Mike Arrington raises an interesting dilemma on Crunchnotes: when he features a site on TechCrunch, often times the site ends up crashing due to the overwhelming load of traffic that gets sent its way. Its a lose-lose situation as since TechCrunch would clearly like people to see what their review or piece of news is about, while the startup in question would clearly like the exposure that TechCrunch brings.

And neither gets to see the benefit of it really happening as the site goes down.

Case in point: Spotplex, which went down faster than wunderbed in a fistfight after it got some TechCrunch love.

Funny thing is that getting highlighted by influencers on the web isn’t a new thing, nor is it going to go away. Sites which act like traffic funnels for thousands, if not millions of people, will continue to direct traffic to unsuspecting sites. Sure there’s TechCrunch, but what about Seth Godin’s blog? Digg? Slashdot? The New York Times? StumbleUpon?

I think it poses a particularly interesting quandry to startups, however. While we would all *like* a giant surge in traffic for the benefit of bragging rights, a little bit of adsense income, and possibly an increase in retained traffic, many startups depend on any free publicity that comes their way.

Sure, I think they’d all like the slow (or rapid) organic growth that accrues over time — but for many of them that are operating on shoestring (or, no-string) budgets and minimal personnel, getting featured isn’t just a question of “that would be nice if … “, but rather “that might be the break we need if only — “.

Startups need to be able to handle the traffic loads at any one time if they’re serious about their web application, because these kinds of events are tremendous opportunities for free publicity and need to be managed as such.
Some of the Mike’s readers have made a few suggestions as to the solution:

• Letting startups know ahead of time when they might get TechCrunched
• TechCrunch should start a mirror service for their startups
• TechCrunch should have a “minor league” blog to feature beta’s
• There should be screencasts of featured sites instead

These are all fine in their own way, but I really think that startups should try and find a solution themselves; after all, the onus isn’t on any one influencer to try and protect the sites they link *to* (although its in their best interests for it to be up), simply because a web app startup can’t always predict *who* is going to be linking to it.

On the other hand, I’m not qualified to make any kind of technical suggestions as how to manage scalable dynamic hosting in an easy and economic fashion — but a one suggestion did come to mind.

I wonder, speaking of startups, if this is something a “startup” could even work on – providing highly scalable hosting solutions mini- or micro- web applications in a typical  low-cost web2.0 fashion, with higher fees kicking in when these applications “make” it to the big time.  It would be a numbers game of course, with a tiny sliver of startups actually getting big enough to pay for the rest, but perhaps the challenge is just big enough to represent a great opportunity.  And there’s certainly enough interest in the current Web2.0 boom for such a “meta-” company to find enough real takers amongst the tire kickers.
And if it works out, don’t be afraid to let everyone know you heard it on DJI first. ;)