How Important Is Domain Privacy Protection?

If you have purchased a new domain name and you are keen on building your online identity, you might be wondering if domain privacy is needed?

The content of a website is accessible to all on the web, for the right users and also for the unethical users. Any website is constantly on the verge of cyber-attacks causing tremendous damage to the brand’s reputation, and brand value. The owners of the website take various precautions like using strong passwords, backing up data regularly, adopting DDoS protection, and installing anti-malware software.

Website owners often overlook the security of an important aspect of the website – the domain name.

This is the most visible element of your website, and there is no option to hide that from anyone. There is a possibility that hackers have an option to peep into your personal information using your domain name as the key.

If you are worried about securing your domain name for maximum privacy, then this article is for you!

What Is Domain Privacy Protection?

When you register a domain, as per ICANN rules you have to provide complete information like name, address, email, and phone number to the registrar. Your personal information is displayed publicly on the WHOIS database. Except for personal information, some other facts like your web registrar, name servers, and expiry date are also mentioned. Displaying the information publically has a reason; if any future issue like ownership confirmation arises regarding your domain, then this information can be used for solving the ownership issue.

Like advantages, sharing information about you and your website has many drawbacks. One big drawback is anyone can find that information on that database and use it however they like; even they can cause spam attacks. In that case, you will undoubtedly try to prevent attacks on your website. To do so you need to make your domain private and add domain privacy protection.

The WHOIS Database

The ICANN or Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a non-profit organization, that does the maintenance of namespaces on the internet. They do so by managing the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and the Domain Name Server (DNS) root. ICANN makes the collected data public on the WHOIS database. This database can be accessible publicly; when anyone types a domain name, the related information regarding that domain is displayed on the screen.

This database ensures that each domain is unique and that any online business is not compromised.
Before registering the desired domain name, you can check if it is already registered by someone.

Why Is Domain Privacy Protection Important?

To protect your enterprise information and your personal information from falling into wrong hands, most web hosts provide domain privacy protection. You should choose this addon for your domain for the following reasons:

Protecting Your Personal Information

Everyone on the web can access your personal information through the WHOIS database. Applying for domain privacy protection confirms that your personal information, like your name, registered address of your company, email address, and phone number is encrypted and inaccessible to unregistered users.

Stop Selling Your Personal Information

Without domain privacy protection, you are in great peril. Anyone can gather all your company’s personal information and sell that to any third-party organization. Many third-party organizations engage themselves to extract personal information from the WHOIS database and sell that information to other business organizations for profit. They can disturb you with unwanted emails and phone calls.

Prevention Of Spam Calls & Emails

You register your domain name with your contact number and email address in the WHOIS database, and soon after you start receiving a lot of spam emails and spam phone calls. Maybe you have become a victim of data scraping and somewhere in some spreadsheet, your details have been added. The trouble does not end here.

The scammers with your personal information can send spam emails to you or your team under the guise of safe mail with a suitable subject matter. If those fake emails are opened by you or by your team, your company data can be compromised.

Nowadays email phishing scams have become very common and they are affecting even top companies of the world. Adding domain privacy protection can keep you keep safe from those spam calls and emails.

Prevents Domain Theft

When anyone changes your domain’s registration information without your permission, it is called domain theft. This can be done by cyber attackers using your email address and domain registrar account.

After committing domain theft, the hackers can install malware software, or do phishing on your website. Eventually, you entirely lose control of your domain, and that leads to financial loss and brand value damage.

Fewer Chances Of Hacking

If your website is not completely secured, hackers can hack it during a domain transfer. In this case, the hackers can hijack the cPanel of your domain, and in extreme cases, they can transfer the domain to their name. Domain privacy protection reduces the chances of hacking to a great extent.

Stay Safe From Competitors

It is an evident fact that your competitors will try to know your personal information to find out where you are located, who you are, and how to reach you. With that information, your competitors can get an idea of your business operations, and this way your business secrets can be public.

Your competitors can make business strategies similar to yours. This is hard to accept if you are an online startup and started your journey on the web recently with some innovative offerings for the market. Investing a little in domain privacy protection can make it harder for your competitors to know your business secrets.

Stop Unwanted Traffic

Any website without domain privacy protection gives access to personal information to hackers, and competitors. They can send false, malicious, and unwanted traffic to your website. It has two unwanted consequences – Your real visitors may lose the chance to access your website, and this false traffic can crash your domain if that is hosted on a shared server.

Easy To Add

Adding domain privacy protection is not a tough task. Just reach your web hosting provider and their support team will help you to do so. Either they will add that protection on your domain on your behalf, or you can add it through cPanel. MilesWeb offers domain privacy protection that can be easily added to your domain name when required.

What Does Domain Name Privacy Look Like?

MilesWeb offers domain privacy to every customer for every eligible domain.

So what is a private registration for a domain name and how does it look online?

The example shown above depicts how your contact information is displayed when you have domain privacy protection and when you don’t. This means that people cannot easily reach you by looking you up in the WHOIS records, domain name privacy masks your identity.

Over to you

If you own one domain on any server, shared or dedicated, then you need to claim for domain privacy protection service. That will keep your data safe from spammers, hackers, competitors, and telemarketers.

Many first-time domain owners forget to choose domain privacy protection as they become busy preparing the content of that website and uploading it to the server. They have two options to add domain privacy protection to their website:

Choose domain privacy protection while registering the domain for the first time. This is a wise choice as the domain is protected from any type of damage from the very beginning.
Any web host provider gives the option to add domain privacy protection to the existing domain. If you as a domain owner find that your data is displayed in the WHOIS database, and realize that as a threat to your business and personal information, buy domain privacy protection without any delay.

Conclusion

By any chance, domain privacy protection is not mandatory for your website. However, it is always wise to keep your domain safe from any unwanted attacks from hackers, and spammers. This addon adds a noteworthy boost to your online security. For every organization, their personal information, and business secrets are priceless. So, investment in any type of protection for your domain is a complete value for money.