Hackers bullying Internet Genius

This article is a follow up of another written about a guy who was selling advertising on a website to make money to pay for college.
While it was going really well, this article discusses an incident where the British student who owned the website, Alex Tew, was threatened by hackers. They told Alex if he didn't pay them $50,000, which was only 5% of what he made off of the site so far, that they would hack into (shut down) his site.

"Tew ignored the threat. Hackers then initiated a so-called distributed denial of service, in which attackers take command of third-party computers, through a virus or other security vulnerability, and instruct them to send junk data to the target site, overwhelming servers and causing the site to crash or perform poorly."

Now, considering people actually paid to have their advertisements on the website, do you think it was worth the risk of losing the site completely for the $50,000 dollars of the $1,000,000?

If he lost the website completely, his customers probably would've been pretty upset and he could've possibly had to given them their money back.

If he would've given in to the $50,000 dollars and there was an article published about it, wouldn't others try to do the same and then he'd lose way more than just $50,000?

Did the time it take to get the website back up and running outweigh the $50,000 he could've paid to the hackers?

I think he did the right thing just because you can't always do something just because of fear and since the website is a simple design, while I have no idea how long it took him to get it back up and running, it probably was worth not giving up the money for school.

What do you think?