[topgun]

I think they can do better.

Migrating the application to Amazon Web Services would be a start. AWS has the services in place to auto-scale and to auto-descale based on the load. So FIRST would pay when the scaling is needed, and not pay when the scaling is no longer needed. AWS is one example of several cloud services available.

Scale testing is easily doable, both from a software and a money standpoint. I was using JMeter years ago to do load testing on my websites. JMeter is still used, and I would bet several others are available as well (both commercial and opensource). It is not hard to do load testing.