Lots of outages have hit the now-legendary Million Dollar Homepage site, and have been blamed on a massive distributed denial of service attack.
Perhaps the fame of Alex Tew, and the near-instant wealth he created with his simple pixel-for-a-dollar advertising site, was too much for some jealous person or persons to handle. His MillionDollarHomepage.com site took the brunt of a “major DDoS attack,” the site’s host told Netcraft’s Rich Miller.
Tew, who has stated he plans to maintain the page for five years, may wish to spring for the protection option from his host, InfoRelay Online Systems. “DDoS protection/prevention was not included in the customer’s plan,” Russell Weiss of InfoRelay said in the email.
After an eBay auction of the last 1,000 pixels, Tew walked away from his audacious money-raising plan with $1,037,100 dollars. He started the site as an idea to make money for college, and has been cited as investing about $40,000 in the effort.
The steps taken by the host may not have taken full effect yet. As of press time the Million Dollar Homepage was not reachable. “The site’s traffic has been very intense over the past few weeks, in excess of 200Mbps, actually,” Weiss also wrote in his message to NetCraft.
Press Direct International suggested that the success of the site should be partially attributed to Digg. In an article about Tew’s site, writer Drew Graef said Tew owed Digg and Alexa some props:
Just as writers should include attribution for the work of other writers in their own published works if included in a given piece, it would be nice if Alex Tew were to at least acknowledge the contribution of the Digg members who set off the series of events that have enriched him. Try as we might, we never found any discussion of The Digg Effect nor the roll Alexa played in the success of Tew’s site in any article or news show where Tew was interviewed.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
