GoDaddy orders US site to find new host in wake of Heather Heyer slurs

14 Aug 2017

A GoDaddy-sponsored racing car. Image: HodagMedia/Shutterstock

‘It’s go time’: Web hosting provider GoDaddy follows its company motto by telling far-right website The Daily Stormer to leave after it breached terms of service.

For its part in publishing an offensive piece on 32-year-old Heather Heyer following her death at the protests in the city of Charlottesville, far-right news site The Daily Stormer has been told by its domain holder, GoDaddy, that it is no longer welcome.

Heyer was killed in a hit-and-run incident by a car allegedly driven by James Alex Fields Jr. Following the news of her death, the website personally attacked her in a piece containing multiple slurs.

After being made aware of the piece by Amy Siskind, founder of The New Agenda organisation, GoDaddy stated on Twitter that The Daily Stormer had 24 hours to move its domain to another provider for violating its terms of service.

Under its contract with The Daily Stormer, GoDaddy hosts the domain, but does not host the site.

In a statement to TechCrunch, GoDaddy expanded on this by saying: “We have informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service. If no action is taken after 24 hours, we will cancel the service.

“Given this latest article comes on the immediate heels of a violent act, we believe this type of article could incite additional violence, which violates our terms of service.”

‘The world’s most genocidal Republican website’

The decision comes several months after GoDaddy was advised by the US’s Southern Poverty Law Center that it should remove The Daily Stormer from its domain as it is “dedicated to spreading anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism and white nationalism”.

However, The Daily Stormer administrators are likely to be focused on keeping their site in one piece after a group purporting to be the Anonymous hackers revealed it had taken over the website and threatened to take it down within the space of 24 hours.

Visitors to the site can see a statement from the group that says: “We have taken this site in the name of Heather Heyer, a victim of white supremacist terrorism. For too long, The Daily Stormer and Andrew Anglin have spewed their putrid hate on this site. That will not be happening anymore.”

Launched in 2014, The Daily Stormer has been widely criticised for its white nationalist viewpoint, calling itself “the world’s most genocidal Republican website”.

A GoDaddy-sponsored racing car. Image:  HodagMedia/Shutterstock

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com