Denver, CO -- (SBWIRE) -- 12/06/2012 -- A blaze which started at a Denver data center on Wednesday night has been contained with no one hurt, authorities say. The fire was reportedly started by an overheated server utilized by local Medicare Supplemental Insurance comparison website: http://medicaresupplementalinsurancecomparison.net.
The fire started roughly two hours after the website’s initial launch. As the server heated up from the initial rush of traffic the CPU cooling system malfunctioned causing a chain reaction that led to the fire starting. The fire rapidly consumed a corner of the first floor in the data center.
“This isn’t the first time a website’s launch has caused a server to overheat,” says Marcus Stevenson, director of operations at FSPServerDirect. “Overheating servers are common with websites that underestimate the demand they’ll receive at any given time. Though a fire would not have started if the system had not malfunctioned in the way that it did.”
The fire reportedly caused significant damage to the host building but none of the neighboring structures were affected. Experts say the most expensive loss will likely come from the damaged server racks- Each one costing up to $10,000.
The Medicare website owners would not comment, but according to a company spokesman the website is back up and running and was only down for 3 hours. “Admittedly we underestimated the sheer demand for this type of website,” says a company spokesperson. “We received 18 thousand visits in our first 2 hours online, most of which came from people searching for Medicare supplemental insurance through Google. As we entered our second hour after launch our site was suddenly kicked offline. Only the next morning were we told that our website might have caused the fire, but since hosting is an outside service we were not held accountable. The data center admitted to us that their own negligence was a major contributor to the fire. Needless to say we have upgraded to a brand new server and had it checked over thoroughly. We will now be able to handle as much traffic as we can get.”
Experts say the demand for the site was so high because it’s one of the first websites of its kind to provide side by side comparisons of Medicare supplemental insurance companies by only entering a zip code. “This is rare for these types of sites,” says a company spokesman. “Most sites like this require personal info before they provide quotes, and the non-invasiveness of our site has definitely contributed to its popularity.”
To learn more about the fire, or to get free side by side comparisons of the most reputable Medicare supplemental insurance providers in an area, please visit: http://medicaresupplementalinsurancecomparison.net/
About medicaresupplementalinsurancecomparison.net
Medicaresupplementalinsurancecomparison.net was created in December of 2012 to help shoppers get the best rates for Medicare supplemental insurance. The website utilizes the absolute latest in price quote technology, and has already received rave reviews from the industry.