Last Saturday I was trying to renew the registration on my truck at Utah.gov and lo and behold it was down. I thought that was funny, but it came back up about 3 hours later and I finished what I had to do. I don't know how long it was down before I noticed. In poking around, however to determine if it was them or me, I noticed that the IP address for Utah.gov isn't inside the State network anymore. Its on a network owned by ViaWest, a company out of Denver. So, I've got some questions:

• Why, when the State already pays tens of thousands of dollars per month for Internet connectivity at UEN is Utah.gov being hosted on an out of state network?
• Who approved this? Seems like the CIO's office would have to be involved.
• The new contract with NIC (PDF) requires that UII move the machines that host Utah.gov into a state data center. This seems to be going in the opposite direction.
• Who's paying for this?
• Why did the outage last for at least three hours? Is anyone monitoring the site?

I'm going to do some more poking around and see what I can dig up. If you know more and would like to let me know, feel free to leave a comment below or to send an email or AIM me (PJWindley).