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It's very important for you to know about the domain privacy issue when you planning to register your own domain name or choose your web hosts. This article will give you an overall introduction about this critical issue and its solution-- Private domain registration.
Personal information exposed
Did you know once you registered a domain name, all your personal information, including your name, family address, phone number and email address, would be exposed publicly, which is available 24x7 to everyone in the world. The exposed information enables email/mail spammers, business promoters, identity thieves and all other kind of attackers to grasp domain owner's personal information from the WHOIS directory, and the access to your personal information is so easy that nobody can control it !
It happens because the domain name service (DNS) management organization, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), requires that all those registration information must be available publicly in the "WHOIS" directories.
Private domain registration
With a service called ‘private domain registration’, you can keep your personal information private. This service is often provided by domain name registrars-- when a user buys the domain privacy together with domain name, the domain name registrars will replace the user's information in the WHOIS directory with the information of a forwarding (or proxy) service, so that only the replaced information will be shown to the public.
Example
The following example shows you the difference between none-privacy protected (left) and privacy protected (right) domain registration. (it's a screenshot from domainsbyproxy.com)
Do I need Domain privacy
Yes, absolutely. It's not only needed by personals, but also by businesses. For business owners, you want to promote your company, your products and your services, but you don't want to expose your employee's personal information, esp. your core IT person's contact information. Why? Because all the internet/network/system hacking start from gathering detail information ! You don't want the hackers to get your company's IT information so easily, don't you?
Some special domain privacy policy
1.Good news: .ca domain-- Privacy protected.
The .ca domain is the country-top-level domain name for Canada. Started from June 10, 2008, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority no longer posted registration details of individuals associated with .ca domains.
That means, if you register a .ca domain, you get your domain privacy protected
automatically, no need to buy extra private registration service from your domain name registrar.
2. Bad news: .us domain-- No privacy
The .us domain is the country-top-level domain name for the USA. Started from March 2005, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) stated that all owners of .us domains will not have the option of keeping their information private, and that it must be made public. No Choice.
Where to register and how much
So as what you can see, domain privacy is so important to you and your business, it's not an option, it's a must have. The good thing is, it's available from most of the domain name registrars.
The difference is, many domain name registrars sell private domain service separately at a cost around $9 per year-- the same cost as a domain name-- while a few companies (like 1&1) provide it for free when you register a new domain name(s), which will really save your money.
If you starts with a web hosting plan, in most of the case, you have to buy Private Domain Registration separately.
Here's a list of top 5 largest and also the best domain name registrars for your reference.
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