So today Mike Filsaime is doing a big giveaway for his Butterfly Marketing 2 course.  Mike bills himself as a viral marketing expert and I don’t know if you’ve ever had any success with viral marketing yourself, but here’s the thing about it.  Traffic tends to come in surges and places tremendous loads on your server.  Anyone who has ever gotten an article to the front page of Digg.com or similar can probably attest to the server crushing traffic.

There are many elegant solutions you can use to keep your server humming along when you’ve got thousands of people trying to access it all at the same time.  There are some simple ones as well that any IT guy with even basic knowledge should know how to implement.

However, it would seem that this viral marketing expert with and his team don’t have any of those people on staff.  The nice thing about doing a product launch is the ability to prepare for a much higher than normal server load.   You could easily lease load balancers and extra servers for the project (yes, it will cost a bunch of extra cash, but this is a product launch, a ton of cash is made on these things) if you know you’re going to be getting a lot of extra traffic.

Now I don’t pretend to have any behind the scenes knowledge of what they actually did do to get ready for the launch, but they didn’t do anything close to enough.

I’ve met Mike, and he seems like a good enough guy, but I have to say that I can’t for the life of me understand how anyone who has been through product launches before and is a viral marketing expert isn’t prepared to handle the traffic generated by a successful campaign.