Government Changes Web Hosts
Did you ever wonder what company was behind the U.S. Government's health care website disaster? What company does the government use to host this healthcare site? Well, that information has been leaked.
Today, the U.S. Government signed a deal with Hewlett-Packard to replace Verizon. That's right, the current company the government uses to host sites is Verizon. Surprisingly, though, the government isn't ditching Verizon as a result of the healthcare website mess. The decision was made prior to the release of that site.
Goodbye, Verizon
According to the Wall Street Journal, the government began moving some of its hosted sites to Verizon's ‘Terremark' division in 2010. When that happened, numerous websites that were moved were locked out, shut down, or faced blackouts because Terremark wasn't up to par.
That's when the government decided that Verizon's Terremark wouldn't do, and the decision to move to HP was made. In short: the government knew back in 2010 that Verizon wasn't the more reliable host available. But, nothing really happened until today. That's nearly two years later – and switching hosting providers earlier may have meant avoiding the whole healthcare.gov mess.
What Now?
HP won't be taking over the government's hosting charges quite yet. The company will start hosting sites in 2013, but that won't happen right away. As for the healthcare.gov site that's still not working right for most Americans, that site will be up and running smoothly by the end of December – that's the promise, at least.
A number of Americans still can't use the site, so that's not such a great thing. Hopefully, moving to HP's hosting instead of Verizon's will be a move in the right direction for a government that can't stand to lose any more website battles with its citizens. So far, numerous outages with Verizon's hosting centers have caused a lot of citizens to seek other ways of finding and signing up for healthcare.
Government Changes Web Hosts: Moving the Site
Moving any site to a new hosting provider is a big deal. Moving a site as large as the U.S. healthcare site is an even bigger deal. In order to ensure that the whole thing goes off without a hitch, hiring experts in all fields will be necessary. The goal is to move the site without causing any additional problems, and this means spending more money to hire more experts to make sure everything happens without incident.
How long will it all take? We're looking at a few months before the site is moved to HP's services completely. In the interim, everyone working on the project will spend time trying to figure out how to make sure that the transition happens smoothly. Will it succeed? It's really hard to say right now, but it looks like the whole thing will be an exercise in patience – not the the majority of Americans have any left when it comes to government-run healthcare websites.
