Million Dollar Homepage down for past 2 days, Reports says its because of a major DDOS attack launched against the site,

The Million Dollar Homepage which has been reported to run for 5 years is now down for a considerably long time, Most reports say the site was down because of a major DDOS ( distributed denial of service ) attack against the site,



Infoworld reports

"The wildly successful pixel-powered Web page of a British university student is coming under increasingly intense DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks trying to knock down the profitable brainstorm

The site is hosted on a server in Ashburn, Virginia, in a data center run by Equinix, where InfoRelay has much of its hardware, Weiss said. The high bandwidth use didn't cause problems for InfoRelay, as the company has a multigigabit network and provides bandwidth for a major search engine, Weiss said.

But The Million Dollar HomePage attracted malicious attention, coming under DDOS fire late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning, he said.

Officials from InfoRelay met to figure out what they could do to stem the attacks within the constraints of Tew's service package, Weiss said. Tew wasn't on an enterprise-level deal that often includes advanced hardware, from vendors such as Cisco Systems (Profile, Products, Articles), used to prevent the effects of DDOS attacks, Weiss said.

Administrators implemented several proprietary internal techniques to slow and alleviate the effects, he said. "We sort of volunteered our time to do what we could," Weiss said.



The attacks are coming from computers worldwide, including the U.S., Europe and Asia, Weiss said. The attacks could be the work of a botnet -- a network of computers illegally commandeered for sending spam and DDOS attacks.

"

Sitelutions.com their webhost says the site was burning 200 megabits per second of internet bandwidth ( Oops )

"We are honored that Alex selected us to host his site. With so much worldwide coverage, Alex needed a host that could support [the site's intense bandwidth requirements," said Paul Singh, Assistant Director of Operations at InfoRelay Online Systems, Inc.

Sitelutions has hosted The Million Dollar Homepage since September, 23, 2005. At that time, Mr. Tew's site had grossed approximately $108,000. Since Sitelutions has hosted the site, Mr. Tew's site has received up to 16 million hits per day, 500,000 unique visitors per day, and has utilized up to 200 megabits per second of Internet bandwidth."

So when will the site be online?