I wrote last week about paying a little more for things of value, and yesterday my company got a painful lesson in this. This is a business story, but it can easily be related to many things in our lives. Here's what happened:

Last week our site IndexCreditCards.com put out a news release on our picks for the best new credit cards that launched in 2007. I blogged about it here as well. We saw this as a year-end "best of" list that might be of interest in terms of what the trends are in the industry, or whatever.

Well, our press release got picked up by Marketwatch.com and a story was written that made it seem like we had named the best darn credit cards in the whole marketplace, which was not our intention. I e-mailed the writer saying I thought the article gave the wrong impression, but there are thousands of news articles written each day, so, I thought, no big deal.

Well, things got bigger. This week the story was syndicated to Yahoo's personal finance area, and yesterday there was a link to it from the Yahoo home page. You may have heard that a lot of people use Yahoo. It's true. The server for our site was completely overwhelmed by the traffic sent via a link in the article, and the site was virtually unreachable for almost 8 hours. Not only did we lose the huge amounts of traffic the story would have driven, but the fact that people could not get through also stopped them from reading the story from our perspective, so that they could see that we had listed the Top 10 NEW cards and not the best 10 in the whole market.

The lesson? Pay a little more for a better server, and you won't be begging tech support people to do something, anything to get your site back up when your big opportunity comes up. Even though we weren't entirely pleased with the news story itself, you can bet the thought of being a step away from the Yahoo home page was appealing. And the opportunity was almost completely ruined by the fact that we did not have the server capacity in place to handle the traffic. Yes, it would've been a little more expensive to pay for a more robust server, but the difference is less than $100 per month. And, yes, for a site like ours that powerful server is generally not needed, but it was needed yesterday, a day when a lot of people were getting their first impressions of our site, impressions that I can confidently say are not-so-hot based on what happened.

We're upgrading now, but it's the old close-the-barn-door-after-the-horses-escaped kind of story. Our chances of hitting that Yahoo home page again are remote.

Lesson to you: don't cheap out on important stuff, especially if you can afford not to without significant pain.

(Photo of the pants-down guy above comes from the photo work of that one asian.)