I’m often asked this question so I’m going to save my fingers and answer you all at once.
Outages come in two flavors expected and unexpected…
Expected outages:
These happen typically once a week or every other week where the service is unavailable for about 10 minutes. During these outages we put in place new server side code which either adds new functionality for Paltalk or fixes some outstanding bugs. We also will take some physical computers we use as servers out of use and replace them with more current hardware. We try very hard to keep these outages as short as possible. A handful of times during the year we have a scheduled outage of a longer duration (1-2 hours) when we need to upgrade some major piece of equipment which we can’t run without.
We try to do these scheduled outages between 1:30 and 2:30 AM EST, Some people may ask why that time? Why not some other time that impacts less people. The problem is that Paltalk is a worldwide service. When people are going to sleep on one side of the world, people are waking up on the other. It is no longer possible to pick a time when no members are impacted at all, so we just have to choose the least busy times.
Unexpected outages:
Are well, unexpected. They can happen anytime. Sometimes they are due to a flaw in our code — *very rare occurrence — sometimes a major piece of hardware fails or our Internet Service Provider has an issue with connectivity. Other times it is due to the service actively being attacked by malicious people. We do our best to try and mitigate these and a host of other possible unexpected problems, but we know we are far from perfect and continue to endeavor to improve. During these outages we are especially grateful for your patience and continued patronage.
* added by demand of Developers
Note that including expected outages, our uptime last year was around: 99.5%
-Pete (paltalk)
