The Danger of Innacurate Whois Info

Recently I was looking for the site of someone I met at Elite Retreat last year and ended up typing www.cpaaffiliates.com to get to his site, CPA Affiliates, instead of the correct address, www.cpa-affiliates.com. What I got was the old Server Not Found error. I realized that I had forgotten the dash in the domain name, but it got me wondering who owned the better, non-dash name.

I knew a quick whois would give me the answer, but I definitely wasn’t expecting what I found. Apparently the owner of cpaaffiliates.com had used invalid information on their record and had their domain name suspended because of it. That’s the first time I had ever seen that.

That was quite a wake-up call for me because I traditionally have had less than accurate information on my records. The info was always very close, but because I knew it was public information (and I didn’t want to pay $9.99/yr to make it private), I never disclosed information like my phone number, and when we moved I left the old address info on there for years. I recently fixed that, but uncovering this record convinced me that I better keep my information up-to-date an accurate.

How much of a problem would it be for you if your domain was suspended temporarily like this? If you’re wary of publishing your home address on your domains, get a post office box or UPS Store box instead. A UPS Store address, in particular, will give you an address that looks like a physical location.

As for a phone number, I think I’m going to be a big fan of Grand Central, which Google just bought recently. I can send unknown numbers straight to voicemail and check them from wherever I am. Quite a nice setup.