Have you ever looked in your rearview mirror and seen an accident happen in the spot where you were a second ago?

It has happened to me while driving, and just recently I also escaped getting in an Internet accident of sorts, which hurt a lot of people.

When I started working with the Internet, I purchased my first domain name, kingdomdesign.com. Domains were quite expensive back then, and when competition opened up, I moved all my domains to a newcomer in domain registrations, called RegisterFly.

RegisterFly had cheaper prices, and I began using them for all my client domains as well. I also recommended them to friends who needed to buy domains.

A year ago, I selected a new domain registrar for my business, and finished moving all the domains I manage away from RegisterFly to the new registrar. It was a lucky break, because last year RegisterFly began having some customer service problems.

Apparently, things kept rolling for them until this year, when RegisterFly’s ownership had some disagreements. There were accusations of fraud and mismanagement of company funds.

This shenanigan went so far as to cause the breakup of the company, and the loss of their license to be a domain registrar. It is still unclear what will happen to millions of domain names that are registered with RegisterFly. They will probably be saved, but not without much stress on the domain owners.

I am exceedingly thankful that I no longer do business with RegisterFly, as their “accident” surely would have caused great pain to me and my clients.

It is now with great care that I offer domain registration and management services. My domain registrar of choice is EasyDNS, a company who has “been around the block” on the Internet (see: “are you guys going to be around in 6 months?”). EasyDNS understands, like I do, that your domain is the lifeblood of your website, and often your business (read their CEO’s comments here).

Additionally, the RegisterFly wreck caused me to rethink my use of private domain registrations. These allowed us to hide the real owner’s name from the public database of domain owners, and eliminated the junk mail problem.

However, I have seen that with private registrations, if we ever needed to transfer your domain registration to another provider, you cannot prove your ownership of the domain, since your name does not appear in the public database.

This realization has led me to abandon private registrations and register all domains as normal public domain registrations for myself and my clients. If we ever had to switch registrars in a worst-case scenario, we can now do so. The junk mail problem can be dealt with, losing a domain cannot be.

We were fortunate to avoid an accident, and I learned some painless lessons. I’ll continue to drive cautiously. Enjoy the ride.

When you purchase of a domain name, personal contact information is required. This data goes into the public WHOIS database, which lists the owners of all domain names in existence.

The information required includes your name, address, email, and telephone number.

The WHOIS information has legitimate uses for technical and legal areas, but it is misused by spammers, junk mailers, and telemarketers. A common use of the WHOIS info is for domain name scams (see our article).

In our opinion the ‘bad’ uses of WHOIS for spam and scams outweighs the ‘good’ technical and legal uses. Thus, we’ve made use of private registrations, which allow us to register domain names for our clients that safeguard their privacy.

A privately-registered domain uses a third party’s contact info, who receives all correspondence on your behalf. They throw away all the spam, and forward any legitimate mail to you. Private registrations have eliminated junk mail for owners of .COM, .NET, and .ORG domains.

Unfortunately, .US and some other domains do not allow private registrations. In that case, we will use a second address line with the words: “Dept. Junk”. This makes it easy to identify and discard mail that was addressed with your WHOIS data. Anyone who contacts you legitimately (say, to inquire about buying your domain) should be smart enough to omit the second address line.

We were recently contacted by two clients who had received notices from the “Domain Registry of America.” These letters asked our clients to renew their domain names through them, with a vague note that “this is not a bill.” We also received one here last week.

These unscrupulous companies send letters and emails that look like a bona-fide bill, but in reality, they are trying to trick us to transfer our domains to them so they can charge their domain fees.

If Kingdom Design manages your domain, you can safely throw away these letters. We automatically renew your domain each year, unless you tell us not to.

We also utilize a suite number or second address line on your registration, which says “Dept. Junk” or “Junkmail.” This is a tip-off that someone got your address by “scraping” together a list of domain owners.

We are also moving every domain we can to a “private registration,” which will hide your real address so you will not get on any junkmail lists. Unfortunately, this is not available for .US domains.