You’re purchasing a new domain name and website hosting; your web hosting provider will naturally attempt to sign you up for domain privacy. This service typically costs anywhere from $10 to $15 a year. Not super expensive, yet the question you ask yourself is if you truly need domain privacy?
What is domain privacy? Any individual who needs to find the owner of a certain domain can easily do that by looking it up in the WHOIS database. A domain name is the URL of a site (i.e. www.example.com). See for yourself and search the WHOIS database: http://who.godaddy.com. When you type in a domain name, you may have the capacity to see who registered the domain, their location, their telephone number, email address and the domain registrar.
Yes or No to Domain Privacy?
Having a business you look for ways to promote and market as much as possible. So for a company domain privacy usually is not a big deal as you want to be seen. As a business, your telephone number, email and location are all over the World Wide Web in a lot of different places, so I wouldn’t ordinarily suggest domain privacy.
However, if you are an individual purchasing a domain name, you may need to think about paying those $10 to $15 additional dollars to conceal your personal data. Paying for domain privacy with web hosting will indicate generic web hosting data when somebody looks up your domain (URL) in the WHOIS pursuit.
If you’re not certain whether you have domain privacy or not, check with your website hosting provider or look up your URL at http://who.godaddy.com to see what type of personal data shows up.
