165,000 Websites Offline Due to Hosting Problems

No less than 165,000 websites went offline on Saturday and some of them are still unavailable as their hosting company NaviSite planned a server migration in the same day. Although NaviSite informed the customers that their pages might be down for a while on Saturday, the entire operation was slowed down by some problems encountered in the data transfer, PC World reported today. It appears that there was a glitch between the IP and the URL handling of the hosted websites so most visitors were able to access the pages only by typing the IP address instead of the URL. Moreover, the consumers were trying to get their pages online, an action which overloaded the network and obviously slowed down migration.

"What happened was first the URL could not match with the IP address and then IP did not match with the machine, so it took some time, and all this time we have a highly trafficked overloaded network. If there is one little problem, they multiply because there is a lot of dependencies," NaviSite spokesman Rathin Sinha said for PC World.

As expected, the customers were pretty upset and some of them even accused NaviSite of fake information provided to them. Cynthia Brumfield, president of Emerging Media Dynamics Inc., was angry because the hosting company did not provide a clear deadline for resolving the problems and moreover, her website was still unavailable.

"According to people who have talked to NaviSite's tech personnel, they were ill equipped for the relocation and ignorant of how to accomplish even basic tasks. At this point, NaviSite's poorly planned data center consolidation has slipped from mere incompetence to outrageous indifference to its customers' needs and should be grounds for legal action, if not government sanctions of some kind," Mrs. Brumfield wrote in a blog post according to the same source.