WHOIS is a commonly used Internet service that provides information about the domains registered. It contains domain availability status, information about the domain owner (their contact information), and the information about the company the domain is registered with (the Registrar). It also contains domain’s registration and expiration dates, and the name servers the domain is using.
ICANN requires domain registrants to keep their contact details valid and up-to-date.To prevent any possible issues with the domain registration, this rule must be followed. Domain registrars give their customers the possibility to change the domain contact information directly from their domain accounts (rarely by contacting support staff). The updates to WHOIS information changes may take up to 24 hours to reach out to all WHOIS lookup websites around the world.
Despite the fact that WHOIS information must be valid, some domain Registries allow to hide domain owner’s details in public WHOIS. This feature is called Whois privacy protection, or domain privacy. Domain registrar replaces the registrant contact information with the info of their privacy protection service.
Did you know?
We also offer a privacy protection service called WhoisGuard. It puts our address information to the public WHOIS instead of yours to protect you from potential spam or identity theft, since your personal information is not available on the Internet. In public Whois, your email address is substituted with our WhoisGuard string that looks like a7b594eb9f5d43c123123c82484363f81.protect@whoisguard.com. Every person who wishes to contact you will need to send email to this address (and it will be redirected to your real one), while spammers will have a hard time bombarding you with unsolicited messages.
We offer WhoisGuard for free for the first year of registration or transfer only for those domain names that support it. Please visit our WhoisGuard product page for more details.
