A screenshot of the "war logs" section of the WikiLeaks site, which has reportedly moved some operations
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Divisive whistle-blower website WikilLeaks (www.wikileaks.org), one of the year’s most controversial and difficult web hosting customers – speaking in terms of its traffic, its need to protect anonymity, and its status as a target of repeated takedown attempts – has left its Swedish web hosting provider PRQ, according to a report published over the weekend by Swedish news website The Local.
PRQ’s so-called bulletproof hosting has been mentioned repeatedly as part of the story surrounding WikiLeaks, a website that has seen numerous takedown attempts – many of them through official legal channels, and of the variety that might cause some hosts to respond by taking the site down – over the years.
The hosting company, located just outside of Stockholm is reportedly operated by two of the founders of The Pirate Bay, the similarly (in status, if not in intent) controversial file-sharing site.
The Local reports on an interview given to newspaper Dagens Nyheter by PRQ CEO Mikael Viborg, who says Wikileaks left without saying anything to the company about a month ago, and has, in fact, left its latest bill unpaid for several weeks.
The article also points to an interview with the TT news agency, given by Jon Karlung, chair of ISP Bahnhof, who says that WikiLeaks became a company of that company in September, housing several servers at a southern Stockhom facility, and has not left Sweden altogether.
Karlung said the site hosts its “homepage and database” with the company, in a nuclear weapon proof bunker.
WikiLeaks has become well known for providing a venue for whistleblowers to anonymously publish confidential documents. Most recently, it made major headlines by publishing 77,000 classified documents related to the US’s operations in Afghanistan in July. In October it published closed to 400,000 documents related to the US war in Iraq.
According to a report published by Netcraft over the weekend, the War Logs section of the WikiLeaks is no longer being served by Amazon EC2. For the past week, says Netcraft, the DNS setup for warlogs.wikileaks.org had been splitting traffic between an IP at Octopuce, in France, and an EC2 IP in Ireland. However, that EC2 IP stopped accepting connections last weekend.
“WikiLeaks appeared to fix the DNS problem [Friday] – warlogs.wikileaks.org is now being served from just a single IP address in France,” writes Netcraft.
The news of shifting server resources at the site comes following the issuing of a warrant, last Friday, for the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Sweden, who is accused of raping woman and sexually molesting another in Sweden.
Assange has strongly denied both charges, and has reportedly hinted that they could be part of a “smear campaign” against him and the website, following the publication of the war documents.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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