Domain names are cheap assets we can purchase now and develop later. Webmasters tend to keep quite a few of them in their portfolio. Along with the domain registration comes a public whois that displays our personal information. Most of us work from home and that information leads to our home address and phone numbers.
Over the last few years domain registers developed a service called whois privacy, but this could cost $4 or more, extra a year per domain name. The biggest problem with whois privacy is that it is harder to prove you own the domain name if you are trying to sell it. Also if you are running a business, sometimes customers may think you are trying to hide something by not presenting your own address and phone numbers. The solution I came up with, was surprisingly much cheaper and I could still receive all my mail regularly.
Address Privacy
The cheapest route is to go to your local Postal Service and open up a P.O. Box. Usually it cost less than $30/year. Some countries don’t have this option, but most have mailing centers that might offer a P.O. Box type service where you can rent a mail box to retrieve mail. The cost of these are usually between $40-60/year.
Example: United States Postal Service (USPS)
Another option that is still affordable is a mail forwarding service, which I currently use for my Whois Privacy. Basically you can get an address at a mail forwarding facility that you can send all your mail to and than they can forward it to you. The average cost of this service is about $100/year.
Example: Earth Class Mail
With both of these options you will be able to put your new address on all of your domain names, at any domain registration company. It can save you a lot of money depending on how many domains you currently have registered. Plus any new domains you register, you can add your new address to also.
Phone Number Privacy
It is not very cost effective to have a second line installed in your house. That can actually cost you a lot of money. But what is easy to get installed in your house is a VoIP line. With the popularity that this service is gaining, you can get a VoIP phone number for about $10/month ($120/year).
Example: BroadVoice
I personally don’t use VoIP option as that is still a bit expensive over time. The solution I use is a phone number forwarding service. Basically they will give you your own phone number and they will forward all your calls to any phone number you choose. The cheapest I have found is for $2/month ($24/year).
Example: Kall8
The best feature with both of these options is that you can set what time of day to receive phone calls. If you only want to get calls during the day, setup this option with your phone number provider. Most VoIP providers have this option, but some of the smaller companies I’ve noticed do not. Make sure to verify that they offer the feature.
By using some of these ideas, you can keep your whois information truly private but still be able to be in contact with your customers and visitors to your website. We all have a different number of domains, so do a calculation of your domains and how much you are paying for whois privacy service to see if any of these solutions would be cost effective for your domain portfolio.
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Please note that Earth Class Mail’s main website will soon switch to http://www.EarthClassMail.com. It is worth noting that the service puts images of sealed postal mail online, thus often negating the need for forwarding. If you see what it is and know you don’t want it — which is how you go through your paper mail over a waste basket — you can simply have it recycled. No forwarding charges necessary.
Thanks Cameron. I wasn’t sure which URL to post because it kept forwarding me to remotecontrol one. I have updated the link for the future change. Thanks for commenting!
My host is 1&1, and they offer the privacy service for free when you purchase a domain through them. Also, the domains are only $5.99! Check it out and I hope that helps someone save some money. Post office is still an excellent idea, a small one for me is about $72/year though.
Thanks for the tip! Do we have to use their hosting service to register domains though?
No you don’t have to use their hosting, I host my own. They have URL forwarding so if you have a great provider, simply forward your domain to it and voila!
Thanks for making the change, Sarah. Upon another reading of your post, I realize it’s worth pointing out that our service differs from the whois privacy offerings of registrars in a few key ways:
1. Our service may be used with all mail, and if one’s goal is anonymity, it can anonymize your address with respect to all mailers. The environmental implications of preventing so much fuel and carbon emissions in delivery of all mail, and increasing recycling 900% over average mail recycling rates, are enormous, and will only improve when we offer the one-click, unsubscribe-me-from-this-mailing-list hard-spam filter that we call UnMailMe.
2. The same fee would give privacy to ALL your domain names, across all registrars.
3. Our service enables you to see and fully manage (shred, recycle, scan, ship, transfer to another user) your postal mail instantly on any connected laptop or cell phone. Scanning in our top-security facilities is cheaper than forwarding, so you not only get critical items faster, you pay less.
4. Our service allows SOHO or small businesses to establish a business presence in any of 18 American cities of their choice. So whether you’re in Belgium or Oklahoma, you can look like a company based in New York, Miami, or Los Angeles, to name a few.
5. Our service will soon scan and deposit checks received, and far faster than humans can endorse and mail or take them to a bank.
We have been speaking to registrars about allowing them to offer our service to their customers directly — something we’d love for them to be able to do.
Cheers!
Lovely article Sarah,
However, what it does not cover, is the name protection. EarthClassMail.com is great, but one still has to use the real name there. When real name is available, getting the actual address would be a matter of few google clicks.
What I found as possible solution is privacyprotect.org and this is free. The only problem is, I’ve read entire site back and forth and could not find, how to input my domains into that system. It says, privacy done through partners, yet there is no info on who those partners are, or how to become one.
Cameron, if you stop by this blog again, a suggestion to you would be add some solution for name protection as well.