However, Epik is a badly run registrar (as evident by the leaks), and the only reason any of us know about them is because they've worked so hard to attract unsavory customers. Registrars mostly offer the same service at the same price, and catering to unsavory clients is their only differentiating feature.
It's their entire marketing scheme (take on customers that legitimate registrars won't), so it's not surprising that they're actually pretty illegitimate.
I'm sorry your data was leaked, and I'd take this as a sign to move.
I wonder if the media outlets will continue with their policies of not reporting on hacked info or not?
https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/responsible-reporting-in...
Then at least some places put into place policies like that, though some were then modified later:
https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/16/twitter-changes-its-hacked...
I use namecheap as my registrar and cloudflare for dns. Though the free namecheap dns worked completely fine for the years I used it too.
No. Epik is (also) known for providing good prices for (medium sized) domain owners (and everybody else who just wanted to transfer their domains for a fair price.): https://www.namepros.com/threads/epik-com-promo-deals-and-ha...
The first post from someone not employed by Epik is someone from Nigeria asking if they can buy a .US domain.
An Epik staff member tells them that .US are restricted to those with US contact information (which is almost correct--you need to be a US citizen, resident, organization, or a foreign entity with a bona fide presence in the US).
Then the Epik CEO answers that post suggesting how to circumvent the .US rules:
> However, just use the free WHOIS privacy proxy. Problem solved. You will need to keep the privacy on in this case.
That won't actually work because (as the Epik staff member points out in another reply to the Nigerian post) .US does not allow WHOIS privacy proxies.
But Epik is absolutely one if not the registrar you stumbled upon the last couple of years if you looked for good transfer prices.
I just think users should give other users in this thread the benefit of the doubt that they weren't Epik customers to support a fascist, hardcore libertarian Christian, Nazi, ... CEO and his company in any form.
They might just have googled for fair .com transfers and transferred a couple of domains in.
Even the threads here on HN from back then where epik gets mentioned don't mention that stuff.
External criticism from prominent publications and organizations of Epik for its hosting of far-right sites also dates back at least as far as early 2019 [5][6].
HN search provides a story about Epik hosting Gab [7] as the highest popularity story result for "Epik" in the date range Jan 8th 2018 to Dec 30th 2019 (HN search is weird about date ranges and wouldn't let me do 1st to 31st) [8]. The front page of that search result has 5 other stories that are not just incorrectly matching on the word "Epic" or companies named "Epic", one of which is about Epik's "forever domains" service and got 3 points and 2 comments. One is about 8chan getting kicked off its previous provider and mentions them moving to Epik (it appears to be the same article as my [3]), but the comments mostly does not talk about Epik. The other articles are all about Epik hosting Gab or far-right sites but received few upvotes and comments.
In the first page of results for the corresponding search for comments [9] I can find 1 comment from 'sadris talking about Epik's low pricing, 1 comment from 'boultonmark on a non-Gab story describing Epik as seeming to be "the go to company for criminals online", 2 hiring posts from somebody who happens to have epik in their username near the bottom, and two comments using the word "epic" at the bottom. The 14 by my count other comments are all about Epik hosting Gab and/or either hosting or not hosting 8chan.
[1]: The SPLC article below [5] says this is the timing, but the Wayback machine[2] doesn't have frequent enough captures of their twitter account for me to verify the timing to more precisely than between
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190119014600/https://twitter.c... has "Protector of responsible Free Speech." in their bio, tweets calling for popular Youtube channels (including Jordan Peterson) to move to BitChute, and referring to itself as "Alt-tech", which afaict is a term coined to refer specifically to technology providers that alt-right sites & people have moved to as a result of bans or moderation policies on more mainstream providers.
[3]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/5/20754943/8chan-epik-offlin...
[4]: https://www.epik.com/blog/epik-draws-line-on-acceptable-use....
[5]: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/01/11/problem-epik-...
[6]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/gy4yg9/the-far-right-has-fou...
[7]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18383947
[8]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1577750400&dateRange=custom&...
