Domain Privacy Protection, Closing the Hole to Thievery.

Domains are a very important part of your business and when you buy a domain, it is usually a very exciting moment as you are buying a “piece” of the Internet. You are claiming your stake on your online brand and you are purchasing the future in your business.

It’s exciting.

But one thing that people take for granted is their privacy. Unfortunately, when you buy domains through most services, your personal contact details are not kept protected from the general public, and worse yet, solicitors and scammers.

When these contact details are left open, you open yourself up to people calling you and offering you services, tricking you into buying things you don’t need, and emailing/mailing you to make you various offers and solicitations.

This is why domain privacy protection plays such an important role in your business. This is know as protecting your WHOIS data (“who is”).

How Does Domain/WHOIS Privacy Work?

When you buy a domain, by default your contact information for that domain is made public with most domain registrars (unless you pay a premium). This can easily be looked up through one of the many free whois search engines out there.

Here is one that I use.

Ex. http://whois.domaintools.com/

If you go there and type in your domain name, you will be able to see if your contact are private or public. By default, all domains you buy here at WA are set to make your contact details private through our "domain privacy protection", Domain Shield. Here is what the whois will look like for this.

As you can see the domain is registered with domain details that are particular to the domain protection organization, DOMAIN SHEILD which are static contact details for every domain that is purchased here at WA (and this is what protects you).

But what exactly can happen if you leave your domains information wide open to the world...

Domains Not Private? The Ways You Might Get Scammed.

There are many ways that people are being contacted through their whois contact details (when they are left as not protected). You will either be contacted by email, snail mail, or telephone with one of the following offers:

• Offering to renew your domain at higher prices. There is one such company that in Canada that does this called iDNS (internet domain name services) and they try to create panic in domain owners making them feel as though they need to renew their domains using their service (which happens to be $40/year for a .com). Your domain will automatically renew through the domain registrar your purchased through, if you bought through SiteDomains, you will pay the same price every year. This is a pure and blatant attempt overcharge and you can see one such letter I received just last week from them.
  
• Selling Similar domains. Lots of the time you will get contacted by a company/individuals that tries to sell you a similar domain (see below). You have no reason to buy similar domains, in particular at the Premium price that they will want to charge you (usually $100+).
  

• Offering SEO services. Lots of the times someone will phone you or email you telling you that you need special SEO submission services for your domain. This is a lie, this is another scam.
• Offering high ticket training/mentoring packages. There are people that are claiming to be “Wealthy Affiliate” related out there trying to do this. If your domain is not private, they will contact you saying they are from Wealthy Affiliate and try to sell you some $1,000+ mentoring package. Total scam.
• The “probers”. People will call you or email you not telling you what they want, rather inquiring and asking you to call them back. One such lady called just the other day and left a voicemail on our business phone. Complete and utter scam.

Most Domain Registrars Charge For Domain Privacy?

The likes of Namecheap.com and GoDaddy.com, two of the biggest and most reputable domain registrars charge for their whois services. These can range from $2.88/year at Namecheap.com to much more at $7.99 per year if you want to protect your domain on Godaddy.

This can really add up and since this is an essential part of a domain purchase, you definitely do want to choose this option as part of the upsell/checkout process. A $12-14 domain soon becomes much more expensive (closer to $22 at Godaddy.com).

We have taken the initiative to change how the industry behaves with the SiteDomains platform. We make EVERY domain, by default, completely private and protected against solicitors and scammers. In fact, we include everything you need in the domain costs, privacy, domain protection, email, auto dns, and next year price guarantee.

This is something that is not offered anywhere in the industry and we have done this because we feel that the domain industry behaves like the internet marketing industry, consumers are being taken advantage of.

Your contact details are 100% private with any domain you purchase using SiteDomains here at WA.

So do know that, a domain registrar or a company that contacts you by PHONE, MAIL or EMAIL that you are unaware of or that even “pretends” to be part of another company is a solicitor/scam. Please be careful and MAKE SURE you register all your domains privately.

If you have a story you would like to share about this or have any questions