When you register a domain name, ICANN (the domain names governing body) requires that your name, email address, mailing address, and phone number are made publicly available. Anyone can see your personal information using a Whois lookup anywhere and anytime. Spammers and junk mailers often search through the Whois database to create mailing lists. That's right. Your personal information is exposed 24 hours a day to these people.

The easiest solution to this problem is of course to use Private Domain Names to protect your contact information.

How does Private Domain Names work?

This service will replace your contact information with the service provider's. They will forward any correspondence to you, after filtering out all the spams and junk emails. The cost for this service varies. My domain name registrar GoDaddy (World Largest Domain Registrars) charges $8.95 per year for this service. However, should you want to get some discount just like myself, you could take up their Private Domain Name service at the point of registering your domain name. If you did that, they will give you a big discount for the domain name where you only need to pay $1.99.

Domains by Proxy

GoDaddy's Private Domain Names service is provided by Domains by Proxy. The member control panel in Domains by Proxy is very simple and straight forward. Basically, it is as easy as logging in and tell the system where to forward correspondences to.

After you have your domain name protected by Domains by Proxy, all your private information will not be shown in Whois search. Your privacy is thus protected!