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

3 points by mikey_p ↗ HN
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?

7 comments

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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.
benologist
The salaries of the people working there.
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.
benologist
Any sufficiently large website doesn't run on autopilot or just servers, they require functional organizations/companies/whatever.
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."

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?