As the Internet’s newest millionaire, Tew can afford to reinvest some of his earnings in additional site maintenance. The 21-year-old UK student launched the site in September to pay his college expenses, offering 1 million pixels of ad space at $1 a pixel. The eBay auction brought the site’s total earnings to $1,037,100. The gimmick has also paid dividends to advertisers in the form of huge web traffic. Milliondollarhomepage.com has received up to 500,000 unique visitors per day.
“The site’s traffic has been very intense over the past few weeks, in excess of 200Mbps, actually,” said Weiss. “The high level of traffic has been well-supported by our multi-gigabit, redundant network.” Weiss said the attack didn’t affect any other sites on his company’s network.
DDoS attacks have previously targeted advertising sites, including a series of attacks on domain parking services earlier this year and an attack on the DoubleClick banner advertising network in 2005.
Netcraft offers a web site performance monitoring service that provides uptime charts, along with e-mail alerts when an outage occurs.