WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange turned increasingly to Switzerland on Sunday, dodging a barrage of threats online and in the real world to keep access to a trove of U.S. State Department cables under a Swiss Web address.

The elusive founder of the website WikiLeaks said he faced "hundreds of death threats." The site hinged on the Swiss Pirate Party's wikileaks.ch Web address, though the main server in France went offline, leaving the site reachable through a Swedish server.

That site showed Assange had begun seeking donations to an account under his name through the Swiss postal system in Berne, the Swiss capital, while also using a Swiss-Icelandic credit card processing center and other accounts in Iceland and Germany. He lost a major source of revenue when the online payment service provider PayPal cut off the WikiLeaks account over the weekend.

On the run, Assange has been widely praised and criticized. Supporters view him as a savior of the media and free speech; critics vilify him for brazenly unleashing diplomatic secrets.

U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called Assange "a high-tech terrorist" Sunday for releasing classified material from the government. McConnell told NBC's "Meet the Press" he hopes Assange will be prosecuted for the "enormous damage" the disclosures have done to the country and to its relationship with its allies.

PayPal, a subsidiary of U.S.-based online marketplace operator EBay Inc., said the WikiLeaks website, which specializes in disclosing confidential documents, was engaged in illegal activity.

A spokesman for the financial services arm of Swiss Post told the respected Swiss weekly NZZ am Sonntag that it was reviewing its "relationship" with Assange, whose stated reason for opening the account was to have a residence in Geneva.

Swiss Post spokesman Marc Andrey said Assange would have to prove he obtained Swiss residency, lives near the Swiss border, or owns property or does business in Switzerland to keep the Postfinance bank account that he opened last month.

The U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, Donald Beyer, also told the newspaper that Switzerland "should very carefully consider whether to provide shelter to someone who is on the run from the law." The SonntagsZeitung quoted Beyer as saying he told the Swiss government that WikiLeaks would likely post more than 250 cables from the American Embassy in Berne.

French web hosting company OVH, which owns the server, didn't immediately respond to calls Sunday. France's Industry Minister Eric Besson had warned Friday that it was unacceptable to host a site that "violates the secret of diplomatic relations."

The company said earlier that it had been hosting WikiLeaks since early Thursday, after a client asked for a "dedicated server with ... protection against attacks."

The president of the Swiss Pirate Party, which controls the wikileaks.ch Web address, said he was in the process of pointing that domain name to a different server, apparently based in Sweden. The site also was still reachable through the numerical address of its Swedish server.

And the party said it noticed an increasing number of supporters creating "mirrors" of the WikiLeaks site on their own servers, meaning that copies of the site would remain up and running even if WikiLeaks were somehow to lose its own site.