Data Center Migration Goes Awry at ValueWeb

A data center migration at ValueWeb has gone badly, leaving thousands of sites offline, some for as long as three days. The migration involved moving several thousand dedicated servers from Affinity Internet's Miami, Fla. hosting facility to a Hostway data center in Tampa, about 270 miles away. The servers were leased by customers of ValueWeb and Gate.com, two business units of Affinity, which was acquired by Hostway in April.

The move, which began Friday night, was scheduled to take 12 to 15 hours. But by late Sunday night many customers reported that their sites remained offline. A forum post by a Gate.com manager indicates that all servers had been connected and powered on in the new location by 2 pm Sunday, but acknowledged that servers remained offline. Customers posting in a discussion thread at Digg said they were still down early Tuesday morning, more than three days after the migration started.

Among the sites knocked offline by the migration was HTML Help, a popular reference site for web site developers. "HTMLHelp's two dedicated servers were offline for over 75 hours," site maintainer John Pozadzides reported. "The worst part was that the company failed to communicate to anyone during the longer than expected outage as they went completely silent - at times not answering customer service phone calls, and sending no status update e-mails."