Trying to make sense of Healthcare.gov through everything that’s happened so far in this botched atrocious rollout, it’s quite mind-boggling. Now comes yet another head-scratcher. The Department of Health and Human Services has confirmed that Healthcare.gov will be picking up the tent stakes from its current Virginia home over at Terremark, a subsidiary of Verizon Communications over to Hewlett-Packard Plano, TX facilities very early in 2014. It would seem likely that the move which is targeted for March were to take place, then activity around this move is already taking place in the background.

Now, Terremark certainly has many enterprise clients, which would mean their services are robust, reliable and competitive. The same can obviously be associated with Hewlett-Packard as well. The tech giant is of course one of the most iconic companies in the business with an enterprise pedigree like few others.  It should also be made clear that to the fullest extent known by the public, the problems that healthcare.gov has on a technical level are with the site and the data, it has nothing to do with the host that runs it.  The problems can’t be pinned on Terremark in any way.  These are government contracts and the details are public or will be made available soon, it can safely be assumed that this was a multiple factor decision, but competitive pricing weighs heavy in these situations and it was probably just a lowest bid situation.

A spokesman for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services division confirmed the move Wednesday but noted that the change in providers had been contracted well before the website launched.

“As we think about the overall performance and functionality of the site, redundancy is a critical part of our planning and we are working to ensure it in all aspects of the system,” the spokesman said in an email to CNBC.

Timing is everything

So why point this out, why highlight this? It seems quite odd to launch a website of this magnitude with a host provider only to switch it out shortly after launch. Let’s get that straight, this is a short timeframe and that’s not an easy task mind you, particularly when you consider the scale of this thing, the problems it has been having and this looming self-imposed deadline to get the site somewhat functional again. It’s extremely hard to imagine that there was much foresight into this and it is starting to seem like the site is headed for another major issue in just a few week’s time. Moving a site this complex, this connected from one provider to another is a significant risk point that incurs the possibility of outage, downtime and degraded functionality. It is something when done properly not only has to be planned well, it has to be tested for over and over again until everything is validated and then it has to be executed just as well. Does anyone have confidence that is going to happen after all the things that have happened so far? Expect that this factor will come up as a major technical reality when it comes to what many people anticipate will happen come Dec 1st. That is that healthcare.gov will not be ready. In many circles we have seen the discussion of the realities of development, particularly one that says 80% of effort goes into delivering the last 20% of work to be done on a project like this. When this grand mission of fixing the site within the month was launched this detail of a physical site change was surely not part of that and one can only wonder what if anything the ultimate impact might be, will that migration be set back or will they just pull the trigger and get it done.
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