Reseller Hosting Guide

With the Software as a Service movement continues to gain momentum, the massive data center outage at ValueWeb/Hostway, which knocked thousands of customer Web sites off the Internet, has implications far beyond the hosting company’s doorstep.Not only are companies that host their applications with an on demand vendor at risk of excessive downtime if a data center has longer-than-planned outages, but developers could be impacted as well, particularly as more migrate to Salesforce.com’s Apex on-demand programming language and platform—and others that may spring up like it.

Salesforce.com last year experienced a series of outages that left customers without access to their front end CRM [Customer Relationship Management] applications — the longest lasting for about five hours or all business day in some cases.

While Salesforce.com blamed the issue on a data center migration as well as on an unpredictable bug, the truth is that any number of issues can impact data center reliability, although it is more common for in-house software glitches to occur, according to some industry watchers. And while many on demand vendors provide SLA [service level agreements] that promise 99.999 percent uptime, there are times when that service reliability falls short.

In an email to eWEEK, John Pozadzides, founder of HTMLHelp.com, wrote that his company, as of Aug. 2, is still having issues with ValueWeb’s migration to another hosting center—five days after the planned migration was to be