Alex Tew is in Trouble

After being hit by a DoS attack that downed the Million Dollar Homepage site, British student Alex Tew now faces a lawsuit from one of the advertisers on the site.

A denial-of-service attack (also, DoS attack) is an attack on a computer system or network that causes a loss of service to users, typically the loss of network connectivity and services by consuming the bandwidth of the victim network or overloading the computational resources of the victim system.

In this case, the major problem is that the advertisement did not go up in time. The Million Dollar Homepage is responsible to make sure that the advertisement is up according to the contract and guarantee certain amounts of uptime after that. The failure to get the advertisement up during the DoS attack is clearly negligence by Alex Tew.

However, there is not much Alex can do to provide an optimum level of service to his advertisers. His quality of service is heavily dependant on the hosting service provider he has chosen. It is a common pitfall for a site owner to concentrate too much, on how to attract enough traffic without knowing the risk of the business model he is in. Excessively many site owners are unaware of their business model and blindly follow others.

It may be true that you have nothing to lose in earning from your personal site. However, you will soon realize that there are hidden costs that you do not anticipate without knowing the business model.