Transferring Domains Away From GoDaddy, Due To Their Support of SOPA / Protect IP

I’m doing a bit of catch-up, and have spent a good while looking over all the conversation that’s been happening regarding two bills in Congress: SOPA and Protect IP.

A lot of the discussion has been going on for some time, but I ignored it until very recently. Back in November, there was a full-page ad in the New York Times from several major Internet companies, claiming SOPA would hurt innovation. More recently, a group of 83 Internet engineers wrote an open letter to Congress, warning against both bills.

Even the Stanford Law Review has spoken out against it:

One really compelling (and lengthy) article on both bills is by Mike Masnick. If you don’t check out any of the other links on this post, I’d recommend reading this one.

After learning that GoDaddy was in support of SOPA, I decided to move several of my domains from them. Many many months ago, Justin was the one who told me about GoDaddy CEO Bob Parson and his elephant hunting. But at the time… my apathy was stronger than any outrage I felt. The recent SOPA/Protect IP support tipped the scale, and I found myself going through the process of transferring domains.

Even though GoDaddy recently stated they no longer support SOPA in its current form, I still decided to go through with the transfer.

I’ve since transferred over eight domains to hover. At $10 a pop, there were a few domain names I decided to leave at GoDaddy since I plan on letting them just expire (no sense in spending money on domains I plan to ditch).

If you have domains with GoDaddy and are considering transferring them elsewhere, I would recommend hover. As an FYI I found this transfer tutorial/video quite helpful.

And if you’re game, you can use my referral link and I’ll get $2 if you make a purchase. Also – hover has a promotional code that will get you 10% off: SOPA.

I’m not sure how long the transfer will take, before it fully propagates. Hopefully you won’t see any bugginess, but if you can’t access the site for some reason… it should be back soon.

See you on the other side…