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I work with US state governments a lot. Departments treasure their .com domains because they can actually get updates to the zone file without having to go thro

I work with US state governments a lot. Departments treasure their .com domains because they can actually get updates to the zone file without having to go through months (literally) of repeated requests to get something added to the .<state>.gov/us domain. If a department or agency has to reach outside to the state IT department for anything the timeline doubles or triples. It’s a real problem.

Mountain_Skies 2y ago
I used to do lots of consulting work for various departments and agencies in the state I was in at the time. The biggest issue was that the state IT department wanted everything centralized, running on only department servers, using a single platform chosen by them (Vignette StoryServer). Most agencies found that to be too restrictive, especially since at the time Vignette only used TCL. Even worse was the IT department's insistence that agencies sign a 99 year contract for cost sharing, the amount of which would never be known in advance since it would only be calculated quarterly based on all expenses the state IT department incurred hosting state agencies.
frakt0x90 2y ago
Same for the enterprise (non-tech I assume) world. When I was on the business side, we treasured any compute we could get that was not tied to corporate IT. Going through them would turn a 1 day fix into a 2 week endeavor. Product development would go from 1 month to 6 or more.
- mlhpdx 2y ago
  Yes. I remember the delight of deploying my first server with a credit card. The previous one had taken 6 weeks and $100,000 out of our department budget. Such a godsend.
- bombcar 2y ago
  You've found out a huge reason cloud took off so hard. Lots of it is shadow-IT. Nobody except a few universities actually uses subdomains as they should be, where you actually delegate the subdomain to the business unit using it.
  - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
    I tried to access gettysburg.edu the other day and was greeted by a stupid redirect page (with a meta refresh tag) insisting on use of www rather than just issuing the redirect immediately. The reality is they're stuck in 1995 and won't make rational changes.
    - sneak 2y ago
      I think someone extremely rational is making a lot of big changes and I could not be more excited to see the outcome.
belorn 2y ago
Do you mean that all .gov domains are handled by the same dns service provider? I can understand if the TLD registry is a pain to deal with when it comes to changing information at the top, but zones files? The whole design of dns have delegation as a central feature so that the registry do not need to do everything.

Mountain_Skies 2y ago

I used to do lots of consulting work for various departments and agencies in the state I was in at the time. The biggest issue was that the state IT department wanted everything centralized, running on only department servers, using a single platform chosen by them (Vignette StoryServer). Most agencies found that to be too restrictive, especially since at the time Vignette only used TCL. Even worse was the IT department's insistence that agencies sign a 99 year contract for cost sharing, the amount of which would never be known in advance since it would only be calculated quarterly based on all expenses the state IT department incurred hosting state agencies.

frakt0x90 2y ago

Same for the enterprise (non-tech I assume) world. When I was on the business side, we treasured any compute we could get that was not tied to corporate IT. Going through them would turn a 1 day fix into a 2 week endeavor. Product development would go from 1 month to 6 or more.

mlhpdx 2y ago
Yes. I remember the delight of deploying my first server with a credit card. The previous one had taken 6 weeks and $100,000 out of our department budget. Such a godsend.
bombcar 2y ago
You've found out a huge reason cloud took off so hard. Lots of it is shadow-IT. Nobody except a few universities actually uses subdomains as they should be, where you actually delegate the subdomain to the business unit using it.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  I tried to access gettysburg.edu the other day and was greeted by a stupid redirect page (with a meta refresh tag) insisting on use of www rather than just issuing the redirect immediately. The reality is they're stuck in 1995 and won't make rational changes.
  - sneak 2y ago
    I think someone extremely rational is making a lot of big changes and I could not be more excited to see the outcome.

belorn 2y ago

Do you mean that all .gov domains are handled by the same dns service provider? I can understand if the TLD registry is a pain to deal with when it comes to changing information at the top, but zones files? The whole design of dns have delegation as a central feature so that the registry do not need to do everything.