[JTenerife]

Well, it's not irrelevant, but it's common practice. Of course bad practice. Seen it myself. Facebook and others might be able to choose the better approach but a lot of badly managed companies / projects choose the last resort solution to through out millions of dollars for hardware as they're incapable of fixing the problems properly. Those projects are politically screwed, so they often sell their solution to buy expensive hardware as success. Sounds ill, I know ...