Newbie Domain Name whois question...

[Rydog]

I'm getting ready to design my own website, but I know that whenever you purchase a domain name, anyone has access to your personal information though a whois command on that url. Is they anyway around this? I mean in this day, how do they allow anyone to know where you live, etc.? Thanks for any help in this matter.

[benevolent001]

Hello Rydog

Welcome to WebmasterWorld

Best of luck with your new project

If you dont want your personal information to be displayed at whois then you can go for private domain registration.It does generally costs more but your information will not be shown to anyone

Hope this helps

[Rydog]

Thanks, Ben. Did I read somewhere that private domains can be hacked easily?

[crescenta]

Some registrars offer "private" registration, others don't. Find out *before* you sign up for a domain whether or not the registrar company you are using offers privacy. Also keep in mind that some offers of privacy are not all they're cracked up to be. I used one registrar which claimed that they could make your listing private, but it really wasn't. (There was no extra charge for this, so I guess you get what you pay for.) Once you register your domain (and it happens that it doesn't offer privacy) you can't transfer it to another registrar for a few months. During that time your private information could be available to anyone who is interested.

Several of the big name registrars offer genuine privacy options. "Domains by Proxy" is one service, but there are at least several others as well.

I don't know about whether or not private registrations are easy to hack, but I think that it would be less easy to find out your identity if you got the domain and the privacy option at the same time. (In other words, you didn't have the domain for a few years with no privacy, and then added the privacy later.) This would be my guess, anyway.

[Rydog]

I plan on using NameCheap.com. They are offering free for one year whois guard. Is this a reputable site? Is their privacy protection worthy?

[benevolent001]

i think if ur going for private registration you should go to networksolutions .they are very costly though

if you dont mind keeping infomation open then you should go to mydomian.they are very good.

[crescenta]

NameCheap seems to adequately conceal information from Whois inquiries. How "deep" this concealment goes, I don't know, but I assume that unless someone gets a court order that your information would be safe with NameCheap or a similar service. I am vaguely aware of at least one tricky workaround to snoop further, but to be honest most people wouldn't know it--*I* hadn't heard of any until recently, but then I don't pretend in any way to be an expert.

Bear in mind that many casual Internet surfers are clueless about many things and will not know how look up domain registration information with Whois. And most people who see Whois information and see that it lists a proxy will not look further. It will only be the really savvy or dedicated (and extremely motivated) snoop who will try to look further. Otherwise, they will just try to pry into someone else's site--someone who isn't using a privacy feature on their domain.

Do you think that anyone might be motivated to single out you in particular and try to find out more about you, or are you worried that some casual snooper will wander on by and try to find out about you? If it's the latter (random snoop), then personally I would not worry too much and I'd go with a service like NameCheap. But once again, I'm speaking as someone who doesn't pretend to know a whole lot--only that I know more than most casual Internet surfers (which isn't saying a whole lot, but...you know what I mean). ;-)

[Eterion]

My webhost is NetSol and they offer a private domain registration service... how secure/deep is it? Well, seeing how their parent company VeriSign supposedly "runs" the whois database, I would say its pretty secure lol. Ofcourse thats what one of their reps told me, so I could be wrong.