Private registration is offered as an option during the registration process for a new domain. This also attracts a yearly cost, in addition to the cost of registering the domain itself.
Should you get private registration, and what is it exactly?
Many people don’t know how easy it is to find out the name, address and contact details for the owner of a domain name (and web site). For example, go to this site and type in the name of a web site:
At the bottom of the listing, you can see a URL (under ‘For complete domain details go to:’) which if you copy and paste it into the browser’s address bar will give you full details of the site’s owner, address, and contact email.
If the web site you are going to build for the new domain is sensitive in any way, or if you don’t want your email address to be harvested by spammers and phishers, private registration offers a way of stopping your contact details being seen.
If you have private registration, and someone tries to find out who owns your domain, they will not see your details, but instead see information like this:
In other words, someone snooping for owner details only gets to see the contact details of the private proxy service instead.
Overall, we would recommend private registration, since the annual cost is so small, and the benefits so great.