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Comment by amy_petrik | Hacker News Reader

I'm less scared of the hoster pulling down your site - not the end of the world - then decided to charge you bandwidth fees for all the MS-DOS attacks. The former presumably has no financial impact, the latter, potentially brutal

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What is an MS-DOS attack?

Off-topic, but there are six different people using the word "hoster" in this thread. I've never heard that word used instead of "host" or "hosting service" before, and yet here it's somehow prevalent. I feel like I'm having a stroke, or I just stepped into an alternate universe. Where did you all pick up that word?

This happens often in comment threads, one comment uses an uncommon word and the entire thread goes along with it.

That's just English being irregular. One that hosts websites should be called a hoster in principle :)

Host is both a noun and a verb. (The host can host a party.)

Hoster is new to me too.

But I get it as a pattern. (If you dine at the party then you are a diner.)

Considering there are probably near-zero MS-DOS machines online these days, I expect their attacks wouldn't cost very much.

On the other hand, based on supply v. demand I'd expect an MS-DOS attack to be pretty expensive these days :)

This!! Everyone seems to "really need" that unlimited scalability of AWS & Co - but they'll happily scale your compute and the bill for you.

Sure maybe you'll get lucky and they waive it.

But sometimes going down is a feature if you're not a multi m/billion dollar business

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