Hostway/ValueWeb: thousands of sites offline during three days

ValueWeb and Gate.com are two business units of Affinity. Hostway acquired Affinity in April, 2007. Hostway provides cloud hosting solution.  The webhosting company has 12 data center throughout North America and Europe. The migration consisted to move several thousand servers from Miami (Affinity Servers) to Tampa (hostway data center).

The webhosting company notified customers, sending them an email, that they will experience an outage:

Dear Valued Customer. Over the last month we have sent e-mails notifying you of an outage that you will experience with your Affinity dedicated server in order to facilitate a relocation of our datacenter. The 12-15 hour outage will take place beginning this Friday [...]  If your server is still not responding at this time, please call technical support at 888.846.xxxx. If you would like to ensure the most graceful shut down of your server, you may log into your server before 8 PM on July 27th and perform a shut down.

We have planned to take every precaution to protect the hardware during this relocation but please ensure that all of your data on your dedicated server is backed up before the relocation begins. Should we need to replace any hardware on the servers, you will be responsible for loading your data onto the new hardware.

On DSLreports.com forum and on Digg, Valueweb customers talk about the issue, resolved 3 days later.

As we can see on Datacentermap, Hostway datacenter are located in Tampa:

 
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