It really blows when dev is down and no one replies to my messages. It's as if it being down doesn't affect them because they're not doing work or something.

Maybe dev server being up is once in a blue moon kind of occurrence there

My company has a platform as a product and both the test dev platforms have been down for over 2 weeks now. I raised a ticket to bring them back up. The current update from today is that test is somewhat working.

I guess that's progress but I still can't really test on a proper environment

Here we have :
1. Internal "test" server, just to test publish, let internal teams play with early code (A windows 10 PC lol, not even Windows server, but it does the job for internal testing)
2. A testing/beta environment, VERY close to production, even cost us money on Azure. Here automated tests are run
3. Staging environment: Same WEB server as Production, shares database with production. But not UserPreferences. Need to be VERY careful
4. Production server
Note : Staging and production can be swapped in 15-20 seconds if something goes badly in an update.