Private domain name registration

I bought a domain name from Yahoo domains recently. It was for a site I was helping my son set up. It's a basic setup. It just uses Blogger to post content. It's working out OK so far.

I didn't realize that you can just buy a domain name from within Blogger now so knowing that I might have done things differently. Still Yahoo domains has a good user interface and it was interesting and not difficult to get it all set up.

One thing that was interesting about domains that I noticed from Yahoo and other providers I checked out like GoDaddy is this private registration option. When you register a domain you have to provide whois information about the domain owner. The whois information includes address, phone number, and e-mail. Registrars like Yahoo warn you that this is public information and spammers and other undesirables will be able to find you when it is posted.

The registrars have a service called private domain information. In this case they offer to substitute their own information in the whois so that you do not have to provide your own personal data. This is an extra cost service. For Yahoo private registration costs almost as much as the domain name itself so it's not really cheap.

I decided not to purchase private registration. First of all I realized that my personal information is public anyway. My phone number is listed and I can be looked up in canada411.ca and elsewhere easily enough. So there's nothing in the whois which isn't already knowable.

The other reason I didn't purchase it is because it is unnecessary. With Yahoo the whois stuff is just a form you fill in. It seems you can enter whatever you want into this form and just manually obscure your identity that way. There doesn't seem to be anything preventing this.

So my tip is to save your money on domain registration and pass on the private registration option since you can just directly type in whatever you want anyway for the whois so you don't need to purchase separate private registration.