The Wikimedia foundation has announced that the organization completed the transfer of popular online repository of all human knowledge Wikipedia from GoDaddy hosting this past Friday. The move has been a long time coming, with several reasons motivating the change over — not the least of which was GoDaddy’s support of SOPA, which contrasted greatly to Wikipedia’s opposition of the proposed Internet regulation.
On the Wikimedia blog Michelle Paulson writes:
We had been deliberating a move from GoDaddy for some time — our legal department felt the company was not the best fit for our domain needs — and we began actively seeking other domain management providers in December 2011. GoDaddy’s initial support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the controversial anti-piracy legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives, reaffirmed our decision to end the relationship.
The GoDaddy webhosting service has been something of a lightning rod for bad press, with the CEO shooting an elephant, their sexist and completely baffling Super Bowl ad, and their support of the SOPA bill. As readers will recall, GoDaddy’s support of the legislation led to an enormous backlash and a grass roots movement that encouraged websites to divest themselves from GoDaddy. The company eventually reversed their stance on SOPA, meanwhile Wikipedia — one of the most popular sites on the Internet — blacked out its pages in protest of SOPA’s potentially overzealous regulation.
Wikimedia says that Wikipedia, and other Wikimedia sites, will now be hosted by the San Francisco-based MarkMonitor.
- GoDaddy actually received more domain registrations as a result of the boycott
- You remember SOPA, right?
