Ask HN: Best practices for whois contact info?

6 points

15 years ago

Go Daddy has changed its position on SOPA, but I've already begun the transfer of my domains to another registrar whose CEO doesn't enjoy killing elephants. This is an opportunity to do a little housecleaning with my registration contact info. Currently I have something like this:

  foo.com sowbug@qux.com
  bar.com sowbug@qux.com
  baz.com sowbug@qux.com
  qux.com sowbug@qux.com

Left column is domain, and right column is whois contact info for that domain. They're all personal (i.e., non-business) domains, though my whole digital life flows through them.

It doesn't seem smart to have me@example.com as the whois contact for example.com; if something went wrong with the domain, then I'll also likely have lost the ability to receive email there. Since all my domains are (soon to be) at the same registrar, I don't want to use another domain I own, either, because it's likely when something goes wrong with one domain, it'll happen to the others at the same registrar under the same account, too. It's tempting to use a Gmail address, but I hesitate to use a free email provider as part of my domain security policy. Finally, as a somewhat orthogonal point, privacy protectors like myprivacy.ca are nice, and they could conceivably break the cycle in the dependency graph, but again, as with Gmail, I worry it could become the weak link (e.g., myprivacy.ca still needs an email address for password recovery).

What do you do?

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