After months of deliberation and a complicated transfer, the Wikimedia Foundation domain portfolio has been successfully transferred from GoDaddy to MarkMonitor. The portfolio transfer was formally completed on Friday, March 9th, 2012. The transfers were done seamlessly and our sites did not experience any interruption of service or other issues during the procedure.

As the provider of the 5th most visited web properties in the world, the Foundation cares deeply about who handles our domain names. 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.

After exploring numerous alternatives, the Foundation’s legal team decided that MarkMonitor could best provide the comprehensive services that we needed. 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. The use of their domain management services ensures greater efficiency in the handling of the Foundation’s trademark and domain name portfolios.

We have been very impressed with MarkMonitor to this point and we are confident we have placed the Wikimedia domain portfolio in competent hands.

Michelle Paulson

Legal Counsel

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.