Invitation-only social media site Ello suffered its first major disruption in service Sunday, leading to an announcement that it had experienced its first distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The advertiser-free alternative to Facebook was offline to users for 35 minutes after the attack as employees worked to fix the issue.
According to reports from The Next Web, the site came back online at 4:51 p.m. EDT after installing a patch. Ello posted on its status page that the offending Internet providers had been blocked. During the outage, site visitors received the message, "The site is currently unavailable while we conduct some necessary maintenance. Follow along for any updates on our status page."
Ello began as a private networking social network, but earlier this year the company created a public beta version of the site. Users can only join Ello after being invited by a friend, but the site has been reported to be attracting as many as 35,000 new users per hour. This sudden growth spurt has been attributed to some Facebook members leaving the site following a controversy about the popular site's real-names policy.
Part of the attraction for business users is Ello's no-advertisements format, which allows professionals to see only updates from other users in their newsfeeds. Ello seeks to put the fun back in social networking with a black-and-white layout that puts the emphasis on user-posted photos.
The company also provides an antidote to Facebook by allowing users to sign up anonymously. Once invited, users only need an email address to register and begin posting, making the site attractive to creatives like designers and artists, which are the site's target audiences.
Ello's quick rise to prominence also puts it on the radar of hackers, who tend to target popular sites. Facebook suffered its own DDoS attack earlier this year, knocking the site offline for an hour. Earlier that week, Ancestry.com endured a DDoS attack that created a three-day outage. Like Ancestry.com, Ello kept users informed through a status page throughout the outage, providing a transparency that helped mitigate any customer-service damage it might have called.
In addition to the hacking incident, Ello is also the subject of speculation about its monetization strategy. Specifically, without an advertising structure, the site will be forced to charge some type of fee to remain solvent. The company landed $435,000 in venture capital funds in January of this year, but even that brought speculation as to how the company intended to survive without ads.
PC Magazine reported that Ello will begin to charge for "extras," such as the ability to manage more than one account on the site. Each of these extra features would likely only cost a small amount to encourage customers to participate. The beta version of Ello is currently free, containing only a few features to keep the interface as simple as possible while users are learning how it works.
Ello founder Paul Budnitz is strictly anti-advertising, telling Fortune magazine, "I want to change the world. I want to prove that advertising isn't the only way to make money on the Internet." He added that the rush toward monetization is leading to the data collection issues that threaten user privacy. Budnitz's goal is to treat users like people rather than products.
This commitment to user privacy is motivating some users to switch to the site, since Facebook's data collection practices have brought negative attention. Data on users is used for ad targeting, helping the site grow its advertising income in recent years. Ello, on the other hand, says it is committed to safeguarding user data and providing users a private place to express their thoughts and network with other members.
A DDoS is a one way to negatively impact a popular website. The goal of the attack is to block users from being able to access the website for an extended period of time, which is why popular sites are often targeted. DDoS attacks are soaring in frequency, with one report stating that from December to January of this year, attacks were more than three times higher than they were a year earlier. Once discovered, the best practice is to do as Ello did and take servers offline until the offending Internet provider can be blocked and service can once again be restored.
Drew Hendricks is a tech, social media and environmental addict. He's written for many major publishers such as Forbes and Entrepreneur.
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