3 simple but effective protection techniques for everyone

Introduction

This guide covers simple techniques which you can easily implement by yourself to protect your properties.

Here are the three techniques:

1. Domain privacy
2. Transfer lock
3. Defensive registration

1. Domain privacy

It consists of masking - partially or entirely - the contact details, including the owner details, available from Whois lookups.

It is a good practice to mask - at a minimum - the email addresses attached to a domain.

This helps protect against spam and scams, especially those that ask you to pay immediately to avoid cancelling your domains.

Domain Privacy is described in more detail in this guide. 

2. Transfer lock

Aliases: Domain Lock, Registrar Lock, Locking or simply Lock

This feature is available for domains ending in many extensions. But not all, as some registries do not offer such feature.

A domain is either locked or unlocked. 

When a domain is locked, any transfer requests (i.e. to initiate a change of the registrar managing a domain) are automatically rejected by the registry.

Best to lock all your domains equipped with this feature to prevent any unauthorized transfers.

3. Defensive registration

Registering alternative domains to a primary domain name is a very efficient protection strategy. Once you own a domain, it is no longer available to others for registration as long as you keep renewing it.

Here are some types of alternatives:

• Legacy extension

• Country-code extension

• New generic extension

• Domain hack

• Singular version

• Plural version

• Typo in the name

• Shorter form

• Longer form

• Hyphenated form

• Name in an other language

• Synonym

• With a suffix

• With a prefix

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