thegames.db just updated their Facebook page a few hours ago.
“Hi guys, we are sorry that there has not been much information about the downtime that we are currently experiencing, so I wanted to write a post to update you all on the current situation.
We started off nearly a decade ago as a small site used mostly by a few groups of retro gamers and HTPC enthusiasts. Since then our user base has grown, along with the ever growing community of API users and developers that have integrated our service into their apps and site.
Serving so many users obviously requires quite a lot of computing resources, and over the years we have taken steps to keep the resource usage low, whist still trying to maintain great performance. This has included putting our service behind the Cloudflare Content deliver Network, along with optimising the database server for the many, many thousands of requests we get every day.
This has proven to be a losing battle. We have regularly had to put more and more financial resources into upgrading our hosting. We currently pay a large, well known hosting company named 1and1 for the highest specification Virtual Private Server that they offer.
This seems to not be enough. A few days ago, 1and1 shut off our service without any warning. After two days of contacting them several times a day, they were finally able to tell us that our service had been shut off for excessive resource usage. It seems that we will no longer be able to host our service with this company.
Our most likely option to get the site back up would be to purchase some dedicated server hardware, and place it in a data centre. This obviously requires a large amount of time and effort, and also financial resources.
We have always made our service available to all of our users at no financial cost to them, and we hope to continue in this manner.
We thank you for your continued support, and we understand how inconvenient it is to many of you that our service is currently offline.
Unfortunately at this point in time, the situation is out of our control. We need to plan and investigate new hosting options.
Thank you again,
Flexage
TheGamesDB”
