"Migration" Downtime Piles Up

In the data center business, folks like to talk about the high cost of downtime. It's adding up quickly as data center closures and forced relocations are taking a heavy toll on site availability for widely-used Web destinations. C/Net's News.com will be offline this entire weekend (Friday night to Monday morning) as it switches data centers. That's a lot of downtime for one of the Internet's busiest news sites.

It's not as though they had a choice. The move was forced by Metromedia Fiber Network's decision to close data centers in San Francisco and Los Angeles as part of its Chapter 11 restructuring. MFN apparently gave just a few weeks notice that it would be discontinuing service in the former AboveNet centers.

News.com isn't alone, either. On June 25th Topica.com was forced to relocate when its colocation center closed. As a result, its Email Publisher service, which provides email newsletter pubishing services for many web sites (including CarrierHotels.com) was offline for an entire day and performing poorly for several days after it came back online.

Last Friday it was relocation time for Interest Alert, which provides syndicated news feeds to hundreds of web sites. The move was completed in a manner of hours, but lingering DNS resolution issues meant some sites' newsfeeds weren't fully functional for up to 24 hours.

It was inevitable that as the industry consolidation accelerated and more data centers were shuttered, the customer migration process would begin to get chaotic. I'll manage to make it through the weekend without News.com. But such high-profile outages won't help win over those who may already be skittish about the stability of the industry.