Malaysiakini was the most visited news site in Malaysia last month, according to the latest website rankings released by the Malaysian Digital Association (MDA).

Registering 2.7 million unique visitors in April, Malaysiakini came out ahead of the Star (2.4 million), Harian Metro (1.6 million), Utusan Malaysia (1.3 million) and Malaysian Insider (1.2 million).

According to Effective Measure, which compiled the monthly report for MDA, the most visited site by Malaysians was Facebook with over 8.5 million browsers, followed by Google with 5 million browsers ( see chart below ).

Malaysiakini is the second most popular local website after online shopping portal Mudah.

Malaysiakini CEO Premesh Chandran said the readership for the independent news website last month jumped by 17 percent from March.

"We believe that the Sarawak state election generated a flood of new readers to Malaysiakini ," he said.

"The jump was even more impressive, given that Malaysiakini was hit by a DOS (denial of service) attack, and we had to shut off all international traffic for a week," he added.

International traffic contributes about 15 percent of the total visitors to Malaysiakini .

The attack, which began two days after the 10-day campaign kicked off, continued until the day after polling.

Visitors increased by 20 percent

Malaysiakini's traffic varies slightly from month to month, but it has generally grown about 20 percent since last year, said Premesh.

MDA - a body composed mostly of publishers and advertising agencies - has selected Australia-based Effective Measure to be the country's official ‘Internet measurement currency'.

Malaysiakini has also one of the highest number of Facebook fans in the country. To date, the website has a total of 146,723 fans.

The Chinese site pulls in the most number of fans with 58,173, followed closely by the Bahasa section, 53,501, and English, 35,049.