[9]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1577750400&dateRange=custom&...
The HN community - or even just small parts of it - did not go hard on Epik nor Rob Monster >12 months ago and mention all the horrible things about them, and it was not as commonly known as some currently make it out to be - not even in the thread about them welcoming Gab, nor the one about them not hosting 8chan.
Your claim upthread was:
> Even the threads here on HN from back then where epik gets mentioned don't mention that stuff.
but the HN search links demonstrate that the threads here on HN from back then where Epik gets mentioned are almost all specifically about that stuff! Not all of that discussion was opposed to Epik, but that wasn't the claim you took issue with.
As to your Google Trends link, yes, Gab has never been an especially popular website, and it was not as frequently searched for then as in the period immediately after Donald Trump's twitter account was suspended, but your trends link shows that the Epik coverage (and the only HN thread about Epik to get any traction in 2018 or 2019) coincided with the most searches Gab ever got (as a result of coverage related to the Tree of Life synagogue shooting) prior to Trump's twitter suspension, and was about three times as much as it gets nowadays. It was only exceeded during the week of January 10th through 16th of this year. Epik itself, of course, has never been as frequently searched for as even Gab ( https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=... ).
Yes it was? That's why I said threads - not posts. Threads include the discussion, not just the articles. And like you showed, even the big discussions did not have people mention how bad of a person Rob Monster is or that Epik is that right-leaning instead of just really free-speech.
In every second about a (big) company on HN, folk here mention how bad that company or some execs are - because it is common knowledge / opinion. And it's always one of the top comment threads in the thread.
Rob Monster and Epik being that right-leaning and not just "really free-speech", and also (Christian) nut jobs - was not common knowledge at that point. Which was my initial point "upthread upthread", that Epik had 100% a boat load of users that were just there for cheap domain prices and that did not know about it and were not there to support any of this. And thus are not guilty by association (and even deserve to be in that leak), like some in this thread claim.
https://twitter.com/robmonster/status/1437543353357328389
It sucks what happened to you, but the only thing Epik sold themselves with is the same freedom that these people are utilizing.
They have the biggest "real" (as in for existing customers and without other limitations) promo / "happy hour" thread on the biggest domain name board: https://www.namepros.com/threads/epik-com-promo-deals-and-ha... - where they regularly had pretty good transfer in prices.
This should be a lesson in exercising moral and ethical restraint, and being conscious of who you do business with. Guilt by association sucks, but I am very skeptical about anyone who says that they run a website on Epik, simply because it is the go-to webhost for extremist and violent content.
When I first heard of Epik, it was due to the kinds of sites/domains he handled that were being kicked off other services for egregious reasons (including and not limited to: hosting white supremacist shooter manifestos, doxxing for murder). That in of itself told me to stay far, far away from Epik.
Advocating for free speech doesn't mean moral abandonment, either. There's a reason things like fighting words, threats of harm aren't considered protected speech... and there's (sadly) quite a few on here who still have yet to learn that part of the lesson when it comes to speech online.
Epik's business model is to specifically cater to Neo Nazis.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/gy4yg9/the-far-right-has-fou...
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/01/11/problem-epik-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epik_(company)
> Epik is known for providing services to websites with far-right content, such as the social network Gab, video hosting service BitChute, conspiracy theory website InfoWars, and neo-Nazi message board website The Daily Stormer.[1][6][28] It was described in 2019 by Vice as "a safehaven for the extreme right" and in 2021 by The Seattle Times as "a home for far-right websites" because of its willingness to host far-right websites that have been denied service by other Internet service providers.[1][29][30] In 2021, The Daily Telegraph wrote that Epik was "a safe harbour for websites said to be enabling the spread far-right extremism and carrying Neo-Nazi content";[25] the same year, Fortune called the company the "right wing’s best friend online".[9] NPR reported in February 2021 that "when websites flooded with hate speech or harmful disinformation become too radioactive for the Internet, the sites often turn to [Epik] for a lifeline."[13]