City website shut down Monday

Anyone trying to look at information on the city of Green River’s website was greeted with an unfamiliar sight Monday.

The website was replaced by a message the domain had expired, cutting off access to the website. According to the city’s IT specialist Brandan Corthell, the city’s domain registration had lapsed.

A web domain is essentially the name of a website. People and businesses running their own websites often have to register their web domain to operate the website and ensure no one else on the internet is using that domain. Registration lapses occur when a site owner fails to renew their registration after a set amount of time.

Problems with domain registration can impact even the largest companies, such as when a former Google employee, Sanmay Ved, managed to buy http://www.google.com for $12. Ved was searching through Google Domains, a service offered by the company to purchase domain names when he came across the listing.

Ved owned the most trafficked website on the internet for roughly a minute before the sale was revoked.

Corthell said the city’s registration was set on a nine-year cycle and notifications about the pending lapse weren’t received by him or anyone else at the city. The city’s IT department, as well as the employees overseeing the department at the time have since left the city. While the issue was an easy fix, Corthell said the website wasn’t available immediately after the domain was reregistered. Aside from cutting access to the city’s website, employees who synced their emails to their phones were also impacted as email was unable to get transferred to those devices. Corthell said employees still were able to send and receive emails otherwise.

The city’s website was back online Tuesday morning.