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Ask HN: Domain privacy?

7 points by benmccann ↗ HN
I've been using domain privacy on my domains, but my registrar recently increased its rates by quite a bit. I found that I would get quite a bit of spam when I made my details public. Have you found domain privacy to be useful? What's a good registrar offering the service at a fair price?

5 comments

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arete
Domain privacy is free (for individuals) at gandi, but the details vary per domain: for .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, .name, tv, and .cc they'll hide your physical location but not name. For some of the country TLDs they'll hide your name as well.

http://www.gandi.net/domain/whois

WillyF
I got rid of domain privacy a few years ago. I don't get all that much spam to my personal e-mail account which is associated with my domains. I've also heard that some people see domain privacy as a sign of a potentially scammy/spammy site.
soult
Domain privacy is not just about email spam. First of all, you will also get letter spam and quite a few scammers that try to trick you into moving your domain to their services by claiming to be "The Domain Registry Of America" (a London-based company, which contacted me multiple times).

Second issue is privacy. Despite (rather useles) efforts by registrars and registries to prevent mass queries to Whois servers, there are _huge_ searchable databases of Whois data. This makes it possible for comptetitors to "spy" on your projects, for crooks to determine your wealth and location, for lunatics/stalkers to be always up to date on your location, etc.

I personally use nearlyfreespeech.net for domains and domain privacy.

christefano
I've never paid for domain privacy and rolled my own instead: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635193

Since writing that post I've switched to using a real, physical address and I list my company's phone number instead. As far as I can tell, none of the junk mail, phone calls and spam I get (which is hardly any at all) are due to my whois information.

pasbesoin
It's been said often before, but namecheap.com seems worth a look. Their "WhoisGuard" (or whatever it's called) is "free" the first year (I'm not sure about transfers) and about $3 per year after that. And their domain name pricing for the "usual" TDL's is about $10. There's always some coupon that will save you a fraction of a buck, sometimes more, if you google "namecheap coupon".

Now that namecheap has implemented persistent HTTPS throughout a logged on session, I don't feel uncomfortable mentioning them.

gandi.net and nearlyfreespeech.net are mentioned here frequently, as well (e.g. prior comments here -- vote them up, not me). I don't have personal experience with them.

I don't know how suitable these providers are for "commercial grade" registrations. In my "real" work, other people buy those thing. (I'd be interested in any informed perspectives on this.)