Recently GoDaddy announced that it will be removing most personal information from Whois records. People who have paid for full Whois Privacy in the past are now getting a new and improved “Full Domain Privacy” product or a partial prorated refund.
But what’s the value of this new service?
The “Full Domain Privacy” is one of three new privacy tiers that GoDaddy is offering users.
Each GoDaddy customer now receives Basic Privacy Protection as a standard. With this tier, your name, number, and email are redacted from the Whois records.
“Full Domain Privacy” is a tier of protection that redacts your organization name, the country, and the state from your Whois records, effectively removing all remaining public information from the Whois record. It also protects customers from domain hijacking and accidental domain expiration and adds a forwarding email address.
The third tier of protection is called “Ultimate Doman Privacy” and adds blacklist checks and malware scans to the “Full Domain Privacy”.
GoDaddy is framing this tiered approach as a potential upgrade for customers. However, just a few weeks ago malware scans were included in the Full Service. And GoDaddy customers are now warned about over 170,000 attempts to steal domains per year, exaggerating the appearance of the problem to scare new customers into more purchases.
The Ultimate service is $15 per year, Full is $10 per year, and Basic is free.
One potential outcome of this new service is that when GoDaddy customers use the Full service or higher they will no longer have expiring domains. It’s unclear how this will affect the expired domain market.
