I had a question last week from a member about private domain registrations. People have varying ideas on whether or not to add the private registration when registering a new domain. Some people register every domain they own as private. Some never do. I’ll describe here my philosophy about private registrations.

I’ve registered many hundreds of domains in the past years. I’ve only registered a couple as private. (I’ll tell you more about those later.) Some registrars would have you believe the world will come to an end if you don’t register as private. Of course they make money from the added costs of private registrations and all the other services/products they try to up-sell. By the way, almost none of the up-sells they offer are worthwhile.

Almost all my domains are public. Yet, the world has not ended for me. In fact, I can tell you that the email account I have always used to register with gets almost no spam even after all these years. Also, I have not had many contacts or salesman call me due to having the info available in a WHOIS lookup.  I might have had some over the years and know I do get a bit of junk snail mail. But it’s not a big deal really.

Since I am very open with who I am and don’t try to hide from anyone, having my domains registered as private really wouldn’t do much for keeping me anonymous.

Actually, more than a few times I have had people contact me about buying a domain that was not for sale. But they made good offers on some which I took. It’s possible those sales would not have happened without having the registration info public. (My AdSense sites have a contact button on them, but not all the rest do.)

Basically, I’m not trying to hide online and have not had many/any negative consequences otherwise for having public registrations.

As I stated earlier, I do have a few sites registered as private. One is a site I registered for a friend with a rather risque name. Therefore, I made it private. Another site I own attracted a very, shall I say, “radical” following. There were those who hated the service/product and those who loved it. They all went at each other pretty good on the blog (as I thought they might when I registered the site). Therefore, I registered it as private.

But it’s up to you to decide. If you feel you have to keep yourself completely off the radar, then make them private. If you don’t, people can do a WHOIS search and find you as the owner. From my experience over the past years, there really are not any “dire” consequences for keeping domains public.

If you decide to purchase the privacy for a domain, the WHOIS lookup will show the info for the company who runs the privacy feature and not yours. If there are ever legal issues (like trademark infringement), your identity can still be discovered via the privacy company with a court order.