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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- After interrupting President Barack Obama's address to Congress on health care reform by shouting "You lie!," US Representative Joe Wilson received a formal reprimand from the House of Representatives. His actions also made his online fundraising campaign the target of a distributed denial-of service attack over the weekend, which sent his site and those of about 150 other Piryx (www.piryx.com) web hosting clients offline.
According to a Computerworld report, a DDoS attack started flooding joewilsonforcongress.com and Piryx's servers on Friday afternoon, continuing into the early hours of Saturday morning. Piryx chief executive officer Tom Serres told Computerworld that the traffic generated was initially manageable until "massive bandwidth spikes," measuring about 1 gigabit of traffic per second, knocked servers offline.
Wilson's and about 150 other Piryx clients' hosting services went offline before traffic blocking filters successfully mitigated the attacks Saturday morning.
A specifically nonpartisan operation, Piryx is a start-up based in Austin, Texas that provides services for managing online campaigns and fundraising for politicians and nonprofit organizations.
While politically motivated attacks of this sort are somewhat unusual in the US, it seems to be increasingly common for hackers to take on political targets. Several high-profile US and South Korean websites were attacked in July, and Georgia's president's website was knocked offline as tensions rose between it and neighboring Russia. These examples and others show that political beliefs have the potential to spill over into explosive online attacks.
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Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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