John Lyons (Dublin North West, Labour)
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Question 119: To ask the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources if he will provide details of all websites under his remit; the annual cost of maintaining each website; the average number of hits per month on each site for the past year; his views on whether these websites can be rationalised to bring about cost savings without compromising e-Government objectives; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [37940/11]

Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)
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My Department maintains the 11 websites that are listed in the table below. The total cost of maintaining these websites including technical maintenance, ongoing development and hosting charges from January 2011 to date, is €197,235.

The cost of the websites cannot be easily broken out to individual costs as most are hosted on the same hardware and share features such as mapping services across all the websites. Apart from the main Departmental website, it is necessary in the interests of customer service, to have some dedicated websites related to specific areas of Departmental responsibility. My Department has rationalised the technologies underpinning these websites by the use of virtualisation and centralised databases.