Click to enlarge

The final 1,000 pixels of the Million Dollar Homepage sold for $38,100 in an eBay auction that closed Wednesday (winner: Elijah Kliger of Brooklyn, NY, director of business development at Netnutri.com, for the new website www.MillionDollarWeightloss.com.), netting 21-year-old UK college student Tew $1,037,100 in total ad sales, writes Rich Miller at Netcraft (via Olivier Travers). As the news got out, the site apparently began experiencing outages, and by late yesterday (Thursday) a distributed denial of service attack had brought the site down.

Tew launched the site in September, offering 1 million pixels of ad space at $1 a pixel to pay for his college expenses. As news spread, Milliondollarhomepage.com has received up to 500,000 unique visitors per day. Tew has said he would keep the site up for at least five years.

"The site received a major DDoS attack, and DDoS protection/prevention was not included in the customer's plan," Russell Weiss of InfoRelay Online Systems told Netcraft. InfoRelay is the owner and operator of Sitelutions, which hosts the Million Dollar Homepage.

Sitelutions offers a 99.999% network uptime guarantee, and says it donates 10 percent of its profits to charities chosen by its users.