When you register a domain name there's always an optional service called "domain privacy" with a small fee. How does domain privacy work? Will you benefit from this service since you pay extra for it? We'll introduce private domain registration from indepth reviews and compare both pros and cons.

Domain privacy introduction
Normally, when we register a domain name we need to enter our real personal details as required by ICANN(International Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers). This includes our full names, contact address and phone numbers. Once your domain registration is done, all such info will be published to whois database and viewable by everyone. Domain privacy or private domain registration is a type of service to hide your personal information from whois search. Those personal information like full names, address, street address and phone numbers/fax etc will all be hided in whois database. All your private information is protected behind proxy, what people see from whois search is all about proxy server information. Because of this, domain privacy is also called whois privacy.

Pros of domain privacy

From above definition and explanation, private domain registration will hide all our personal details from public search thus some sensitive information will be protected from abusing. Basically, we can benefit from following categories with this service:

• Avoid spam. The biggest advantage is you will get rid of lots of spam via domain privacy. Because all your personal data is hided from public search, spammer can not get your personal contact email, phone number and fax number. Means they can not send you spam email, fax message, you can also avoid various not welcomed phone calls every day. For this concern, private domain registration is highly suggested if your mail/phone is flooded by spam messages.
• Prevent domain hijacking. Think you got a high value domain name that's concerned by lots of people. They might send out lots of hijack attempts based your domain records. However, if you have applied private registration service, your details will be hided. Although it's not 100% guaranteed service for domain protection, at least you're safe from registrar end.

Cons of domain privacy

Regardless all kinds of advantages using domain privacy service, there're several negative effect we must realize. Based the modern internet development, it's more and more important to put everything into reality. Following points must be awared if you choose private domain registration.

• Less Trusty. Hide all your domain information means nothing can be viewed by people. If you're running a shopping cart site and your domain is privately registered, users might hesitate a lot to pay on your site in case they did whois search for your domain name. Normally, whois protected domain is always in high risk being considered spam because only spammer wants to hide all their contact details.
• Negative for SEO. As suggested by all major search engine guidelines, they do not suggest hide your domain details. Search engine like google will give less rank to your domain if its private registration. Google would like to confirm all your personal data matches together so your web contents will be trusted.

Conclusion

You can choose private domain registration if security is your mostly concerned point. But if you're going to promote an ecommerce website for better search engine ranking, you should get rid of this service because your site will loose trustness in search engine eyes.

Domain private registration FAQ

How does private domain registration work?
You just follow the same domain registration process to have domain registered. Once done, you might receive another login information for proxy site. Depends different domain registrars, take godaddy for example you will get a new login from domain by proxy(DBP) site to manage your private informations. The domain registration account will be used for technical management purpose such as DNS servers and records.

Who will control my domain for private registration?
You will fully control over your domain. Domain privacy just add extra security layer to your domain name.

Can I update my personal details for private domain?
Yes you can, but it won't show up publicly from whois search.

Can I cancel domain privacy service?
Yes you can, once you cancelled the service, all your personal details will be publicly viewable.

Domain name is a MUST to show up your website on internet. A good and easy to remember domain name will improve your site visibility for better business success. Domain registration always costs you several bucks per year and you may need to pay additional fees for various addon services like domain privacy. But since there's free domain registration available on web, why should we subscribe to paid domain service? When should you use free domain name service and when to pay? We're going to compare both pros and cons side by side between free and paid domain registration service.

Introduction of free domain registration service

Free domain registration service is only provided by few registrars where you can register any available names with specific TLD extensions. Generally, you can sign up free domain hosting account to add as many domain names as you want. You have options to manage domain DNS servers and records in account panel, you can also set redirection to other websites. Currently, free domain registration service is mainly offered by two popular sites: dot.tk and dot.ml

Introduction of paid domain registration service

Paid domain name registration is the main type domain service on internet. There're hundreds of ICANN certified domain registrars from different areas on the planet. With a paid service, you have full access to any domain related service like DNS, domain transfer, domain privacy and domain parking etc. You can register most available domain tlds with a paid service. The largest domain registrar so far is godaddy(www.godaddy.com).

Free domain vs paid domain – available tld options

Free domain names are only provided through a specific domain tld. Till present, such servers is only provided by two providers – dot.tk and dot.ml sites. You can either register .tk or .ml domain name based your prefers. However, please note some branded names like microsoft, google and dell etc can not be registered.

Paid domain name service is completely different, you can register most available domain extensions  based your needs. dot com domain is the most popular choice by most business. Because of this, you should use dot com whenever you want to register a domain since it's the first impression when people refer to a website. You do not have this advantage from free registration service.

