Outage in Baltimore

An apparent generator malfunction at a Baltimore building that houses Alabanza and Bulkregister.com left hundreds of thousands of web sites unreachable for much of Wednesday night. An overheating generator in the basement of 10 E. Baltimore created a smoke condition that forced the shutdown of the building's electrical systems.

Alabanza's chief executive officer, Thomas V. Cunningham, told the Baltimore Sun that all of its client Web sites - about 200,000 across the United States - were affected. A support forum message from ChristianWebHost, one of Alabanza's largest clients, placed the total length of the outage at 11 hours.

Alabanza provides turnkey hosting programs that automate essential functions for its reseller clients. Its hosted software allows resellers to sign up web hosting customers without the intervention of customer support employees or a billing department. Its sister company, BulkRegister, is the third-largest registrar of Internet domain names.

The outage creates a headache for Alabanza, which like most hosts has touted its reliability. "Alabanza recognizes that downtime is not an option for your servers," the company says on its web site. "That's why we invest heavily in hardware and facilities that ensure that your clients are up and running on the web 24 hours a day, seven days a week."