Is privacy registration good or not?

(Should be under the hosting category?)

I'm reading the GWW tutorials and anything I can find anywhere to learn more about...everything. I'm also reading the Crazy Frog tutorials. One of the CF tutorials said to be very careful who you deal with in the adult industry (really, what industry does this not apply to...). They said a way to check if a place is more likely to be honest and legit is to go to WHO IS for the site URL, and see if their name, address, and info are there or hidden/anonymous. They added to stay away from companies where the info is not available.

When I register my domains, I always pay extra for privacy registration to have to do just that - keep my name, address, etc. off WHO IS. I guess what's there instead is the name of my hosting company, which isn't going to give out my info. I live with my mother, and even if I didn't, I don't know about my name, number and address being available to anyone.

Is it true that I should distrust companies who keep their info off of WHO IS when they register their domains? Also, do you think I should change things so my info is available on WHO IS, for anyone looking up my sites? Actually, it does cost a lot more for the privacy registration itself compared to just registering a domain. However, it seemed like a good idea, and my hosting company said people usually want this on their adult sites.

Thanks.

Forgot to say that my idea in using private registration was to keep nutty or potentially dangerous people from finding out where I live, my phone number, etc. On all my websites, I have "contact" for anyone who wants to contact me directly. That way, I am available to everyone without my personal info being released. But this is not enough to be trustworthy according to the Cozy Frog tutorial.

Here's some suggestions.

1- Visa doesn't allow private registration. If you have a membership site or a retail outlet which uses Visa for processing, they CAN give you 24 hours to correct it and then drop you.

2- We have 500+ domains without private registration. Go to either a mailboxes etc. or a PO Box just for this reason. Then use your cell as your phone number.

I know it may sound freaky. The worst that I have ever heard of someone finding out your address is that once a consumer clicked on a "2257" link on a site, and a customer of theirs showed up at the address expecting to meet the model he liked. The producer told the consumer that this was only a office address and he couldn't give out the models location. The consumer said, "Okay, thank you" and left.

Good ideas, Derek, thanks. (and funny story)

As an affiliate, the sites are free, no retail store. But I'll definitely remember that if someday if my sites change.

You'll see just how green I am at this now, lol. I'm curious how this works out when I get to the step of registering my company as an LLC. (For example, my town needs a blueprint of my home and where I do my business in it. I'm not saying the Sec. of the State needs that to grant my LLC, but not sure if they would also want my home address as the place of business, too.) So what you are saying is that despite any of the above technicalities, my company can still have a mailbox etc, or PO Box for my business to use just for domain registration or anything? (....except 2557, where as a secondary producer, I don't don't need to do the record keeping anyway, at least not at the moment.) If so, that'd be great.

Years ago in those days where people actually answered personal ads with letters to a place like Mailboxes, etc. (now UPS store, I think)...need a blush smiley here b:uhoh: ... I heard not to use a PO Box because the gov. doesn't allow something ???? like no adult videos or pics or something sent to PO Boxes. Not sure what that's about, but are PO Boxes safe to use for adult businesses?

Thanks for your time, Derek, I really appreciate it.

We used to add privacy to all of our domain registrations but once the new 2257 regs came out, it wasnt really worth doing as our address needed to be public anyway.

Thankfully because of how Florida law works we have a PO box as our official business address so its not to much concern to us.

Of course the other way of looking at it is....

Every time you make a domain private, that is money you could have used to purchase another domain name.

Regards,

Lee

We also use Private Registration on most of our domain names, I never had a problem with it until recently with the EU Debit system. They wanted us to prove that we own our domain names and not leasing them from a 3rd party. But other than that when we went with private registration our spam and US Junk Mail (scam offers, etc) all stopped.

good info... cheers!

i think it can be good to keep you info safe but also bad because some other people might think you are trying to hide somethiing else like some of those russian twink sites