Free domain vs paid domain – security

Free domain registration just requires you to register with a user/password without further private details like home address, phone numbers and credit card etc. Thus, in case your account is hacked by somebody, you can not call for support about it, mostly you will loose domains in that account.

With a paid domain registration service, you're fully supported and protected by registrar and country laws. If anyone accessed into your account for modifications, you will get email alert instantly so you can take actions. Because you have submitted payment information when registering the domain, you can easily get it back if it's hajacked.

Free domain vs paid domain – SEO friendly

As we known, different domain extensions are managed by different countries. For example .us is managed by American, .cn is managed by China. Their institutions handle domain propagation in their own countries. Means if you browse a dot cn site, it's propagated from China so it might take longer time to load if you're outside this area. From SEO sight, if you're going to promote a site in specific area, a local domain site with local language is suggested. You have a range options to register different extensions domains from paid registrars. However you don't have such option from free domain service. What you get is their local extension site which is less popular than leading selections. Internet connections are not so good in those areas so major search engines may not be able to crawl it smoothly.

Also, because of the free, the service is heavily abused by people. The free point greatly reduced spam site investment and heavily affected the search engine SERP. Because of this, most dot tk domain sites were cleared out from baidu search in China and got almost no ranking at all from google. if you're going to promote business on such domain, all your efforts will be useless.

When you need a free domain service?

The free domain service is not bad itself, its just abused by people. It's still good choice if you want to upload a hobby site with no extra consideration such as search visibility, money making etc. Some web applications only works with a top level domain, but you're not ready to pay for a new domain yet. In this case you can get a free domain for testing purpose. The registration is almost instant so you don't have to wait a bit.

Conclusion

Free domain service is only good choice for hobby purpose. It's never suggested putting your business on such domain for any side consideration. Instead, you should go with a decent paid service like godaddy, namecheap etc. Also, if you're going to host your website with a web hosting service, many of them will give you free domain opportunity, much better than those unprotected service.

CDN is short for content delivery network. Once your website subscribed to its system, the service will deliver your site files to all its network servers on multiple locations. Thus, when your website is browsed by people, it will download from the most nearby network nodes to reduce response time. With the fast technology development, there're more and more paid and free cdn providers, but what would be the difference? Why should you subscribe to a paid cdn service and when go to free option?

Technically speaking, there're lots of difference between paid and free CDN. Especially when you have high requirement to performance and security. Here we'll compare the main points side by side for better understanding

Paid CDN vs Free CDN service – Availability

Free CDN service is typically configured within a small network where just few hardware equipments included. Normally, the providers rent multiple servers in different data centers to configure its small cdn network. Because of the free, it comes with lots of limitations on file types and amounts, most free cdn services are optimized to specific areas only.

On the other hand, paid cdn services are mostly configured through global data centers for maximum availability. You can choose different plans for different purpose so your website will be always online. A decent paid cdn service is always created through leading data center providers with powerful hardware equipments. By delivering your files to all continents on lots of data centers, your website can be accessed anywhere for any time.

Paid CDN vs Free CDN service – Performance

Free CDN will limit the amount of files and file types you can upload. For example most free cdn service does not support flash and media files. It's absolutely not good for movie sites. A paid cdn is different, you have lots of choice from their plans. The most important is they will always compress your files for fast delivering. For example if you have a phogograghy site with lots of high quality photos, it will take long time to load for regular http downloading, but it's pretty fast with a high quality paid cdn service because the uploading/downloading is maximum compressed. People do not want to wait long for your website loading so a good cdn will help a lot to keep visitors.

Paid CDN vs Free CDN service – Security

CDN security is mainly referring to the network and hardware equipments. Basically, there's no protection at all with free cdn service. Those providers would like to serve as more sites as possible by less costs. Thus they can't really invest much to security protection. Even some common security solutions are not available such as ssl and server end firewall installation etc.

But you get guaranteed security protection with a paid cdn service. File uploading/downloading is always done through secure tunnel by firewall protection. Your content is encrypted and compressed on internet via multiple safe layers. You don't have to worry about some popular hackings because all your data is in safe place.

Paid CDN vs Free CDN service – Ease of use

Both free and paid cdn services are easy to use from current user experience. With a simple control panel we can add websites and everything will be auto configured. But we get more features via paid plan. For example solid statistics showing how and when your visitors access your content. It's extremely helpful if you would like to analyze your site traffic for optimization purpose. You also get uptime/downtime reports from website center. In this way you get full reports over the service and help determine if you need to keep or cancel the subscription.

