All week, the infamous hate site Daily Stormer has been battling to stay online in the face of a concerted social media campaign to shut it down. The site lost its "dailystormer.com" domain on Monday after first GoDaddy and then Google Domains blacklisted it from their domain registration services

The site re-appeared online on Wednesday morning at a new domain name, dailystormer.ru. But within hours, the site had gone offline again after it was dropped by Cloudflare, an intermediary that defends customers against denial-of-service attacks.

Daily Stormer's Andrew Anglin reported Cloudflare's decision to drop the site in a post on the social media site Gab. His post was first spotted by journalist Matthew Sheffield.

Theoretically, you don't need a service like Cloudflare to publish a website. In practice, however, a site as controversial as the Daily Stormer is going to be swamped by distributed denial of service attacks if it doesn't enjoy the protection of a service like Cloudflare.

The Daily Stormer, which takes its name from a newspaper published by the Nazis from 1923 until World War II, is one of the most openly racist sites on the Internet. It regularly attacks Jews and celebrates the Holocaust. Attacks on racial minorities, feminists, and gays and lesbians are common.

The current controversy began over the weekend, when Anglin wrote a vulgar post attacking Heather Heyer, a woman who died during this weekend's violent protests in Charlottesville. Anti-racism activists convinced GoDaddy, and then Google, that the post amounted to incitement to violence and therefore violated the companies' terms of service.

Cutting off service to the Daily Stormer appears to represent a significant change of position for Cloudflare, which until now has adopted a position close to free-speech absolutism. "A website is speech. It is not a bomb," Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in 2013. "One of the greatest strengths of the United States is a belief that speech, particularly political speech, is sacred."

The company re-affirmed that position as recently as May 2017. "I'd be deeply troubled if my ISP started restricting what types of content I can access," Prince wrote in a blog post. "As a network, we don't think it's appropriate for Cloudflare to be making those restrictions either."

Update: Prince explained the change of heart in a blog post on Wednesday afternoon:

Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology. Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network. We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare.

Later in the post, Prince acknowledged that "after today, make no mistake, it will be a little bit harder for us to argue against a government somewhere pressuring us into taking down a site they don't like."