I can tell you why the sites went offline, because the funding stopped. I don't know what you're research background is but its painful to even get 5 GBP a month to host a droplet on digital ocean in a pretty lucrative department with liberal internal funding.
Agreed, but all these little things are just a sign that the industry just does not give a shit about software. They could develop mechanisms to fund this stuff, pretty easily actually. But they don’t.
A couple of other weird inequities that I’ve found are:
1. It’s hard to get permission to spend money on software subscription based licenses since you won’t “have anything” at the end. However, it’s much easier to get funding for hardware with time based locks (e.g after 3 years the system will lock up and you have to pay them to unlock). The end result is the same, you can’t use the hardware after the time period is up, but for some reason the admin feels much more comfortable about it.
2. It’s hard get funding to hire someone to set up a service to transfer large amounts of data from different places. It’s much easier to hire someone to drive out to a bunch of places with a stack of hard drives and manually load the data on them, and drive back. Even if it’s 2x more expensive and would take longer. Why? Again my speculation is that the higher ups are just more comfortable with the latter strategy. They can picture the work being done in their head, so they know what they’re paying for.
Louisiana state government spent a buttload of money on dedicated high speed fiber optic lines between a bunch of different universities in the state for videoconferencing, telenetworking, "grid computing" etc. 10 years later the only people who remember how to use the system are at LSU, rendering the purpose moot. Everyone else just uses Zoom or Skype.
> The end result is the same, you can’t use the hardware after the time period is up, but for some reason the admin feels much more comfortable about it.
Simple: predictability. With a subscription based model, admin has to deal with recurring (monthly / yearly) payments, and the possibility is always there that whatever SaaS you choose it gets bought up and discontinued. Something you own and host yourself, even if it gets useless after three years, does not incur any administrative overhead and there is no risk of the provider vanishing. Also, there are no "surprise auto renewals" or random price hikes.
> 2. It’s hard get funding to hire someone to set up a service to transfer large amounts of data from different places.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 40 ton truck filled with SD cards. Joke aside: especially off-campus buildings have ... less than optimal Internet / fibre connections and those that do exist are often enough at enough load to make it unwise to shuffle large amounts of data through them without disrupting ongoing operations.
In research no and it would depend entirely on your institution. For example, I looked at a job putting together a portal for people to freely examine the research put together for a research team. The project had secured a connection with the british museum, and so that website would live on under that. However, if the project had asked to host it themselves even for 60$ a year for 10 years the answer would be no. Funding grants see small opex that extend beyond the life of the project to be open to corruption or just too facile to fund, wrongly or rightly.
