Weddingbee boards

I'm getting ready to put together our wedding website, and I ran across a privacy issue that might be of interest to other couples.

I had bought a domain name (myfirstnameandhisfirstname.com) at godaddy.com and am planning to redirect it toward one of those free wedding websites. If you register your own domain name, your information is stored and made public on the WHOIS database. I hadn't realized this until I was doing some unrelated research at work and looked up someone's contact information via the WHOIS database. I then wondered "What comes up for my wedding website?" and when I entered the domain into the database, up popped my full name, current address, personal cell phone number and e-mail address. Egads.

GoDaddy partners with a company called Domains By Proxy that provides "private" registration; that is, by signing up, your website will be listed under Domains By Proxy's contact information rather than your own. It cost me around $9 to upgrade to this service on GoDaddy, and the change was instantaneous. I checked the WHOIS database immediately and my personal contact information was already replaced.

Domains By Proxy isn't totally foolproof, but I feel much better having that added layer of protection. I hope this is helpful to other brides out there who are trying to protect their privacy and have a website at the same time.