GoDaddy Temporarily Blocks Customers from Moving to Other Hosts

After having been threatened by Anonymous and some of their most precious clients, such as Cheeseburger and even Wikipedia, GoDaddy came forward stating that it didn’t support the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) anymore, or at least not as before.

The problem is that some of their former clients that still wanted to change hosts were experiencing major difficulties.

Namechap, a competitor company, posted a message on their community blog in which they informed customers that GoDaddy was “thwarting efforts to transfer domains away from them.”

“Specifically, GoDaddy appears to be returning incomplete WHOIS information to Namecheap, delaying the transfer process,” Namechap Community Manager Tamar wrote.

“This practice is against ICANN rules. We at Namecheap believe that this action speaks volumes about the impact that informed customers are having on GoDaddy’s business.”

Other similar companies also declared that there were unusually long delays when it came to domain transfers from GoDaddy, but their responses were more reserved, TorrentFreak reports.

GoDaddy responded to the accusations saying that these practices are not uncommon, in most cases being made to prevent abuse, but some voices claim that this was done on purpose to give their customers the opportunity to find out that they sort of backed out of their support for the controversial bill.

GoDaddy representatives also said that Namechap didn’t contact them directly, instead they posted the accusations on their blog, but Namechap denied this, stating that they warned their competitor of the delays before releasing the post.

In an interview with TechCrunch, GoDaddy’s CEO Warren Adelman said that they were prepared to let other companies take “leadership roles” when it came to the anti-piracy act.

“Go Daddy will support it [SOPA] when and if the Internet community supports it,” he said.

The new CEO’s reaction came after The Domains announced that over 15,000 domain names had been transferred from GoDaddy on Thursday and over 21,000 on Friday.