Daily Poll: Do You Use Your Name on Whois Records?

With GDPR in force, “Data Protected” or similar Whois records are becoming common. Some registrars still show Whois information for non-European registrants.

Many domain name portfolio owners, businesses, and others use a generic registrant contact name on Whois records. I have seen “Domain Administrator,” “Domain Admin,” “Hostmaster,” and a number of other terms used as the registrant. I suppose this is done because there are either multiple people managing a portfolio, the registrant wants to keep the person’s name private, or the domain name manager changes more regularly than the Whois record should change. Some companies put the domain manager’s name in the registrant contact field.

I am curious if readers use their own name on Whois records. I would also be curious if people are willing to share their rationale for why they may use a generic term if that is what they do instead.

Do you use your real name on Whois records?


Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

2 COMMENTS

  1. We use an LLC to hold and manage our portfolio. We put that name in the Organization field and Domain Administrator in the Registrant field to indicated that a company owns the domain name, not any human person.

  2. Elliot…

    A third option “Depends” may also add a clearer picture. I allow my name and contact information for all names that are available for procurement. For my company portfolio, we privatize the names as they are NOT for sale regardless of the price. We use Domain Administrator with our corporate contact information for names that we manage for our clients.

    Thanks

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