Whois Privacy: What's your Take

[stscac]

Howdy NPer's. Let's get down to brass tacks...

What's your take on Domain Name Whois Privacy?


Please post:
How much would you pay and for what services?

All the best.

-Steve

 

[rudyhernandez]

This is such an important topic.
One one hand, I don't want to lose a sale because of not being able to be contacted, but damn...I hate spam.

 

[xrvel]

I voted :

• Yes, Free Service => for my developed names. I got this free service from my local hosting.
• Yes, Paid Service => for my developed name about local politician here. I use GoDaddy service.

For my parked names, i don't use whois privacy.

 

[hawkeye]

Personally I think it's a waste of money. If you want to stay private, call yourself 'Private Name', use a PO box, your own private email (very important for getting 'any' related emails), and go use the $7-8 or whatever you saved, to go buy another name. The important thing here is that you the domain owner have control and accessibility over any related correspondence regarding the domain, be it email, snail mail, or phone. Leaving your assets and information (especially domains) in the hands of others that one 'hopes' will always be 'there and fair', is just too risky IMO.

 

[goodkarmaco]

For newbies,

Godadd- and others who talk about having your information private are only interested in your money.

If you get a offer for a name you can sell it yourself. If you keep getting spammed by a certain party, most emails, even Aol have a "block unwanted sender" feature. All I do is if I get a spam, I block the sender and never hear from them again. In the mean while the names I sell for $1,000 come in thru a contact thru the "who is" I pay no fees to Sed- or After--- or any other auction house.

It can pay big to have the who is show your contact.

 

[.X.]

I voted i would use it, If it were free, I really don't care though, I get solicitors calling daily, some times i screw with their minds-LOL, I figure it a mixture of whois, and just about anything i sign up for, that requires my phone number.

 

[onewordonly]

I also voted if it was free, it can be quite costly on some registers but I think I would only need it on a few domains. One example I could use it on is a restaurant review site where it would be good to remain anonymous in case a restaurant owner doesn't agree to my review and gets offended.

On this subject, how do people who own lots of domains/sites deal with the idea that Google will penalize people who own quite a few domains/sites and so the rankings go down? I'm not sure if this is true or not.

 

[Rob J]

I've never heard that, wouldn't Google see the anonymous whois service as a single entity owning millions of domains and penalize everyone who uses it?

I doubt it, I don't see the correlation, people with lots of domains have most of them parked, and parked domains don't rank particularly high to start with, and Google isn't going to cross reference the whois from the billions of sites in their index. It wouldn't make sense for them to penalize my relatively few developed sites because I have many parked domains.

If anything I can see this applying to adsense spammers who make adsense sites by the thousands with automated content. That would make sense.

 

[chandan]

i will use if it is free :p

if i want to sell domain i wont use privacy

 

[casty23]

To add a bit of detail:

When the feces hit the rotary device concerning registerfly, a registrar that was taking people's money but not buying/renewing/transfering the domains, after a great deal of stalling and blame shifting, ICANN(t) tried to get the master list of domains held by Registerfly. Apparently some domain owners who used privacy were not listed and lost their domains.

BTW Registerfly is still in business, last time I checked.

Whois is spam bait, but I am surprised how little I get from that source. I occasionally get a excited snail mail letter telling me that I need to renew and that this company will kindly do the honor for me for $60. - -I do not see how they can afford the stamps. I even got one spam letter that used the graphics from my little town's city hall envelopes - return address was different, they just stole the picture!

Hmm I thought that situation was cleared up. have to look into that sometime.


I prefer to use whois myself. Unless I was using a business address there is no way I would use my personal info on a website.

 

[AdoptableDomains]

I don't use it and don't want to.

1. I have nothing to hide.
2. I as a buyer tend to not fully trust those who do use it, because I think they might have something to hide.
3. Spam from whois seems to have pretty much stopped or is at least being filtered really well.
4. I don't trust ANY registrar for complete control of who owns my domains.
5. I lost a couple domains due to renew notices not translating to my real email address several years ago.
6. I lost a couple domains at registerfly when they crossed up their database and put someone else's name on them when privacy was removed.
7. I almost lost a number of domains when RF automatically put privacy (I didn't notice it), and had to convince Enom with past email records that I was the rightful owner. It took several weeks, and some almost expired in the process.
8. I often get offers from the whois record.
9. I always verify the whois record with a whois inquiry when I get an offer, to make sure I still own the name. (I sometimes forget to remove sale listings)

 

[ckdomain]

I like it for sites I know that will get lots of traffic. Parked or reselling domains I dont care too much. Use name.com when I want private whois.

 

[RegFee]

Moniker only charges $1.00 for this service. Unfortunately, this thread reminded me to test the emails out and I received Mail Delivery Subsystem mailer-daemon errors for the 2 domains I tested at random. I've asked support to look into it, and also asked if Moniker has ever researched the success rate of emails being delivered through this service. Would be interesting to see the statistics. Imagine if 1 out of every 100 emails got lost; assuming each of those "1's" are sales inquiries, that's a lot of money getting thrown away.

 

[AzN]

I will vote Yes, Paid Service, as I use a PO BOX for my whois. I guess this counts as my own privacy service? :p

 

[seven]

Register at Name.com. Opened up an account there and it's fabulous - dirt cheap prices, free whois all day, easy to use, and simple format. I love that place. Ironically I started using it because I called Godaddy about trying to use a promo code on domains and the rep, Javier, acted like none of the promo codes off the web ever work. So I looked at name.com, which was cheaper even without the code, and have since spent $200 there and don't plan on looking back.

Anyways, back to whois. I actually like having it or at least the option to have it. I don't have a definitive answer other than the notion of privacy is shrinking more and more on the internet. In some circumstances, I don't mind having my name out there, but with the Internet you can't always control those circumstances.

If I can think of a better (or more specific) reason or copy someone elses better reason, I'll post it later.

 

[stscac]

I will vote Yes, Paid Service, as I use a PO BOX for my whois. I guess this counts as my own privacy service? :p

I think it does.

-Steve

 

[stscac]

Looking for some more answers here folks!

Some great input thus far.

-Steve

 

[Timewarp]

Its not a huge issue for me, I would prefer not to have my home address and home phone revealed. I take the free privacy at name.com and also GoDaddy usually offers it for free when buying 5+ domains (but dont get caught on the expensive privacy renewals)

One of my .ca registrars added free privacy which I signed up for before reading the fine print, the shady company they have doing it will only pass on your email from a third party if that party sends a $10 certified cheque to them first. Great way to turn off potential buyers!

 

[pokainc]

All this talk that if you use privacy services then people won't be able to reach you and balblabla..... there's a very simple solution.

1- Give your real info to the registrar for verification purposes and so-on.
2- MAKE ONLY YOUR CONTACT EMAIL PUBLIC.

People won't know where you live or won't be able to reach you by phone. They have the email, it should be enough to reach.

I'm sure registrar companies would not need geniuses to program that.

 

[deboer123]

gr

 

[lcbyou]

I would never use private registration because I want to be contacted about my domains.

So do I.