

Ask HN: How does "shutting down" a gov website save money? - mikey_p

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.<p>Is there any way that this is actually saving money? Maybe on bandwidth? Electric usages?
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patmcc
It'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?

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MaysonL
Shutting 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."

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necavi
I 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.

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mikey_p
Yeah, 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)

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benologist
The salaries of the people working there.

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mikey_p
I 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.

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benologist
Any sufficiently large website doesn't run on autopilot or just servers, they
require functional organizations/companies/whatever.