Best Paid CDN Service

There're lots of quality CDN services like Cloudfront by amazon and akamai etc. From existing user experience and customer feedbacks, maxcdn(www.maxcdn.com) is rated the best for both performance and price. Maxcdn provides total of 4 plans that starts from $9/mo. Maxcdn is also one of the very few cdn providers who have specially optimized networks for Asia. If you are going to promote your business in that district, maxcdn service is highly recommended.

Till present, their service is trusted and used by 13,000+ Businesses. Unlike most other cdn service, maxcdn provides guaranteed performance and extra resource purchase opportunity. Their network is setup and optimized through US/EU and Asia continents with real time reporting. All your web contents are protected and secured by SSL/Norton solutions.

Best FREE CDN Service

The most famous free cdn is cloudflare(www.cloudflare.com). Cloudflare actually provides both paid and free plans but free plan is most well known and used. It's added to cpanel control panel by most hosting providers for easy integration. The free plan works the same as paid service but comes with multiple limitations. For example it doesn't support video and compressed files. Cloudflare has total of 23 global points across Europe, Asia, US and AU. Those networks have covered the major internet traffic centers.

When should you subscribe to paid cdn service?

As described above, a paid cdn service has lots of advantages comparing to free ones. Paid cdn service is highly suggested and should be your primary consideration if you operate a heavy traffic site. Especially when it's an ecommerce shopping cart and forum site, you will need to manage lots of sensitive data on it so a decent cdn service is a must for guaranteed performance and security protection.

But if you just manage a simple blog or enterprise site and just want to get better response from other locations, a free cdn like cloudflare is good enough because you don't have to worry about a lot like from a cart site.

VPS is great choice when you would like to learn about server management or after outgrew shared server service. Most of the time, you would like to reduce the cost as more as possible. For this concern, a cheap unmanaged vps server is your best choice. But how to keep your server in healthy state with high security? We have compiled a list of softwares that will help with easy server management and better security.

Centos is the most popular choice for linux VPS by webmasters because it's also used by most hosting groups for its high performance and great source list. You just need to send few commands to keep your system up to date and always in safe place. By default, it's created from pre-configured system templates that just come with basic web server service. We have to install other softwares by our own for production server purpose.

Before we start, we need to update the system software repositories so we can use "yum" commands directly for software installation easily. Please read this guide for tutorials on how to manage repository source. Please note all below operations are done through root login.

Mysql and phpmyadmin
Mysql is a must for your vps server, just send out "yum install mysql server5" to get the latest version mysql installed. You might don't feel good to manage all databases by command lines so you need to have phpmyadmin installed. just type "yum install phpmyadmin" to have it installed.

FTP Server
FTP is a must if you're going to upload/download files to vps server. We highly recommend to use Proftp for best performance and security. Full documentaion can be found on this article. You might also need to add extra users with different permissions. For better management we recommend ProFTPd Admin for webinterface administration.

phpsysinfo
phpsysinfo is an open sourced server resource usage monitoring tool which can show up your system usage in real time. This includes disk usage, CPU/memory usage. You can download it directly on sourceforge site, there's no installation required, just unzip to your website working directory and browse to it.

Mail server
Email is important feature for any server. It's easy and quick to get it enabled on centos server. The most popular choice is postfix. Full documentation can be found on this krizna article. Once configured you can install any other webmail management scripts like roundcube for professional email service.

Kloxo control panel
Most of the time, you might not sure what to install for a professional and secure server setup. For such case, we highly recommend one of the most powerful and free control panel software "Kloxo". Kloxo is almost the same as some leading control panel solutions and supported by a large community. Fully introduction and installation guidance is available on this official page.

Basically you can configure any service via Kloxo control panel. You can use it for DNS server management, Mail server management, FTP and user management. You can also offer server space to multiple users using kloxo for hosting service providing. It's highly recommended service if you would like to keep everything managed centrally and professionally.

IPtables
The MUST service for linux server firewall setup. All server end security rules can be defined by iptables perfectly. Documentation is provided on this centos wiki.

It might be little hard to understand various rules. However you don't always have to deal with command lines for professional firewall setup. There's a nice GUI tools provided on iptables.info site. There're multiple tools provided for firewall setup like fwbuilder, ipmenu, easy firewall generator etc. Using this service you can manage all security rules via GUI instead command line window.

Above listed softwares/services are currently configured on our own servers and so far so good for production usage. Of course, you may also need other services based your needs and you may subscribe to a managed vps hosting directly for guaranteed security and support. However, the unmanaged option is always good start to help with further understanding of your server.