I’ve just received an email from Alex Tew of milliondollarhomepage fame about his site. (yeah, I bought some pixels back in September). Looks like the DDoS story is true, here’s what Alex had to say about it:
I’m pleased to report that The Million Dollar Homepage is back online after
almost 6 days of downtime due to a malicious attack by hackers who tried to
extort $50,000 from me. I’m pleased to say that I did not pay a penny, and
worked closely with my hosting company Sitelutions and DDoSprotection.com to
stop the attack. I can also report that the FBI are investigating (this is
because my website is hosted on servers in the US).
Hearing of Alex Tew’s site being attacked reminded me of an interesting story I read a while back about DDoS attacks as extortion attempts at csoonline.com. It gives a nice insight as to the way these things work (essentially the same as offline “protection money” schemes against small retailers etc) without being technical. I think there’s a bit of an established industry around dealing with it these days.
I’m glad Alex didn’t pay and managed to get it sorted out, although if he’d update my 100 pixels with the icon I want instead of the ‘R’ for ‘reserved’ I would be just tickled pink. Mine is the ‘R’ beneath the big “Download Movies” button-looking graphic in the centre towards the top of the grid. Having “Die and Go to Hell!” as my mouseover doesn’t make a lot of sense without my DIE graphic does it? And no, it’s not related to anything but I thought it would get people’s attention.
Also, milliondollarhomepage.com must be getting a fair bit of traffic now, I’m averaging around 150 visits/day this month just from my tiny icon. Crazy stuff.
Finally, the guy who paid $38,100 for the last 1,000 pixels is pretty nuts! I’m not sure I can see how he’s going to get a return on that, although in theory he would get at least ten times the traffic I’m getting and probably actually a lot more than that because his visibility will be much better than mine with big contiguous chunks of pixels.
P.S. I’m bitter; I still can’t believe how well the MillionDollarHomepage idea worked, it’s too simple and too crazy. Mr. Tew obviously has some marketing smarts — bootstrapping the thing to get the first 1000 pixels or so sold must have been the hardest part. Good luck to him for bringing such a crazy plan to fruition.