Hours after the company began hosting Wilson's homepage on its servers, Piryx found itself the target of a distributed denial of service attack, Serres said. Such attacks are designed to render servers and networks inaccessible by flooding them with useless traffic.

The attacks appear to have been directed at the joewilsonforcongress.com site, Serres said. At the time the attacks started, the site was handling about 100 transactions per minute and had already collected more than $100,000 from people who wanted to contribute to Wilson's campaign, he said.

Initially, the traffic generated by the DDoS attack was manageable but soon Piryx began noticing "massive bandwidth spikes" that knocked its servers offline, Serres said. The data center hosting Piryx's servers confirmed that it was the victim of a DDoS attack. At its peak, the DDoS flood generated about 1 gigabit of traffic per second, which is about 1,000 times the normal traffic on Piryx, Serres said.

After several failed attempts at mitigating the attacks, filters to block the traffic went into place early Saturday morning. Service has been normal since then, he said. It's not known from where the attacks originated, but Serres said it appears to have been initiated by those opposed to Wilson's comments, he said. "It was clearly politically motivated to take down Wilson's ability to raise funds online," Serres said.

The incident appears to be one of the rare instances of a politically motivated attack against a Web site in the U.S. said Kirsten Dennesen, an intelligence analyst with Verisign Inc.'s iDefense Labs. The attention attracted by Wilson's comments, especially through social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter, appears to have contributed to the attack, she said.

"One question is whether there are going to be any response attacks," she said.