Whenever you register a domain name, you are required to provide a legitimate email address, street address, phone number and name as the contact for that domain. And this information is listed in an online database (WhoIs), which is accessible to anyone on the Internet. This is how you’ll be contacted regarding legitimate business involving your domain name.
It’s also why you’ll be contacted by some illegitimate businesses. In my experience, sooner or later, a 'bot will harvest all this public information, and you'll get occasional spam at the email address you provided. You'll also get snail mail that tries to trick you into "renewing" your domain name registration (which, in fact, transfers the registration to another company with exorbitant annual fees, if you fall for this simple con).
Your options for limiting or preventing this are to:
(1) Not worry about it, and live with slightly more junk mail. Be selective about the contact information you provide. Don't provide your given name, your primary email address, nor a street address where someone could stalk you; but do provide contact information that works. (I use a p.o. box.) And, as always, caveat emptor; be especially suspicious of all unsolicited messages you receive.
(2) Pay the additional annual fee which most domain registrars
are happy to charge you for a "private" registration. Instead of listing YOUR contact information in the WhoIS databases, a privacy service will list their own, and act as a filter between you and the public Internet. This does add one more layer of complexity to administering your own domain; and it becomes doubly important not to lose the account ID and password you'll set up for this service. (Without them, you could get locked out of your own domain account, which would be a fat pain in the tokus.) Be certain the privacy service you use is legitimate and easy to use, not just a cheap trick to effectively take ownership of your domain, thus preventing you from using different domain (or other) service providers in the future.
(3) Let a trusted third party manage the domain for you, having them provide THEIR contact information for the registration. Shielding your personal information from the public is just one feature of the Domain Administration Service that I provide to businesses and individuals.
Yes, that last sentence is a plug for my professional services. If you’d like to discuss how I can make domain registration simple, by handling all the geeky setup and administrative annoyances for you, email me for more information at Domains@Mykl.biz.
If you prefer to do it all yourself, the domain registrar that I use and recommend is:
They generally offer more features and lower prices than their competitors.
While I find GoDaddy’s various account control panels tolerably straightforward (and better than some others), they could still be better organized and less complicated. If technology tends to give you a headache or just makes you twitch -- or if you’re too busy to learn another arcane process which you’ll rarely use -- you may be a little overwhelmed by the different setup pages and the wealth of options. Check it out, to see if you’re comfortable doing this yourself. But if you’d rather focus on your own work, and conserve your limited leisure time, than please consider my services. Just send me an email, so we discuss your needs, and how I can take care of this for you today.
16 June 2007
questions invited:
