WhoIsGuard Review – Worth Having?

What Is WhoIsGuard?

How many times have you sat down to work and stopped to check your email or had to stop what you are doing to answer a sales call?  The answer might be WhoIsGuard if you have dealt with this common problem. NameCheap is one popular registrar that is partnered with them. WhoIsGuard is a premium service that will help you protect all your personal information when you register a domain name, and you will not be seen on any of the WhoIs websites.

People try to figure out your contact information.  A lot of unethical marketing companies troll their databases to reach out to you for promotional offers. It is very important to have a privacy service if you are trying to be private on the internet and don’t want to be bombarded with emails or sales calls throughout the day.  In this WhoIsGuard review, I will state the pros and cons of using this service, so that you can decide if it’s something you need.

The Pros

• The pros of this are fairly obvious You get real security for your private information the moment you sign up for a website, and you will be able to protect that information.  Meaning when people look through WhoIs you will be protected behind a proxy server.  There will be no email, phone number, or email address displayed to the public.  For more information on how private domains work, please check out this article.
• You can set up the WhoIsGuard software to work within 1 or 2 days of purchasing the service. That means that it will go to work as soon as you sign up for a new domain, and there will be no lapses in your coverage.

The Cons

• The biggest con is it’s going to cost you an extra monthly or yearly expense.  This service is not free. (UPDATE: NameCheap now provides WhoIsGuard for free with every domain registration and renewal.)
• A lot of the times when you purchase your domain name it’s free for the first year.  The next year when your domain is renewed you will be billed extra for it if you don’t disable the service.
• The problem with hiding your information is that people cannot figure out who you are. That is a problem if someone wants to make an offer on your domain or get in touch with you personally.  For instance, let’s say someone tries to contact you through your “contact us” page and it doesn’t send you an email.  They can’t go to who.is and look up your information.

How To Enable WhoIsGuard?

First login to your NameCheap dashboard.  Then click on “domain list”.  This will show you all the domains that you have registered with NameCheap.  Next, your going to want to click on “manage”.  There is a little checker next to that you can either enable or disable it.  (green means it on, and gray means it’s disabled)

What Is Displayed At Who.is Sites:

This is what your contact information will look like when you use WhoIsGuard:

As you can see, it’s behind a proxy and doesn’t show any of your personal information.

The Verdict?

This WhoIsGuard review shows that it’s a great way to protect your private information and stop spam. You may not need to be protected when you first start a new domain, but you can sign up for the service at any time you wish to. The WhoIs sites are not going to be of any help to someone who tries to research you.

Me personally, I think it’s worth it to have WhoIsGuard once you have over 100 unique visitors per day.  If your site is under development or your building on getting traffic to your site, I wouldn’t advise in purchasing it.

UPDATE: NameCheap now provides WhoIsGuard for free with every domain registration and renewal 🙂