Racist Daily Stormer moves to Russian domain after losing .com address (updated)

Update: By around 4 PM Eastern time, the site had gone down again after CloudFlare dropped support. Our original article follows.

Earlier this week, the infamous hate site the Daily Stormer lost control of the "dailystormer.com" domain after two domain registrars—first GoDaddy, then Google's domain service—refused service to the company. The companies were responding to a social media campaign against the Daily Stormer after a post on the site attacking Heather Heyer, who died in protest-related violence in Charlottesville this weekend.

The decisions of Google and GoDaddy made the site inaccessible on Tuesday. But by Wednesday morning, the Daily Stormer was back online with a new, Russian domain name: "dailystormer.ru." In a post announcing the site's return, editor Andrew Anglin credited Internet troll turned neo-Nazi Andrew "weev" Auernheimer, the Daily Stormer's administrator, for getting the site back up and running.

The Daily Stormer has also set up a .onion address, ensuring that it will be accessible over the censorship-resistant Tor network even if it loses its new domain name.

Anglin argued that the campaign against the site has actually worked in the Daily Stormer's favor. "We’ve been given a massive amount of publicity by the media," Anglin wrote. Anglin posted a traffic chart showing that the site got a massive surge in the hours before it was taken down.

It's an example of the Streisand effect: when efforts to suppress information leads to media attention that actually increases public exposure. Until this week, the Daily Stormer was an obscure site frequented by a small number of hardcore racists. The campaign against the site didn't get it shut down, but it did raise its profile.