Many of you might have heard of the WHOIS guard which prevents your contact information to be visible on the web.
If you have an established website or have just purchased a domain from a popular domain provider like GoDaddy, Namecheap, Domain, IONOS, etc., you may have encountered that you are required to provide your accurate contact information along with your company’s phone number and email address, and almost each of them are providing a WHOIS guard.
Would my contact information be publicly displayed?
Whenever, you register a new domain name from the domain providers, you are required to provide the contact information to the domain providers which is then supplied to the ICANN authority which stands for The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
This authority assigns the domain names and IP addresses to the person who want to have them according to the availability of that name or number. There are over 2000+ domain registrars such as GoDaddy, Namecheap, IONOS, etc.
ICANN needs this contact information to prevent the abuse of these names and to facilitate the registration and expiry of these domains. This information gets recorded into a public database which is called “WHOIS Database”. This database collects all such information and displays them to the person who want to access them.
You can also check the contact information entered during the registration of a domain name. Just go to this website and enter the domain for which you want to search contact information. For example, facebook.com
You might get plenty of information such as registrant contact, authority, address, etc.
What is WHOIS Guard?
WHOIS Guard is a tool to hide your contact information from displaying publicly. You might have noticed that whenever you try to search such information for some big brands like Facebook, Google, etc., their is actually the information of the registrar (such as GoDaddy) and not the registrant (Google).
This is because of the WHOIS guard which prevents this information from being displayed publicly. Try searching for techbhole.com in the WHOIS database. You would not get any information which would be worthy. But, does that mean, I didn’t enter the correct information during my domain registration. No, this is due to the WHOIS guard which is being used by my domain name.
But, why is it really important?
There are many risks associated with your contact information being displayed online. There are Hackers all around the world looking for a loop hole to hack into your account. They can use this information for spamming your mobile number, email address or can even try social engineering to Hack into your online banking or social accounts.
You might not want to take a risk by displaying such information publicly.
So, the best way out there to prevent this is to use Whois Guard which is provided by most of the domain registrars during the registration of domain. Some of them provide it for FREE and some of them provide it for a nominal charge.
If you want to register a domain name with WHOIS Guard for FREE, We would recommend Porkbun.com, because, they provide this service for FREE. Check out their restrictions and additional information here.
Note: We are not associated with Porkbun in any way, you may choose any domain registrar for registering your domain names. Their may be other registrars which provide this service for free. Our recommended registrar is also based on other security & cost factors.
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