IP Democracy: Navisite Suffers Massive Failure, 1,000s of Sites Down

Applications services and managed hosting provider Navisite is in the midst of a massive outage as the publicly traded company attempts to consolidate its data centers. Unfortunately, my sites (not this blog) and email have been down for the count going on two three days, with no end in sight.

For the past two three days, Navisite has been promising to fix the issue within a "few hours." Now they are promising to resolve the problem by midnight [ed. midnight deadline came and went with no resolution], although at this point very few clients trust what the company has to say.

Navisite has hosted several conference calls promising a solution to the unexplained problem, but none has materialized.

At least 1,400 organizations host their servers with Navisite and at least some of those servers are partitioned among multiple parties. One commenter (link here but the site is down as of 10:03 a.m.) has suggested that at least 200,000 web sites have been pulled down by Navisite's poor planning.

One lesson painfully learned from this episode: if you can avoid it all, don't outsource your hosting. And if you're not in a position to bring the hosting in house, don't, under any circumstances, rely on Navisite to get the job done.

Update: As of 7:40 a.m. this morning, Navisite has still not resolved the problems that have shut down several hundred thousand web sites. The company's PR contact phone number is "not in service" and I just spoke with a Navisite technical support representative who claims not to know about the source of the problem. He promised to have someone call me. An estimated 175,000 sites have been knocked offline for the third day in a row, most of them are either small mom and pop operations, the lifeblood of the Internet, or non-profit agencies. A good diary of the screw-up is here. Mobile Mind recommends finding another managed hosting provider.

Update: If you're a Navisite customer and have been down for the past three days, please post a comment and tell me your story. It's inconceivable to me that so many sites have gone dark and the mainstream press hasn't picked up on what's going on with Navisite.

Update: Three days following the migration disaster, Navisite has gone public with a statement. They've promised to have a "significant majority" of us up and running by 1 pm. EST today. (Of course, they've been promising to have everybody up and running all weekend.) Still amazing to me that the mainstream press isn't all over this.

Update: Guess what? The 1 p.m. deadline came and went my sites are still down. We're definitely going to ditch Navisite when this is all over and I hope they compensate us for the time and cost it will take to do so.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on November 4, 2007 9:53 PM to IP Democracy