I'd like to thank everyone for their input. I've read all of the replies so far. I see I'm not the only one who had this experience. I've been googling around to get an education on load balancing and bandwidth forecasting, and it seems there are white papers that have it down to a science. In the end, the almighty dollar has its say. If a company wanted all clients to experience 100% uptime, it would be far too expensive. They coined terms such as "acceptable unplanned downtime," which should make all of the readers at least somewhat upset. A company can decide which percent of its customer base will suffer through service unavailablility, and scale their hardware deployment to satisfy that metric. Everyone outside of that fringe: tough crap. I'm not sure I liked learning about it this way.