Million Dollar Homepage Falls To DDoS

David A. Utter
Staff Writer
Published: 2006-01-13

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.

Source: WebProNews

nice post ryan

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Will Stumpf - TalkNikon
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Thats a shame it was DDoSed, it was an interesting site. I wish I had come up with the idea but don't we all?

Yeah, it's a shame it was DDoS'ed for sure...but then again, the advertisers had already been ripped off anyways...meh, that creator hit such a gold mine

It's ideas like these that after reading them, we all think "hey, I could have done that..." When I checked earlier today, it appeared the site was back up which is good.

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Mark Blair
NowParenting - "Parenting Discussion Community"
HostHideout - "Where Professionals Discuss Web Hosting"

I am planning on doing a local version on that page
What an idea. He made alot of money.

No offence but he made his Million and top of the search engines in couple of months. I don't feel sorry for this guy.

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It's not a shame for him, it's a shame for his advertisers who spent good money on those spots...Even though the site is back up now and they were idiots in the first place for purchasing the spots, haha

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...some super-sweet signature

Yep, even though you may not like the guy (for whatever reason) he still doesn't deserve to have his server attacked like that.

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Mark Blair
NowParenting - "Parenting Discussion Community"
HostHideout - "Where Professionals Discuss Web Hosting"

I agree... all those adverts were paid for and thay awere done so for a reason... so i do feel sry for them not the owner

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