Nov/090
Virtualpetlist interviews Keith Kurson, owner of Subeta.net
Please introduce yourself.
I’m Keith Kurson, and I own Agoge Inc., which is the company that owns Subeta. That means that beyond working on Subeta, I also manage and contribute to our other web properties. I’m always happy to answer questions, since it means I get to be connected to the community.
1: What is Subeta?
Subeta is, at it’s core, a virtual pet site. Over the years we’ve added a lot of things that have pulled focus away from the pets, but we’ve still got a good amount of work dedicated to the pet aspect of the site. Beyond the pets, we have (what I believe to be) the most advanced human avatar system, out of any site, including GaiaOnline, which is our most popular feature at the moment.
2:What are your future plans for Subeta?
I’d like it to be more social. We’ve recently released things like the forum pulse, the friend feed, publishing your feed to twitter, forum groups, etc. All of this things bring us full circle on making the site about the community, and people interacting with each other.
I’d like to continue in our last year of amazing events, that are incredibly immersive and have users interacting with each other. We recently had an amazing event that included something that I don’t think most sites (especially neopets) would considering doing. If you’re interested, it happens on page 11 
. As you can see from that page, we’re capable of telling an incredible story, as well as having astounding art to go with it.
The most popular event, I’d say, was our huge zombie invasion in February which was dubbed the ‘Love Epidemic’ because it happened right around the time that Valentines would normally take place. Users had to bite each other to get achievements, and that further spread the (multiple strains) of the disease around the site.
Also right now we are in the process of redoing things like our registration, and a tutorial system, because the site is big and confusing to new users. We want them to be part of Subeta the moment they join, and right now it’s just… confusing. Something we’re working on 
.
3: Why do you think Subeta made it to where it is today?
The number one reason, is the incredible talent of our artists. While I respect other sites, I think that our creative department is the most amazing in the business. The detail that those girls are able to fit into a GIF pet image, is amazing. As things go on (including that plot image above) I continue to be impressed, and amazed at the art that comes out of our art department.
I think another reason is that our staff is friendly, and we’re approachable. I’ve got something like 22,000 posts on the forums, and I’m posting daily. Sometimes I’m snarky (which people get used to, I guess!) but I always try to be helpful, and that goes for the entire time. We answer tickets quickly, and try our best to make sure that users have the best experience possible.
Also we don’t have ugly ads on every page of the site.
4: What made you decide to integrate so many social networking features into Subeta, and do you consider subeta more of a virtual pet site or an rpg/social networking site?
I think that the more friends people are able to make on the site, the more people will stick around. There are more profile comments and sMails made on the site than any other activity. People are interested in making friends, and staying in contact. Things like the friend feed make it easier to see what your friends are doing, and we have a lot of options to make it less intrusive.
5: What is the core technology that powers Subeta, specifically, the software. Certainly you have optimized both your MySQL and PHP installations, and have several other background software.
Our images are served by a server running Lighttpd.
Our webservers run Apache, and we run SVN on it to keep the files in sync between all the developers. We have a panel that deploys files between all 3 servers (via merge) when we’re ready to update the main site.
We have a dev server that has all of our personal repo’s on it.
We have two database servers, one that is the master and one is the slave. The master does most of the hard work, and the data that is fetched from it is all the important stuff. Items, sP, pets, etc. The slave processes things like the forums, shoutbox, etc. We’re running MySQL 5.4 with InnoDB but soon we plan to move to XtraDB.
We use Memcache for our caching needs, APC for our PHP file caching needs, Cacti for our graphing (server load, users online, etc) needs, everything else is custom coded, or compiled.
6: What makes Subeta unique?
There are a few things. Like I mentioned above, our human avatar is leaps and bounds better than any other I’ve seen. Not only in terms of the art that is used, but in terms of the sheer amount of clothing options, as well as the ability to customize it.
Beyond that, we’re innovators in the space of micro-transactions which isn’t so much a unique feature of Subeta anymore, but it’s something that we did first. A lot of the things that we have on the site are things that we did first, or brought into the “main stream” for other sites to include.
We’ve got a lot of projects currently being worked on that’ll bring us back to the point where we can separate ourselves easily from the other sites, which is why we’re hiring PHP developers to push that along .
