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Ask HN: How does "shutting down" a gov website save money?
Alot of US government sites are directing to a status page today, such as data.dov or nasa.gov. Obviously the hardware and such is still in place, ready to be re-enabled. I fail to see where they would be saving money by taking this action.
Is there any way that this is actually saving money? Maybe on bandwidth? Electric usages?
- necavi 13y agoI believe that the reason that many government sites have gone dark is because most of them have a large amount of dynamic content that relies on some amount of human oversight which cannot be provided currently. Switching to a static page is much easier and cheaper than providing warnings/removing links to content that will not work during the shutdown.
- mikey_p 13y agoYeah, some have gone that route: http://www.ed.gov http://www.ed.gov. Just put up a notice and leave everything accessible. Others aren't redirecting, but are unavailable: http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds
- benologist 13y agoThe salaries of the people working there.
- mikey_p 13y agoI can understand that website won't be updated, but that doesn't seem to be a valid reason to completely redirect it to an 'offline' page. Servers keep working without anyone there to press buttons.
- benologist 13y agoAny sufficiently large website doesn't run on autopilot or just servers, they require functional organizations/companies/whatever.
- MaysonL 13y agoShutting down the government, and the websites, isn't in any way about saving money. It's about holding us hostage. It's a power play: attempted extortion. It's a childish temper tantrum, the kind a two-year-old throws when told "No."
- patmcc 13y agoIt's not that it saves money, it's that if the people who manage it aren't allowed to work, it's super dangerous to leave a website up. What if it gets hacked/compromised in some way, and employees are literally not allowed to take it down/fix it/whatever?