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Comment by nabc45 | Hacker News Reader

>Most of the whois hiding services cost money

Where? I never paid a dime

It's probably a question of whether the privacy features are separately charged or are bundled in a standard plan that's a bit higher priced than "bare" registration.

Since control panels, reputation, policies and other services like DNS are also things that can be bundled together, it's going to be difficult to say whether or how much you're paying for just the privacy component.

123reg charge for whois privacy too, as do a bunch of other registrars.

Always felt like mild extortion.

Please do share the registrar that blocks all whois data for free!

google domains

namesilo [1] provides free whois privacy on domain name purchases. Classic interface, but very cheap. :)

[1] https://www.namesilo.com

I love namesilo, and I find the interface refreshing/charming. The price is right, too!

As an aside, .us addresses cannot be registered anywhere with privacy controls enabled.

It doesn't seem that .us addresses would be subject to GDPR? One could see .com as an edge case, even though really Europeans should just appreciate the fact we let them on our internet b^), but .us is not in doubt.

True for .us. however: There is currently (as far as I understand) no way to hide whois data for .de (German) domains. So that might get interesting.

Namesilo?

https://www.pairdomains.com/

Free protection, no upsells, $19/yr for 1 yr of .com $13/yr for 5 years. TOTP 2FA as well. Never had a problem for the 15 years I've been with them.

I've used Hover.com (owned by Tucows) for several years. In my opinion they are the anti-Godaddy. The things that should be free are and the extras are presented as just that. No trickery or beating you over the head with up-sales.

Are they really free though if the price is higher than alternatives? Also the renewal costs look like they're mostly regcost + $2 for some reason

Whois privacy included in the price is still much better than having to remember to buy and renew the service per domain.

Any registrar making money on whois privacy has an option and motive to autorenew the privacy with the domain. If anything Namecheap bugs me with it because I don't want whois privacy on my domains!

If you don't want it, then you can use pretty much every other registrar that doesn't build it in.

But an issue with whois privacy is that if you ever don't have it for a period (like you forget to renew/autorenew), then it's now saved in a number of DNS/whois history services.

Those services are probably also in breach of GDPR. :-)

The higher renewal charge is odd, I hadn't noticed that before. It's nothing like most of the TLDs, but it is nearly half of what they list [1] as trending.

That aside, I'm still glad to pay a little more for the overall better service. If they were charging anything like the old Network Solutions prices, that'd be a different matter.

[1] https://www.hover.com/domain-pricing

Yeah in all honestly a couple extra $ wouldn't put me off using them, I was more wondering if there was a decent reason behind it. Having said that I'm paying almost $20/year less for my io domains at Namecheap, that one's a bit of a steep difference

Once a domain is registered all they need to do really is process auto-renew payments, notify me if my card was declined for any reason, and make sure it's kept registered at the registry.

Unfortunately in any case though I've stopped at the gate, they don't appear to have an API

gandi.net

Doesn't hide your name.

https://wiki.gandi.net/en/contacts/privatewhois#this_service...

Other services do.

njal.la (and they host DNS as well!) - operated by ex-piratebay dudes

There’s an UDRP precedent saying that using njal.la as your registrar constitutes bad faith.

http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/text/2017/d2017...

Given that precedent matters a lot in UDRP cases, I’m not sure that njal.la is a realistic option.

Glorious porkbun.com

Seconded.

They run their own TLD's .design, .ink and .wiki [1] so these guys really know their stuff. Support is not 24/7, but usual office hours, but those who pick up your phone/email REALLY know what they are talking. Plus really cheap domains, they mentioned somewhere that they are aiming for $1 mark-up for all TLD's.

[1]: http://toplevel.design/

Me three. I own a few .ninja domains there. I didn't even notice they gave you free privacy until after having bought there. Every question I had was promptly answered in a few hours as well.

I think it depends on TLD. My country TLD whois just lists registrant info as 'data restricted' unless it is explicitly requested to be public.

I registered my domain on Namecheap and I got WhoisGuard at no additional cost, maybe it's only for the first year though? I made sure it was actually no additional cost by removing it to see the total and it was still the same price, $11/year. I say "no additional cost" but it might actually be more like "bundled cost."

Namecheap is free for first year but you have to pay for any additional years.

Thanks for the info.

Ah, yes, its documented:

https://www.namecheap.com/security/whoisguard.aspx

>When you register an eligible new domain name or transfer an existing eligible domain into Namecheap, you'll receive the first year of WhoisGuard privacy protection absolutely FREE.

OVH but they do not hide the name, just all other data

Gandi

Gandi user here. After I read your comment I tried to enable this but it doesn't work.

When I change whois privacy to enabled and press save it just says "Unable to update the contact."

This happens both with my .com and my .net domain.

Weird; I have active domains where it's working. Given it requires a contact info update, could be an unrelated bug. I'd definitely file a ticket.

Dreamhost

https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/216458407-Enabl...

http://gandi.net

.ca domains don't need to be protected - they get it for free. I only need to sign up for the extra protection when I register domains on other TLDs.

Where are the free services? And are they really free, or are they silently included in the domain cost? I’ve yet to see anyone beat Namecheap’s $13.75 for .com (2nd year onwards, with protection).

name.com charges extra for "whois protection." The e-mails I have registered for various contacts are pretty much spam buckets. You pretty much need a separate VoIP account to handle all the scam calls/voicemail too.

I get some calls/e-mails so quickly I wonder if they have some kind of live stream setup for registrations on some TLDs.

Godaddy

At least in Canada, this is absolutely not true. https://ca.godaddy.com/domainaddon/private-registration.aspx

Sorry, I thought you were replying to the, where it's free parent, not the where it's not free parent. Please ignore what I wrote earlier.

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