Recently we have been working on a Facebook Application called The Lunch Game. The premise is simple – we have a database of 500 thousand restaurants in the United States that is searchable by your location and the type of food you want to eat. To delve a bit further it also allows you to include friends in your choosing session by considering their preferences for foods that they like and dislike and then you can send them an invite. For example: I am in Overland Park Kansas and want to eat with my friend Enigma who is in Lenexa Kansas. I select where I am, types of foods I want, and then select him as a dining partner. The resulting list shows me places near us as well as which places would best accomodate our collective tastes. Turns out to be Red Robin.

I didn’t bring this up as a sales pitch, but instead for a more interesting reason – although I do find The Lunch Game to be a great idea! The funny part to all of this is the concept of Web Success. A few years ago there was this commercial for a company on the Superbowl, I think, regarding a website launch that goes bad. Realize that bad on the web can mean a few things: 1) NOBODY comes to your site. 2) People come and never come back. 3) So many people come that your site explodes resulting in people not coming back. The guys over at Penny Arcade are known to wield the power of breaking someone’s website just by Tycho or Gabe merely mentioning said website’s existance. Evil Bastards!

Back to my point – let us pretend that you have this clever idea for a website, take the time to put it together, and launch it. You do a little Search Engine Optimization(SEO) on it, maybe even go so far as to purchase some Pay Per Click(PPC) ads all in hopes of getting a following. The thing is most people don’t realize what it means to actually have a successful website -  a REALLY successful website – it takes hardware, loads of it, and bandwidth, tons of it. In fact in many cases it can take more than the average person can even afford.

My point here is that Enigma and I were discussing The Lunch Game, and its place on Facebook, and have talked about the very scary prospect that is a successful website. If that thing takes off, like we all hope (GlazednConfused sacrifices a chicken every day to the greek god of the Internet – Webisius), then we may in fact be screwed. Enigma isn’t too concerned as we are web dudes and thus do know what to do if we have a traffic explosion – we move the site to bigger IRON (Iron is the industry slang for SERVERS). The thing is, as I said, we are tech guys and thus actually know what to do – what if you aren’t?

The guys over at Penny-Arcade have this following for their site that is a little on the HOLY CRAP side – something like 50 million page views a month. I’ve met them, hell I even interviewed Tycho for an online radio show I used to do – and in that interview Tycho eluded to the fact that they never expected to be successful, especially not on the magnitude that they are now.

So if you have this problem what do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?