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I've had a couple of extended outages with the website. Is there something wrong with it?

Chess.com is running on the sheer will, dedication (and financial backing) of a very small group of people. 

The site has experienced tremendous growth typical of the web 1.0 days.  When this happens, server, bandwidth, and human resources are quickly stretched to the limit resulting in periodic performance problems.

As Erik had posted in the history of Chess.com, it's popularity has garnered some jealousy among its perceived rivals as well resulting in some malicious attacks.

A donation function is probably soon in the works and I strongly encourage anyone out there who enjoys the site to dig in and offer a sign of monetary thanks for the wonderful effort demonstrated by the dedicated team who have brought us this site. 

we are rolling out some HUGE and very impactful features over the next little while and some of the changes we have done to the site can cause temporary outages. today we launched some new code and it caused some hiccups :) the problem is that you can test everything PERFECTLY on your development server, but how that code will react when there are thousands of people on your website is a different story. so we have it all under control, but sometimes it is a bit rocky, especially when we push stuff live while people are still on the site (as opposed to scheduled times when we bring the server down).

does that help answer your question? 

 Does chess.com gets profits on books and softwares? Because on the website they only review and direct to wholesalechess.com or something like that...

Have you thought about creating a beta-testers group? I mean a big one, about 100 users to tests all these new features before they are delivered on the production server. Maybe this would help to detect changes that would affect the website performance when huge amounts of users are connected.

 Is there any project in the future of having your own shop (I mean with books, programs, etc.)?

My background is in large IT deployments and troubleshooting. If you need a technical hand send me a private message and I'll contribute my time to help.

As for my initial question; it is answered, thank you. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't an unknown problem causing outages, as they have a habit of creeping up too :)

 nope. :)

 well, that is a good idea. we have a dev site, but this whole site is still in beta (haven't you seen the logo? :D)

 it isn't an easy fix to do that. the DBs are seperate, etc. it's a good idea, but you don't really know what is going to happen unitl you are in the THOUSANDS, which is what happened today. it wouldn't have been detected with less than 500. 

 Now that you say it, I have just noticed the "beta" word on the logo! (It looks really tiny at 1280x1024). Maybe you'll find a way to simulate the workload using some software. Per example you could try to make a program that would simulate 1000 concurrent connections on the test db.

My comment was just an idea to help you with your development, not a complain. anyway, I'm sure you are performing an outstanding work with chess.com, so I encourage you to continue with your development work!

The outages may or may not be fully explained above, but a more consistent problem seems to be that page refresh and so on is very definitely slower than it was a couple of weeks ago.   Perhaps the site has reached a level of usage where the underlying code is beginning to be stressed.  To some extent any outage is (just) tolerable, but slowness is the one 'feature' that will drive folk away.  There are so many consistently fast sites out there, as of course you realise, that the current trend is a little depressing

I am unsure if the 'Beta' add-on is really a valid excuse for flaky performance. After all, Google Toolbars have been in permanent beta for a very long time, but that has not equated with flaky.

You were not even born when this convo happened, kinda trippy.

its interesting