Also, I’d like to say that we’re unique in the resources that we have to push the site forward. We’ve been incredibly successful not only with Subeta, but with our projects and that means that we’ve got the resoruces to hire new staff to what is considered a ‘real job’. We take tax information, we issue a paycheck with taxes taken out and offer above minimum-wage pay. That’s something that most sites starting out sites can’t really offer.
7: How old were you when Subeta first launched? What made you keep going?
I’m not sure, it was so long ago! It went through several ‘versions’ before it ended up where it is now. I believe that the first Subeta was started when I was 14, but then at some point there was a terrible site crash, and I had to ‘reset’ the site, which happened when I was in High School, as a sophomore.
The reason I kept going is that I saw that I could be successful doing something that I enjoyed. I like to program, I was alright in PHP, and working on Subeta was (and still is!) something that I enjoyed doing. It was worth it for me to dedicate my time to it, instead of other things.
8: Pinkpt asked “Where do you see Subeta in 2 years time?” and you said it’ll be somewhat similar as it is today. Has anything changed on Subeta in two years of time, or has it remained the same?
I think that we’ve done a LOT in the past two years, and I’m glad that we can still be considered ‘the same site’. We’re not interested in selling out, or changing our entire foucs, or doing something that would upset our entire user base. I’m happy where we are, I just want to keep moving in the direction that we’ve been moving in.
9: How many users does Subeta have?
We clear users who have been inactive for more than a year, so. Right now there are 115,742 activated accounts on Subeta.
10:How much traffic does Subeta receive? How many servers?
We are currently doing roughly 5,260 queries per second (18.9M per hour) and have about 1,200 online at any one time. During off-peak time (2AM-8AM) we have about 500-700 people online.
We’re running on three web servers, with the ability to add another one whenever we need it. We get roughly 38,000 visits a day, and yesterday we had 2.4 million pageviews.
You can see the last day’s user online count in the above image.
11: Who is responible for subeta’s daily updates?
There are a lot of people responsible for different kind of updates. Any item adding is generally for the user Amber to do, as she’s the item administrator. If there is some sort of new feature, I generally announce those (and write them).
Luxe is responsible for updates concerning pets, new pet colors, pet revamps, etc.
Alex is the go-to go for larger picture things, downtime, etc. I make him write the ones that people will usually hate me for 
.
12: How many staff members do you have?
We currently have 38 people on the staff.
13: How do you feel about Marapets, Neopets and Powerpets?
I think PowerPets resonates the best for me, for the above choices. Their dedication to charity is admirable, and keeping the site the way that they want it, is also admirable. I’m always excited to see owners who aren’t greedy or money hungry, and don’t make the site about how much money they can pull in. I think Powerpets does an excellent job at walking that fine line. Also, I like that they’ve always managed to keep the focus fully on the pets.
As far as Neopets goes, I don’t really have an opinion. They’re still a good destination if you want to play fun flash games, they’ve got everyone beat on that. They’re still decent at putting together a plot (even though they all end the same way) I enjoy signing in (Yes, I have a neopets account!) to do the puzzles and things like that. When they have challenging content, I enjoy it. I admit I’m very jealous of their success and I hope that I find a way to mimic it but not lose my soul along the way.
As far as Marapets goes, I’m not impressed. It’s full of ads, the owner obviously doesn’t care about the users, and it’s just… not good.
14: What are your goals for Subeta?
Like I said above, we’re always looking for ways to make the site more social, and make the users come closer together. I think we’ve got some good ideas to work toward for next year.
We’re going to continue focusing on our story, which is something that for the first few years we didn’t really do. We’re working heavily on the lore and plot behind all of our yearly events, and trying to refine everything into one central story that the users can feel like they’re a part of.
This makes it easier to do things like our first ever plot, the War of Atebus. Then it didn’t really feel like you were part of the war. If we did something similar now, I think that users would feel like they were part of the war effort, much like they felt attached to the NPC Amy during the last plot, and a lot of users were actually upset when she died.
15: Where do you see Subeta going in 2 years? 5 years?
I can’t really divulge our biggest secrets, so take a look at the above questions. We’re going to be working on new innovative features that really make users see that we’re site that they want to dedicate their time to.
Thank you for the questions! And remember that I’m always happy to help and try to pass any knowledge that I have on to whoever needs it. If you’re looking for help, feel free to PM me on VPL.