Bungled Hostway/ValueWeb Data Center Move Results In Several Days of Downtime

[mandy]

A torrent of Web site postings to social networking site Digg, along with several quickly erected blogs, reflect a data center migration gone badly awry, leaving thousands of Hostway customer Web sites in the dark.

Hostway Web hosting customers have posted reports that their Web sites and back-office applications have been offline for as long as three days...

The planned July 27 data center migration at ValueWeb, a Hostway company, involved moving more than 3,700 servers 270 miles, from Affinity's Miami hosting facility to a Hostway data center in Tampa, Fla...

full article: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2165290,00.asp

Long 600+ post thread on the ValueWeb forum -the anger grows page by page:
http://forum.valueweb.com/showthread.php?t=1344

a related article:

With the Software as a Service movement continues to gain momentum, the massive data center outage at ValueWeb/Hostway, which knocked thousands of customer Web sites off the Internet, has implications far beyond the hosting company's doorstep.

Not only are companies that host their applications with an on demand vendor at risk of excessive downtime if a data center has longer-than-planned outages, but developers could be impacted as well, particularly as more migrate to Salesforce.com's Apex on-demand programming language and platform—and others that may spring up like it...

In an email to eWEEK, John Pozadzides, founder of HTMLHelp.com, wrote that his company, as of Aug. 2, is still having issues with ValueWeb's migration to another hosting center—five days after the planned migration was to be completed...

full article: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2165828,00.asp