Resources reclaimed by retiring BYU Domains
BYU's Office of IT gracefully sunsetted a 6-year-old service that provided students and employees with personal web domains.
The effort freed up 2,000 hours of support time, $265,000 in annual expenses, and prevented an overspend of $120,000.
In their biggest Retire & Remove effort yet, BYU's Office of IT ended the BYU Domains service at the close of 2021.
Providing personal web domains to students and employees was generous and innovative when BYU Domains launched in 2015. Yet it became very time-consuming and expensive.
In 2020, the Technology Support Center dedicated 2,000 hours in response to 1,200 help tickets addressed through 57 different Knowledge Base articles. The $265,000 budgeted for hosting and domain names in 2021 would have fallen short by an estimated $120,000 without a change in course.
INFOGRAPHIC: BYU Domains retirement figures
By comparison, it takes fewer resources to create, host, and maintain the university's official websites through BrightSpot than it did to offer personal web domains to members of the campus community.
The magnitude of investment in BYU Domains called into question a line from the university policy on personal use of IT resources. It specifically states that personal use should be incidental and should not "consume finite resources."
Because the academic use of BYU Domains was limited to a handful of courses, OIT leadership and the Academic Vice President's Office made the decision in the spring of 2021 to retire the service.
Making the Sunset Graceful
Over the summer of 2021, the service retirement team guided faculty members to alternatives that matched the objectives of their course curriculum.
Professor James Gaskin is the coordinator for Information Systems 201, the class responsible for the most BYU Domains registrations. Gaskin pivoted to GitHub pages, a free hosting platform. He created and shared this YouTube tutorial to show students how to set up space for their final project.
"The transition to GitHub was pretty seamless," Gaskin said. "GitHub is a bit tricky for students when it comes to file management, but a few sentences of instruction in our coursebook helped them navigate. We actually had fewer hosting issues with GitHub than BYU Domains."
Other faculty settled on other solutions to meet their specific needs. For example, a music dance theater class switched to social media as a way for students to showcase their performance videos.
For individual users wishing to keep their domain, our partners at Reclaim Hosting made the transition smooth. They migrated all remaining users to their general servers and sent each of them login information and invoices. Users have until March to either pay their share or move their domain to another hosting service.
Security gap closed
BYU Domains had a history of security incidents because patching, updates, and monitoring were left completely to the individual user. Some campus partners used the service to create a department website on the BYU.edu domain. Over the years, a number of these sites were compromised by scammers who published unauthorized content that reflected poorly on BYU.
Retiring BYU Domains not only closed that security gap, it prompted another wave of migrations to the university's preferred web publishing platform, BrightSpot. This will bring additional benefits such as increased uptime for BYU.edu websites, better brand alignment, and greater accessibility.