How they spend $10m on....this?
I work as Director of Technology for a "Customer Experience Management" firm (we used to be "Market Research" but that's not cool anymore) - so we basically do what the online census does for a living, setup pretty websites to ask questions and store answers.
Now, I know there's like 24m Australians, so there sample set is a little larger than my companies clients, and with a fine for not partaking, there's more of an incentive to take part, so uptake will be greater.
But, we run these things 24x7, no loss of data, international respondent base.
And we don't spend anywhere near $10m, I'm struggling just to comprehend how you break that all down. I mean, even if you bought hardware (Instead of leasing for the month you're actually online) and pay ridiculous software fees, I'd be hard pushed to spend anywhere near half that, and certainly be able to process more than 260 respondents per second, with failover, and DDoS mitigation..
..but then, secure by design is our motto, I'm not paranoid, you're dealing with confidential information on the internet for big businesses, anything can happen..