“[It started with] a sinking feeling of despair, anger at the person responsible, and urgency to get the problem fixed,” MensNiche sales manager Scott Trimble told XBiz. The company’s server is maintained in Arizona and was down for 102 hours.
The three-year-old company, with offices in Los Angeles and London, suffered a DOS attack last Monday morning that left customers without a data server for most of the work week. While the problem was fixed, company principals decided to compensate clients for 120 hours of the downtime by projecting from averages of sales for the previous month.
"We know that our affiliates are the most important part of our business and we will stop at nothing to keep them successful and happy," said technical director Andrew Slack.
MensNiche, which markets sites like penis-health.com and FemRelieve.com to both the adult and mainstream markets, also provides Webmaster Clinics and design services to customers as well as self-generated feeder sites that provide information about products.
MensNiche will not comment on the fix used to solve the problem, as the search for the hacker is still in process. Trimble noted that MensNiche’s server was only hacked on the Arizona server farm where it resides, and that the refund-plus-bonus was welcome news to the company’s customers.
“Affiliates have been extraordinarily happy, “ he told XBiz. “which is what we were aiming for.”
