I understand how servers work. Most than likely the issue they're having doesn't have to do with server infrastructure (CPU/memory/NIC), but rather some kind of database tuning or connecting pooling. Most large servers these days are virtual machines to which you can dynamically allocate additional resources. If a server is CPU constrained you can dynamically allocate additional CPUs to that server in realtime. In my professional experience with applications of this nature I'd lay odds on this being some kind of database query tuning issue.