{"id":808,"date":"2009-07-10T18:49:15","date_gmt":"2009-07-10T23:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/?p=808"},"modified":"2011-04-06T18:13:51","modified_gmt":"2011-04-06T23:13:51","slug":"the-eighteen-million-dollar-web-site","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/the-eighteen-million-dollar-web-site\/","title":{"rendered":"The Eighteen Million Dollar Web Site."},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning someone had one of those talking heads infotainment morning \u00e2\u20ac\u0153news\u00e2\u20ac\u009d shows on in another room, and I was half listening to a story about the stimulus bill.\u00c2\u00a0 Millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent on roadside signs telling us that millions of taxpayer dollars being spent on road work.\u00c2\u00a0 Toward the end of the segment the host casually mentioned that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re spending eighteen million dollars on a web site that tracks the package\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s spending.<\/p>\n

I figured I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d research that later, but didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to \u00e2\u20ac\u201c an article about it showed up in a tweet from the Cato Institute.\u00c2\u00a0 Yep, eighteen million<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I run three websites:\u00c2\u00a0 davehitt.com, which includes The Facts, the Quick Hitts podcast, and this blog, and the separate sites The Podcast Peer Awards and Blood Witness.\u00c2\u00a0 It costs me less than $200 a year.\u00c2\u00a0 Granted, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re talking a shared server and maybe 1500 unique visitors on a busy day.\u00c2\u00a0 But I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve also worked for an e-commerce company and am familiar with the costs involved.\u00c2\u00a0 A big, busy e-commerce site costs $50k-$100k to set up, and five or six grand a month in hosting fees.\u00c2\u00a0 Even if Uncle Sam was contracting for a site to be built from scratch it shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t cost more than five or six hundred thousand dollars for design and implementations, and no more than 100K a year to keep it up and running.<\/p>\n

Eighteen million bucks for a single web site.\u00c2\u00a0 This is the same government that stupid people believe will bring down the price of health care if we socialize medicine.\u00c2\u00a0 Yeah, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning someone had one of those talking heads infotainment morning \u00e2\u20ac\u0153news\u00e2\u20ac\u009d shows on in another room, and I was half listening to a story about the stimulus bill.\u00c2\u00a0 Millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent on roadside signs telling us that millions of taxpayer dollars being spent on road work.\u00c2\u00a0 Toward the end of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,4,19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=808"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1428,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808\/revisions\/1428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}