July 31, 2012 3:00pm by David Farrar

A bad thing

A website dedicated to opposing gay marriage has been removed from the internet the day it was launched after it was the target of one of the “largest unprecedented attacks” on a website in New Zealand.

The “Protect Marriage” website, launched today by Family First, crashed in a matter of hours as a result of a “large-scale denial of service attack” according to the site’s webhost.

It was back up and running at 1pm, but had been removed completely by the webhosting company later this afternoon, to “protect its own servers”.

“Due to large scale Denial of Service attacks against this domain it has been decided to ensure the stability and security of our servers and network, this account has been removed,” said a message from 24/7 Hosting.

This is a very bad thing. New Zealanders should hear both sides of a debate, not have one side get closed down under a DOS attack.

If I had a server myself, I’d offer to host the site. Is there an ISP out there that believes in free speech and thinks it can handle such attacks?

I’m especially annoyed the site has gone down, because it means I can’t fisk it 🙂