Hi Snarkie,
Do you have any insight or ideas as to why Neopets has been going down so often? It often stops working in the evenings for 1-2+ hours at a time. I think TNT said during Comicon they are working on it but didn’t give any specifics. It’s a little concerning that it happens so frequently and with no warning. Just wondering if they could be performing maintenance or working on something else.
Heya, Ellen! Thanks for the question.
Since I no longer work there, I have no definitive insight into this. Sorry. 🙁 Based on my experience in the industry, I would guess it’s just bandwidth/server issues. That’s just a guess though.
Neopets is not an easy site to run. You need good servers, fast databases, and (hopefully cloud) hosting but that all costs money. We had issues sometimes when we were on our own back in the day. Servers just go down with no warning when they get taxed. But then Viacom’s huge server farm kept us running for “free” since they owned us, so we had almost no issues as the site got more complex. But that support was lost during the transition to JS. I have no idea what they’re running on now! (It was AWS during the transition but I would imagine that’s changed.)
Also, hot damn that’s old code. I can’t imagine they can upgrade PHP without breaking the whole site either? Unless they’re just suppressing every error and hoping nothing is fatal? Who knows? I do not envy whoever their sys admin is. Heh.