Domain Privacy Pros and Cons
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.
