is at least some contingency planning to account for technical issues. That being said, it's not a great look on your first day of service.
For those who understand the IT speak:
Prior to 2am, and, just now:
After 2am, but, prior to "now":
Bletchleyite
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Chris999999
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Despite their shambles of a website, I managed to send them a question. Apparently their average response time is 15 days! So I should get a response by Christmas Eve. I am poised in anticipation.
They clearly have no interest in IT or customer service. I wonder what they know about running trains?
They clearly have no interest in IT or customer service. I wonder what they know about running trains?
It's First group, you expect them to spend a sensible amount of money?I refer you to my "too cheap" comment above
AlexNL
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I'm going to assume that FirstGroup's IT people have looked at the other sites which they manage, including high-profile brands such as GWR and TPE, and used those as a baseline to plan capacity for the AWC website.
Depending on their IT set-up, it may or not be easy to add additional capacity as needed. In this modern "cloud enabled" day and age it can be easy to automatically add more capacity as needed (it can even be done automatically) but this does depend on everything being developed and deployed correctly. If the setup is more 'old fashioned' (even when on AWS) getting additional capacity can mean a lot of work.
Interestingly enough, if you go to http://sitecore-cd-alb-1946473879.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com directly you get the new Avanti West Coast website. It feels reasonably snappy to me, I guess that's because the majority of the load is gone.
Depending on their IT set-up, it may or not be easy to add additional capacity as needed. In this modern "cloud enabled" day and age it can be easy to automatically add more capacity as needed (it can even be done automatically) but this does depend on everything being developed and deployed correctly. If the setup is more 'old fashioned' (even when on AWS) getting additional capacity can mean a lot of work.
Interestingly enough, if you go to http://sitecore-cd-alb-1946473879.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com directly you get the new Avanti West Coast website. It feels reasonably snappy to me, I guess that's because the majority of the load is gone.
I would expect at least acknowledgement and a response in a couple hours (until after working hours, then the next day), then any actions if required in the next few days.
AlexNL
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Looks like Avanti have got their things in order. www.avantiwestcoast.co.uk now shows the full website and it loads fast, too.
MotorcycleAlan
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Yes it was very fast loading this:
We're sorry, we can't take you to our website right now.
All over the local press in Manchester and Birmingham. Not impressed.
We're sorry, we can't take you to our website right now.
All over the local press in Manchester and Birmingham. Not impressed.
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