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As it's mostly static content, they're likely just using Amazon as a CDN, which isn't very expensive at all.

Makes perfect sense actually. It'll be interesting to see what Amazon has to say about this.

Using CloudFront (Amazon's CDN) does promise to solve their immediate DDoS problem.

I don't know much about wikileaks as an organisation but I expect most of their money comes as donations via the web site.

So, clearly having wikileaks.org up at high traffic times is important.

A competent hosting company - with a sufficiently fat upstream pipe - should be able to handle it. Amazon has the scale to absorb this attack.