Epik was founded in 2009 by Rob Monster, who serves as the company's chief executive officer. The company is based in Sammamish, Washington., Epik is the 22nd largest domain registrar in the United States, as measured by the number of domains registered through the company. In February 2019, it was announced that Epik had acquired BitMitigate, an American cybersecurity company based in Vancouver, Washington. BitMitigate protects websites against potential threats including distributed denial-of-service attacks. The company continues to operate as a division of Epik, and BitMitigate's founder Nicholas Lim briefly served as Epik's chief technology officer.
Hosting of far-right and illicit content
Epik describes itself as a protector of free speech. Epik has a history of not responding to reports of illegal activity on the websites they register, which is unusual for domain registrars based in the United States. Pharmaceutical watchdog website LegitScript reported in 2018 that they had alerted Epik to the sale of illegal drugs and counterfeit medications on websites registered by Epik, and that Epik had not acted upon the information. In August 2017, Epik and BitMitigate began hosting American neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and Holocaust denial commentary and message board website The Daily Stormer. This was in response to GoDaddy and Cloudflare terminating services for the site after it published an article mocking Heather Heyer, the victim of the vehicle ramming attack that occurred at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that same month. Epik received media attention in early November 2018 for registering Gab, an English-language social media website known for its mainly far-right user base, after it was ousted by GoDaddy for allowing "content on the site that both promotes and encourages violence against people". This came shortly after it was revealed that the perpetrator of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting had used the service to post "hateful content". Tal Moore, a member of Epik's board, resigned in December 2018 over the company's involvement with Gab. On November 7, 2018, Pennsylvania Attorney GeneralJosh Shapiro sent a subpoena to Epik requesting "any and all documents which are related in any way to Gab" after Gab registered its domains onto Epik. Gab posted screenshots of the subpoena letter in a tweet on the day the subpoena was sent, despite being asked to keep the letter confidential. The tweet was deleted hours later. In an email statement to Ars Technica Monster stated that "the news of the subpoena was not intended for public consumption" and that "we are cooperating with their inquiry". Epik is also known for registering other websites with far-right content, such as the video hosting serviceBitChute and the conspiracy theory website InfoWars. On August 5, 2019, Epik competitor Cloudflare announced that in the wake of the 2019 El Paso shooting they would no longer be providing services to 8chan, a far-right imageboard known as a location for hateful content and child pornography, which the perpetrator of the shooting had allegedly used immediately prior to the attack to post a manifesto justifying his actions. The same day that 8chan was removed from Cloudflare, Epik began providing hosting services, and Monster released a statement explaining their decision. Later that day, Epik's primary hardware and connectivity provider Voxility banned Epik from renting their server space. Voxility's vice president of business development stated, "We have made the connection that at least two or three of the latest mass shootings in the U.S. were connected with . At some point, somebody needed to make the decision on where the limit is between what is illegal and what is freedom of speech and today it had to be us." The Voxility ban took 8chan offline, along with The Daily Stormer and other Epik customers. On August 6, Epik reversed course and announced that they would not provide hosting services to 8chan; on August 7, Ars Technica noted that Epik had only ceased hosting their content and was still providing 8chan with DNS services.
