You say that using websockets was less reliable than streaming HTTPS, can you elaborate why? In my experience websockets are perfect to use for the use case you described, are there disadvantages?
Are you saying that at one point the servers would crash relatively often, which would leave sockets clients hanging, unless some complicated client-side code was written - whereas without sockets, a load-balancer could automatically switch clients to functional servers, without extra coding, and mitigate the issue? Isn't the problem the crashy servers?