Many registrars offer various forms of private registration. This allows you to list the company’s information in the WHOIS data for your domain. Each domain is required to have current and accurate information listed in the WHOIS database. If the owner fails to do this, they risk deletion (loss) of their domain, so it’s obviously important to so.

The advantages to private registration are that you don’t have to list your home address or phone number, giving you a degree of privacy. The disadvantages are that you have to read the Terms of Service for the private registration service you wish to use, so that you can ensure that you’ll retain ownership. Furthermore, countries such as the United States make it a crime to communicate anonymously and “annoy” people. While this law is vague, and applies to criminal harassment, if your website offers material that may be controversial, or may upset people, you might wish to consider listing your domain with your data.

Your website is an investment. You invest in the cost of the domain name, and the hosting, as well as license fees for software such as vBulletin. Why not invest an extra £10.03 or so a month and get a voice mail number from services such as Evoice, and obtain a postal box for your mail? The investment is minimal, and by doing this, you don’t use private registration, and you list accurate and legitimate data for your domain. The requirement for the WHOIS database is that your phone number and mailing address accept calls and mail.

Of course, anonymous registration works fine for many webmasters as well. The choice is up to you, and the “right” choice varies, depending on the nature of your website.