Wow.  Thanks for the update.   I'd like to see a WhiteBoard friday about this after its sorted out with graphics  on how DDoS are carried out and how they are deflected.  And, how you know its happening to you.

These guys must be pissants if they are only asking for a few hundred bucks.  Would be funny to see Mr Skinner point at the camera and say... "We didn't pay-off a $200 pissant and we will not pay you."

In general, if you are writing about information that is commonly available on many websites, then that information can be considered to be "common industry knowledge" - and most authors would not use citations.   Facts that would likely be in the body content of an introductory college textbook would also be considered as "common industry knowledge".

However, if you are stating specific information that might only be available from one or a few sources, then a citation is a proper thing to do.  Also, if you are giving facts or advice that you feel it is important to give others credit or responsibility, citations are good there too.

The above is what I generally do for writing content for a specific industry.  I also tend to use more citations where parts of my writing approach the limits of my firmly confident knowledge.

You are obviously doing research and visiting sites that you think would be superior to your own.  What is their practice on citations?  That might be a guide for you too.

People who run PPC campaigns should be focused on the average cost for a conversion and the average profit on a sale.  These can vary wildly as traffic blasts arrive from various sources that might have purchase intent or not.  As soon as the eye is removed from the cost of what you are doing and the profit that it is producing, then a vendors shirt can be lost without knowing it.

If you are going to make this site enormously popular then owning the .com will allow you stop the loss of type-in traffic to the .com domain.

For popular .org .gov .net and other domain extensions, lots of visitors instinctively type .com as the domain.  I do it often myself when attempting to visit some .gov and .org sites.  I am usually surprised at what I find there.

I know of a couple .com domains that get thousands of visitors per day because visitors don't type .gov as the extension.

Right now my company is blogging five days a week, which is way more than our competitors and most other companies do.

Five days a week might be focusing on quantity.

Blogging will not do anything for your website if the content is not quality... and when I say quality, I mean good enough to attract traffic and natural links.   If you are not blogging quality you might be adding dead weight to your website and it might even be Panda bait.

Look at your analytics.  Are your blog posts pulling in any traffic.  Are they pulling in any conversions.  Are they attracting natural links from respectable websites?   If they are not doing these things then blogging for blogging's sake is a waste of time.

Instead of comparing how many times you blog per week, take a look at how your quality compares with your competitor.  Determine if the content is useful to your visitors and be very critical and honest with yourself.   Are your visitors even seeing it?  Does it answer their relevant questions about how to use your products, how to select them, how to maintain them, other information about them?

If you are blogging daily and are doing a good job there should be a lot of visitors to your website who arrive through your blog home page or arrive through the main page of your website and click into your blog.  If that isn't happening then, maybe your blogging is not useful.

Do the assessments above, reflect upon your plan and don't worry about how many days per week you are blogging.  Worry about if you are blowing your competitors out of the water with the content that you are producing.