The Wikimedia Foundation announced that all of its sites have been migrated away from GoDaddy to MarkMonitor. The transition was completed on Friday, and the foundation it was done so without interruption to services.
Wikimedia began talking about leaving GoDaddy in late 2011/early 2012, though it has taken a while to pull off. This was of course, in response to GoDaddy’s position on SOPA/PIPA.
@jimmy_wales
Jimmy Wales@jsweder @GoDaddy We are moving. They will not get another penny. We are being thoughtful about choosing.
61 days ago via web · Reply · Retweet · Favorite · powered by @socialditto
When Wikipedia blacked out in protest to SOPA, it was seen by 162 million people.
“After exploring numerous alternatives, the Foundation’s legal team decided that MarkMonitor could best provide the comprehensive services that we needed,” said Wikimedia Legal Counsel Michelle Paulson. “MarkMonitor is a U.S.-based registrar with an office in San Francisco and has substantial experience managing other high-traffic domains. The company will help the Foundation consolidate and centralize management of all of its domains, will provide services needed to manage a global domain portfolio and will better protect our domains with additional security features.”
“The Foundation was already utilizing MarkMonitor’s brand protection services and we found their dedicated customer support team’s work to be exceptional,” Paulson added. “The use of their domain management services ensures greater efficiency in the handling of the Foundation’s trademark and domain name portfolios.”
While there was certainly a lot of hype about others leaving GoDaddy (as there was following the whole elephant scandal), the numbers of those who fled were really not all that big.