One of the most important factors when browsing the web is privacy. Our data can be exposed in different ways and represent a problem. This must also be applied when owning a website, since our data could be visible to anyone and obtain information about where we live, our name, address … Now, there is what is known as private Whois . We will explain what it consists of.
What is private Whois
First you have to know exactly what Whois is. It is a database on the Internet where any user could find out who is the owner of a generic web domain (.com, .net, etc). You can have not only the personal data of that person, but also know information about when a domain expires.
This may seem useful since at all times we know if a site is legitimate and have knowledge about the responsibility of the same. It can also be useful for someone who is interested in a specific domain to be able to make an offer to buy it or even wait for it to expire, in case it is not renewed, knowing when this would happen.
But this logically represents a privacy problem. It is possible that the owner of a website does not want their data to be there public. They do not want anyone to have knowledge about their personal data or email address, for example.
This could also lead to being part of Spam lists, being the victim of Phishing attacks and other cyber threats. Someone could use that data against us if they find any use.
That is why many website managers choose to hide this information . It is something that is possible to carry out in a simple way, although it is not always available. That’s where Private Whois comes in.
Private Whois, the option to hide the data of a domain
Private Whois is nothing more than the solution for everything we mentioned earlier. If a user wants to hide their data, prevent the information from being available to anyone on the Internet, they can do it.
Normally the domain registrars where we have our site offer this service. It is paid. It is usually around € 5 per year. Sometimes more, since it depends on the company where we have the contracted service.
What does the company that offers us private Whois do? It is obliged to give data of that domain, but instead of giving ours, where our full name and other information such as e-mail would appear, which could be used to send Spam. What that company does in that case is put its own data . It’s like answering to us.
Thanks to the private Whois we can hide our personal email address, telephone number, name and physical address. All this data could be openly available to anyone who is interested.
Limitations for using private Whois
Keep in mind that there are limitations to be able to use private Whois. It is not something that can be used by anyone and in all circumstances, since it will depend on several factors that we are going to explain.
One of them is the type of extension we are using. As we know there are different. There are the generic ones, which could be .com, .org, .net … But there are also the country code ones, such as .es, .pt, .fr …
We can only use private Whois in the case of generic extensions. For example, if our website is .com, we could contract it.
We must also take into account, and this is important, that we can only use it if we are natural persons and not legal entities . That is, we could hide it if it is a personal website and it is not a company site. In the latter case we could not use it.
In short, the use of private Whois is something that is very present in the network. It is an option that many webmasters take into account to always maintain privacy and avoid possible problems such as spamming, for example.