Product Announcement

December 2008

Domain Name Private Registration

Many of you may feel vulnerable to deceptive practices with your personal information publicly available on the Internet. When your domain name, your website address, is registered on the Internet your name, company name and contact details are published and are now available to all. Further, depending on which registrar you are using, your data could be subject to automated “mining” of the information by high-speed computer queries.

A concept called Private Registration attempts to address this issue by displaying alternate contact information in the public WHOIS database listing. WHOIS is a protocol that allows persons to search the global domain name registration database.

We are able to provide this for you through the registrar that we have chosen to work with for domain name registration.

Benefits of Private Registration:

• Privacy – Alternate contact information will be displayed to keep personal information private.
• Protection – Reduces e-mail from spammers, guards against identity theft and deters unsolicited telemarketing calls and direct mail.
• Value – For a low incremental cost, you will have the peace of mind that your e-mail address, home address, or phone number information will not be mined from WHOIS and misused.

Key features of Private Registration:

• E-mail Masking – Your private registration e-mail address changes every 14 days. E-mail received at this address will be filtered for spam and important messages forwarded to the designated e-mail account.
• Full Control – Unlike other proxy services, the customer remains the registrant and holds all the rights on the domain name
  

How does a Private Registration work?

This information is taken in part from the SRSplus website who is the registrar that DGT Internet Marketing uses.

The SRSplus® Private Registration service masks the information that appears in WHOIS so that the registrant’s personal data isn’t available to the public. With the private registration the following items are masked:

Email: A dynamic, randomly-created alpha-numeric email is listed. The alias filters spam and forwards other messages to the email account on record with SRSplus.
Postal Address: The registrant name appears with a SRSplus P.O. Box address. Mail received at this address is processed as follows:

• First class mail is returned to the sender
• Third class mail is shredded
• USPS Express Mail is forwarded via fax for free. SRSplus will forward hard copies via Fed Ex if a customer makes the request and pays the delivery charges.

Telephone Number: The domain name is listed with a SRSplus Private Registration toll telephone number, which screens calls on your behalf. If called, a recording will state that this is a private registration and will refer callers to contact your postal address.

What information is made public in the WHOIS database?

When a customer registers a domain name, the registrant’s address, e-mail and phone number are published in a public WHOIS database, as required by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The public WHOIS database is accessible by anyone, 24 hours a day, and includes the following additional information:

• Address, phone number, and e-mail address of other domain name contacts
• Date of the domain name registration
• Date of the most recent update to the domain name record
• Date that the domain name registration will expire
• Host name and IP addresses for the domain name servers
  

How is the SRSplus Private Registration service different from the “proxy” services?

Those who offer Private Registration by “proxy” become the domain name holder or registrant themselves. The SRSplus Private Registration, the customer maintains full control as the registrant over the domain name registration.

How Private Registration Works