One of my friend who got inspired by my tips started blogging recently. Although, he wasn’t a geek like me and didn’t know more about web hosting\costs\privacy and stuff. His other friend helped him setting up a website for a cheap cost with minimum bandwidth\space and he finally kick started his blog. When I checked the whois information for his domain, I could get all his personal information such as his email address, phone number and his current address. I immediately notified him about this serious privacy hazard and then he chose the hide his ‘who is’ information.
If you are not familiar with the term, ‘whois privacy’, it’s a service offered by most domain name registrars that protects your information as a domain registrant from people performing a “whois” on your domains.
To view the whois information of a particular website, just hit http://whois.domaintools.com/[websiteURL].
Ex. http://whois.domaintools.com/thesharath.com would give you the ‘whois’ of mypassion and since I have chosen the hide my who is info and if you want to find out more, you would have to contact PrivacyProtect.org and they in-turn will email me.
Until some years ago many people would recommend you to use a whois privacy service. It would protect your contact information, after all, and given the privacy issues on the web this could only be a good thing. I still believe this is valid, although the World Wide Web has evolved so much from the past years.
This is really handy to safely shop online, and one of the points used to verify the credibility of an online store was to check the whois information for the domain.
If you are creating a website as a hobby and prefer to keep your contact information private, then using a whois privacy service is fine.
Finally, if your reasoning for using the privacy protection is the fear of getting spam on that email address buckle up people, make sure you have added whois privacy to your domain to protect yourself from spammers.
What are you opinions on WHOIS privacy? Post your comments below!
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