Let me explain. People buy website “space” and generally pay for this on a per year basis. Some organizations, and perhaps even these particular sites, are hosted on servers owned by said organizations and live in their office location or at a data center somewhere. Long story short, it costs the same amount money to display the normal website as it does a site that says “we don’t have a site”. Now, had the Government been truly trying to save money, they would have simply shut the servers down (assuming they host their own instead of paying someone else) and we as internet users would have gotten the dreaded “Page cannot be displayed” message… BUT…that’s not what happened here. What’s worse? They paid someone to create all these pages that say we don’t have a page instead of just leaving it alone and letting it sit there (granted, this *should* have been trivial to do, so it likely wouldn’t have cost that much). Oh! And they paid someone to flip it all back (note that they made the statement about bringing someone out of furlough to put the Amber Alert site back online). I mean, that makes perfect sense to me… spend money to be shutdown.
–Dan Thompson