If you’ve tried to reach a government site today, you may have noticed that the “shutdown” applies to the virtual homes and social media accounts of federal agencies no less than their brick-and-mortar offices… at least some them. It’s a bit hard to make sense of why some sites remain up (some with a “no new updates” banner) while others are redirected to a shutdown notice page—and in many cases it’s puzzling why a shutdown would be necessary at all. With the offices closed, you might not have personnel on hand to add new content or other updates, but is pulling the existing content down strictly necessary?
For agencies that directly run their own Web sites on in-house servers, shutting down might make sense if the agency’s “essential” and “inessential” systems are suitably segregated. Running the site in those cases eats up electricity and bandwidth that the agency is paying for, not to mention the IT and security personnel who need to monitor the site for attacks and other problems. Fair enough in those cases. But those functions are, at least in the private sector, often outsourced and paid for up front: if you’ve contracted with an outside firm to host your site, shutting it down for a few days or weeks may not save any money at all. And that might indeed explain why some goverment sites remain operational, even though they don’t exactly seem “essential,” while others have been pulled down.
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/online-washington-monument-syndrome
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