With the times changing, technology is getting better and better. However, there are downsides to everything. These days, it’s easy to gather information regarding something or someone effortlessly. While researching something is a good thing, it is not always the same case because this includes privacy compromise. Websites are not an exception to compromised privacy; web attacks and data breaches hugely cost a company or an organization millions of dollars.
One of the simple ways for a hacker to retrieve data from your website is by accessing the information available on the domain name registration of your website. Hence, you must understand domain privacy and ensure that your information is secure and unavailable to hackers.
What Is Domain Privacy?
Domain privacy is one of the many steps you must take to ensure that your website/company is secure from hackers. When you register for a domain name, all of the personal information that you share gets stored in the Whois database. The information you share can be anything from address and phone numbers, domain name to internet protocol (IP) address.
However, this information will be publicly available, and we must protect the data from being accessed by outsiders by enabling domain privacy. A hacker can trespass the Whois database and assume your identity as the website owner and collect all the information present in the database. There is a Whois lookup feature on the internet that you can use to collect information regarding a domain you enter.
As you can see in the following pictures, when we search for the google domain, most of the data concerning google is safely hidden from public view because of domain privacy.
Why Is Domain Privacy Important?
To protect your website data from falling into the wrong hands, you must sign up for domain privacy protection. The following are the reasons why domain privacy is necessary:
To Ensure Personal Information Protection
As we have discussed already, not having domain privacy can let hackers gain access to information regarding your website. It is not only limited to hackers, but anyone with wrong intentions like your competitors, acquaintances with a grudge, and just about anyone can access data regarding your website.
Scam And Spam
You need to share your contact information like phone numbers and email addresses to register for a domain. If you do not have domain privacy, your contact information will be publicly available, and anyone can access it.
You might receive a lot of scam calls advertising something for sales and annoy the most out of you. Or you might even get spam mails of which, one might be a phishing email which can result in further loss to you.
Selling Of Personal Data
Most companies engage in data scraping, which includes gathering information from sources like the Whois databases where the data is publicly available. This data will get sold to third-party vendors and, these vendors share the data to advertisers/marketing companies who bombard you with annoying calls and emails.
Will Benefit Competitors
Knowledge is everything, even in cases where you want to gain the upper hand over a competitor. If you allow your domain information to be publicly available, your competitors will gain knowledge that helps them win against you. If you want to stay first on the track, you must enable domain privacy.
Unwanted Traffic
Sometimes, if you do not have domain privacy, it will gain the attention of a lot of hackers. While every website wants to reach everyone, reaching a hacker is not what you want. After all, one of our priorities is to protect our websites from hackers.
Domain Registration With Authentic Details
One might think, why consider domain privacy protection when you can provide fake details for registration? Well, as good as that idea sounds, it is not practically possible. Everything that you submit for the registration will be verified to ensure that the data you gave is correct.
Websites Can Get Hacked
Developing and maintaining a website is not an easy task. Each website is the physical form of someone’s hard work and dreams, and if it’s not thoroughly secure, the website can fall into a domain transfer trap. To be precise, hackers can access your domain control panel to transfer your website and make it their own.
How Do I get Domain Privacy For My Website?
If you already purchased your domain but did not get domain privacy, do not worry. You can get domain privacy while you register your domain and also as an add-on for your website. Many domain registration services like GoDaddy, Domain.com, Hostinger, Namecheap, and more, provide add-ons that users can purchase.
There are also domain registration services that will include domain privacy as a default option while registering a domain name. Domain privacy costs can range between $2 and $20 and, it is an essential investment of your money. If you do not have domain privacy yet, give it a chance, you will not regret it.
Website security is immensely crucial, and your website will take a blow if a hacker attacks it successfully. Hence, we must always protect it. While you hide your details with domain privacy, secure your website with WordPress security plugins like the Hide My WP. It will give you all-day protection from all kinds of attacks. A few of its best features are:
- It lets you hide or rename the themes and plugins folders.
- It can hide your WordPress.
- It helps you change WordPress permalinks.
- It will help you hide the login page of your website to prevent brute-force attacks. This feature will help you set up a login query and login key.
- It has a firewall that can block attacks like SQL, XSS, CSRF, read arbitrary files, and brute force attacks.
- It informs the user about:
- Value (How they hack you?)
- Page (Which plugin did they use?)
- Impact (How dangerous is that?)
- IP/ users (Where are they from?)
- It will assist in hiding or renaming WP-admins.
- It will disable direct access to PHP files and directory listing.
- It will let you minify HTML and CSS.
- It will allow you to change anything in your source code.
- It has anti-spam included.
Conclusion
We can take anything easy but not our website security and privacy. Many companies lose millions of money due to not protecting their personal information from the internet. There are many disadvantages of not having domain privacy, and it is a must to rectify that security mistake. Domain privacy is a service that hides the data that you provide for domain registration from public view. This way, your data will be secure, and you can be stress-free.
Also Read: How to Back Up Your Website, and Why It’s Important