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Don't become a victim of your success

There seems to be an increasing trend for much-hyped new online ventures to crash and burn within hours of going live.

Here in NZ we saw it with ListSellTrade.co.nz and in Australia they've also had something similar with a new online retail site called Click Frenzy.

These, and a number of other "zero day fails" serve as wonderful examples of just how the internet has changed in the 15 years since I launched my very popular 7am.com news website.

7amNews didn't crash on its first day of operation - even though it was running on a budget $29 web-hosting account.

Why didn't it crash?

Simple -- on its first day it got barely 100 page-views!

Back in the pre-dot-com boom era, there just weren't that many people online and even those who did log in on a regular basis didn't have the social networks that can create massive changes in traffic flows within a few short minutes.

Life was so much simpler back then. You could come up with a good idea, create a website, launch it and then, if you were lucky enough to be successful, gradually add the necessary server resources as the demand grew.

These days, if you come up with a killer idea and you promote it through the mainstream or social media then you'd better be ready for a tsunami of traffic right from the get-go.

Anyone who doesn't prepare for this wall of IP requests will find themselves in the same boat as Wheedle, LST and ClickFrenzy -- a victim of your own success.

Of course this makes launching a new online venture far more risky and expensive than it once-was.

Do you pay for a massive amount of server capacity and connectivity that you may never need -- or do you limit your spending and hope that traffic grows slowly enough to allow the commissioning of new resource in a way that keeps pace?

Get it wrong, either way, and chances are you'll be out of business in double-quick time.

Perhaps this creates a wonderful business opportunity however. Which NZ company will be smart enough to offer online startups a low-cost but rapidly scalable server solution so that they don't need to empty their wallet unnecessarily but, if things go better than planned, they won't be left suffering a DOS attack from the very people they're trying to attract?

Looking at the fallout that has killed LST, Wheedle and ClickFrenzy, it seems that the very worst thing you can do is to hope for millions of customers but only plan for thousands.

I'd be interested to hear from readers -- how would you go about setting up the server side of a new venture that could become an overnight sensation? More importantly, how would you go about setting up such a system at the lowest possible cost - just in case they didn't come at all?

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