2010 Web Host Industry Year in Review

Following its release of more than 250,000 US diplomatic communications cables i

n late November, WikiLeaks became one of the biggest ongoing news stories in the
world.
The website made headlines on almost a daily basis in late November and througho
ut December. A visit to The WHIR WikiLeaks tag page shows a tally of 38 articles
in 2010.
The first major WikiLeaks release of the year came in the form of 92,000 militar
y documents relating to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of 2009.
Released on July 25, the reports were documents written by soldiers and intellig
ence officers, describing lethal military actions involving the United States mi
litary, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with politica
l figures, and related details. release of the documents drew outrage from membe
rs of the Pentagon, including White House National Security Adviser Gen. James J
ones who argued that the information could put the lives of Americans and our pa
rtners at risk and threaten our national security. week later, Pentagon spokespe
rson Geoff Morrell ordered WikiLeaks to return all the classified war documents
they had and remove them from the site. Unsurprisingly, given its mandate, the s
ite did not comply.
At this point Sweden Pirate Party stepped in and offered to host the site. In la
te August, the Party began providing several new servers and free bandwidth for
the site, hosting it from an undisclosed location somewhere in Sweden.
In late October, WikiLeaks began to prepare for the possibility of the US govern
ment following through on its threats and moved the content for its Iraq War Log
s site away from servers housed in the US.
The main WikiLeaks website was still being hosted at US based Amazon EC2 instanc
e at the time while its DNS services were being provided by EveryDNS.
Then in late November, WikiLeaks left the Swedish web hosting provider PRQ, as w
ell as its Amazon EC2 service.
The Release of 250,000 US Diplomatic Cables
On November 29, WikiLeaks began releasing roughly 250,000 classified communicati
ons cables, immediately creating a media circus. The highly sensitive material c
ontained exchanges between the US government and its global diplomatic staff.
In the hours leading up to the release of the documents, WikiLeaks was hit by a
DDoS attack that temporarily took the site offline.
A few days after the release of the diplomatic cables, Amazon disconnected WikiL
eaks from its cloud hosting service. Many speculated that Amazon was pressured b
y the US government to ditch the site as a customer.
The site eventually found offshore hosting at French Web hosting provider OVH, b
ut the country industry minister requested the site to be taken down from French
servers.
OVH called on the courts to rule on whether or not it could legally host the sit
e. The courts are allowing OVH to host the site while they further analyzes the
legalities of the case.
Meanwhile, Canadian DNS provider EasyDNS was confused for EveryDNS in a blog pos

t, causing many other major news outlets to repeat the factual error in their ow
n reports. EasyDNS accepted and is currently one of the many DNS providers offer
ing services for the more than 2,000 WikiLeaks mirrored sites. The website is no
w being hosted by McLean, Virginia based ServInt.
ServInt offices are located within walking distance of the headquarters of the C
IA, which recently launched a dedicated WikiLeaks Task Force to assess the damag
e caused by the leaked US diplomatic cables.
WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange
It no surprise that the man behind WikiLeaks experienced a fair share of legal w
oes throughout the year.
In late May, the site founder Julian Assange reportedly encountered trouble with
security at the Melbourne Airport upon returning to his native Australia.
This would only be the start of Assange encounters with the law. In November Ass
ange was arrested for allegations of sexually assaulting two Swedish women.
After 10 days, Assange was released on bail from prison, thwarting an appeal led
by Britain Crown Prosecution Service.
With the help of WikiLeaks supporters, which included filmmaker Michael Moore, A
ssange lawyers assembled the bail.