Isn't it all about customer experience? Let's face it: the ticketing business does not typically follow a level, steady demand model. There is a daily demand level, relatively low, with significant spikes for key events.
If I'm providing technology services for that type of model, I plan resources appropriately for the expected customer's customers' experience, and I need to fully understand the model of what my customer is trying to do. End customers don't give a non-street-legal helmet car full of shit if the site works perfectly 99.9 percent of the time, they care about what the system is like when they're trying to access it. At 8:00 this morning, or before every home playoff game, people are all trying to get tickets. They're having a shitty experience. That reflects poorly on my company because I'm providing the service, and on my customer because their name is on the site and they're the ones trying to sell something.
Tatanka's bottom line: it's not like someone is trying to implement a ticket sales mechanism on a server that serves up recipes to housewives that lack creativity, it's a system designed for ticket sales. It should be more responsive to the demand it is likely to get during peak ticket sales, and flexible enough to take advantage of resources when they're needed, especially if the hosting environment is responsible for serving several tenants. NDSU's peak ticket demand, although awesome, is very very small compared to what a decent ticketing system should be able to handle on a routine basis.
Flame away.