Corporate Blog

We have offered so-called private registrations (“WHOIS privacy”) to clients for years, but it’s not a service we have gone out of our way to push. This is because the public record of your domain registration is (or was) an important factor in establishing the authenticity of your business, and hiding it is (in our opinion) counterproductive for that use.

However, one of the major effects of the GDPR on the Internet industry is that, for now at least, all of your contact information for your domain registrations is no longer available to the public. This is a welcome development, as far as keeping your email address out of the hands of the spammers and fraud artists who mined the WHOIS for email addresses is concerned

We do offer WHOIS privacy, and will continue to do so with our new registrar. However, our contract with the new registrar means that we can only offer it to non-commercial registrants. The use of WHOIS privacy by individuals is entirely prudent and sometimes necessary, but should not be necessary for businesses. Therefore, for that small percentage of our commercial clients who have been using WHOIS privacy up to this point, we will no longer charge you for it and it will be removed from your domain registration once your domain is transferred to the new registrar.

Per your domain registration agreement, all domain registration data for domains registered with us are still available to us, the registrar and (if necessary and armed with the required legal documents) law enforcement, so this change changes nothing in that regard. We’re just giving our business clients notice that WHOIS privacy will no longer be available to them, but the good news is that it’s no longer really necessary with access to the WHOIS being restricted by default now.

Something you might want to consider is changing the contact email address for your domain(s) if it receives a lot of spam. The fact that spammers can no longer harvest email addresses from the WHOIS will not stop them from spamming addresses they already have. However, if you set up a brand new address for the WHOIS and delete the old one after a short overlap period, your new address should receive far less spam.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know. Thank-you.