Healthcare.gov will soon be hosted by HP rather than Verizon

The Obama administration has just three days left to fix Healthcare.gov, the buggy federal health insurance website, before its self-imposed deadline expires. But there’s one new wrinkle that could make things better or worse: the website is moving to a new hosting provider. According to The Wall Street Journal, the US Department of Health and Human Services is replacing previous host Terremark, a subsidiary of Verizon, with Hewlett-Packard instead.

The move doesn’t seem to be related to Healthcare.gov’s troubles, as the HHS reportedly saught to replace Terremark in the spring, long before the hosting provider’s data centers suffered a pair of embarrassing crashes. HP was awarded a $38 million contract in the summer, according to the Journal, months before the website launched on October 1st. However, transitions between data centers and hosting providers can be tricky, and there’s a chance things could go wrong yet again. Still, with all the politiical attention, HP will be under a lot of pressure to ensure a seamless handoff and perform better than the competition.

“We are working to ensure a smooth transition between the two contractors,” an HHS representative told the Journal.

Earlier today, the government revealed that a parallel online health insurance marketplace for small business owners, SHOP, has been delayed by a full year.