As of 2021, 75% of the data breaches happen because of external hackers and website attackers. The thing that is even more astonishing is that the cost of attacking a website or doing a security breach can result in a loss of $3.62 billion. This is exactly why domain privacy is important for your platform. If you want to protect your website, you must understand the importance of domain protection.
You cannot be dependent on one particular strategy to secure your website. It is about being proactive and aware of all the mishappenings that can take place within your platform. Keeping your website secure is a formidable task. Even in a world where people consider online tasks because of the pandemic, it has been quite a challenge to secure websites.
What is Privacy of a Domain?
When you are registering a domain name, your personal data is preserved in a database called WHOIS. WHOIS is a small abbreviation of the question “Who is responsible for this domain?”. Domain privacy protection is a third-party service that teaches you to safeguard your domain name and personal information from the outside world.
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If you are not interested in purchasing domain privacy protection, you risk exposing your personal data on the WHOIS public database. Assuming that you are a domain registrant, everyone would have the privilege of looking into your personal data. The personal data includes the domain registrar’s email ID, phone details, mailing details, name, and all other credentials required to complete the registration of a domain name.
WHOIS protects the personal data of all the domain registrations online. The data includes data registrant information, approvals, domain expiry date, renewal date, etc. This database is pretty similar to how you own a particular asset under the rules and regulations of a governing authority. Start with yourself and think about the car you recently purchased. You would have completed the registration under the governing authority, which looks after the ownership, the starting date, and the finishing date.
Importance of a Privacy of a Domain
If you do not secure your personal data, there can be a whole lot of things that can cause trouble for you or your platform. Therefore, the privacy of a domain is essential and must be considered by you at all costs. Below, we have shared a few reasons you must consider masking your personal data within the WHOIS database.
1. Data can be Seen by Everybody
When you know what is domain privacy protection, it will tell you about the exposure of your personal data. If your personal data is part of the WHOIS public directory, it means that everybody can look into it. Your personal data will become exposed to the public. The people in that category include those you should never want your data to be exposed to, such as hackers, attackers, competitors, and anyone that can prove to be dangerous for your platform.
Image from WHOIS
By exposing your data, you have made it easy for your competitors to do the competitor analysis. If you have made your first website or are in the middle of making one, this can be a massive risk. By not considering privacy protection for your domain, your personal data will be at the risk of identity theft. To make it even worse, if your website gets hacked, your customer data will become exposed the same way. Such problems can destroy your small business and your reputation, which will take a long time to rebuild.
2. Risk of Getting Scammed
Now, as your personal data is exposed to the public worldwide, be ready to face the music from pushy marketers. These marketers will be out there in full force, trying to get in touch with you and getting to know your details. You may get numerous calls from a person who is willing to sell something.
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If these people get to know about your details, you are at risk of getting scammed. Therefore, you must understand how to protect your domain name. Most of these scams and controversial calls come from phishing websites. Therefore, you must identify and eradicate those phishing websites with the help of Strikingly.
Phishing websites are made to capture all the sensitive information, such as username, password, name, phone number, etc. They secure these details for malicious reasonings as a result of no domain privacy. Strikingly is a massive believer in keeping accounts secure and ensuring a safe website experience for everyone. If you identify any malicious platform, do not waste any time and fill out our malicious site report form. If your report is correct, we will take down that website within 12 hours.
3. Website Can Get Hacked
It takes time for your website to build properly. If your website does not have domain privacy protection, your domain name is at risk of fraudulent domain transfer. It means that a third party can sneak into your domain control panel without letting you know.
Domain name privacy protection ensures the masking of important confidential information. Just like you cannot allow strangers to sneak into your house, you cannot allow external people to check your domain internally.
If you can transfer domains, it will enable you to control both your website and domain via Strikingly. When you transfer your domain host to our platform, we become your domain host eventually. Therefore, you can manage your domain DNS and consider its renewal by your Strikingly account.
4. Personal Data can be Sold
You may wonder why domain privacy is important when you see dangerous companies doing ‘data scaping’ by collecting personal data from WHOIS and transfer it to third parties for selling purposes.
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Recently, there have been allegations imposed on Facebook for selling personal data to advertisers. These rumors resulted in numerous people leaving that platform and prioritizing other social media platforms, such as Twitter. Clearly, this isn’t a small issue and must be resolved quickly. To look into these cybersecurity matters, you must choose the best web hosting provider.
5. Spam Emails
Once your data gets exposed to the public, a huge chunk of calls isn’t the only thing that you have to worry about. You also have a ton of spam emails waiting for your opening because of your fragile personal data. If you want to understand what is domain privacy protection, you must be aware of how dangerous spamming can be for you and your business.
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All the spammers know that your personal data is exposed through the WHOIS database, and mail is the easiest thing to target small business owners. If you want to highlight them, you must look at their names. The spam will not come from professional email addresses. They will usually come from email IDs that are unpleasant and do not have any representation.
6. Your Competitors will be One Step Ahead
By exposing your personal data, you have just made life easy for your competitors. They will know everything about you and the way they can contact you. When you are a small business owner, you are working with very limited resources. More importantly, you are working out strategies to be one step ahead of your competitors. For example, you can promote your website content to outsmart your competitors, and you can also make your website user-friendly.
However, if you don’t know what is domain privacy protection, you are landing in hot water. If your product is unique within the market, this negligence can bring even more consequences.
7. Difficulties in Registering Domains
You may probably wonder whether there is a way in registering a domain with fake details. Why put your platform at risk by delivering the personal detail to the WHOIS database? The fact of the matter is that you can only register your domain name with authentic information.
Domain Privacy is entirely different from domain authenticity. You require authenticity to get your domain registered. However, the authenticity is completely separate from the way how to protect your domain name. Furthermore, authenticity is required to gain the trust of your audience. You can’t portray a false image in front of your public, or it will only be a matter of time before you lose your reputation.
Conclusion
Once you have understood domain name privacy, you must be aware of whether you have it already or not by checking with your domain registrar’s customer support. Many small businesses (particularly the online ones) in the world don’t even know about this term. They just get done with the domain registration and feel that they are done with the domain security.
If you want to buy or register your own custom domain, you can consider Strikingly for this matter. On our platform, the purchase of a domain is entirely separate from the website subscription package. If you are willing to connect your domain, you must upgrade to our Premium Plan.
If you are in the first year of any of our yearly plans, you can get $24.95 credit for registering a domain. If you want more than one domain, you must pay for the domains during registration which covers one full year of ownership. All of the domains purchased from Strikingly include domain privacy protection. Your personal data will be declared as the owner of the domain, but it won’t be exposed to the public. So without any further ado, head over to Strikingly and get your domain registered.
