WHOIS Privacy, Custom Domains and Email Hosting

moonpie

Hello. Jeff here.

I’m thinking of obtaining and registering a domain for my email purposes and I have some questions.
If you can answer one question or all questions then that would great and helpful. If you have been through the process of registering your own custom domain(s), will you give me some advice. I’ve been doing my homework on these subjects but I would still like to have some input from other people.

WHOIS Privacy Service: When one registers a domain and if the WHOIS privacy service is enabled will one’s personal information be guaranteed to remain private and masked?
Which domain registrar(s) would you recommend and have had good success with? ( I have seen Namecheap and Porkbun )
Email Hosting: Can you recommend a good privacy focused email hosting service based on your experience and satisfaction? ( I’m leaning Proton Mail but there could be others that I’m not aware of )

I would like to start using email aliases to increase privacy and to reduce the risk of phishing and control/reduce spam .

Any suggestions/tips would be greatly appreciated to help guide me to success.

Thanks

InternetJeff

moonpie

Thanks, InternetJeff, for the info.

Proton Mail, good I’m on the right track.

Would I get bombarded with sales calls for hosting services and website development if I register a domain at some registrar and then use a hosting service somewhere else?

ToNIX

I’ve been 100% satisfied with Porkbun. SSL certs auto renew, free email forwards, etc. They’re awesome.

david3

Generally, whois privacy should remain enabled, unless you turn it off.

I’ve used many different registrars, depending on who has the best deal. I used porkbun previously, but transferred my domains to spaceship, since they had a better deal. You can check them here:

https://www.spaceship.com/promos/

I run my own mail servers, but I do use mxroute for outgoing email for better deliverability. I think they’re worth checking out. They don’t make a big deal about privacy, but it’s a smaller outfit. They usually have good black friday deals, you can check if they have any available here:

https://accounts.mxroute.com/?cmd=cart&action=add&id=255

ryan77627

I can also vouch for Porkbun, that’s who I am migrating all my stuff to at this point. I was on Cloudflare’s free plan at one point and used them as a registrar, however I had an issue where they parked one of my domains once even though I didn’t let it expire. Getting into contact with support was more effort than it was worth, so I just moved the domain to Porkbun.

Also agree with the Proton Mail sentiment (just beware you need to use their official apps/website, if you want to use a custom email client you will need to run the Proton Bridge program they have) unless you really want to host your own, just be ready to pay for SMTP relays so you don’t need to worry about deliverability issues. (I host my own, I do not pay for an SMTP relay, and I often go into spam.)

moonpie

I have signed up with Proton and purchased the Unlimited plan. I will take advantage of the Password Manager and Proton Drive, and aliases using SimpleLogin.

I have to admit that the Proton services are a little intimidating and I will have to read up on how to use them effectively and properly, and to also watch some videos.

My next step is to select a registrar for a custom domain and I only want it for email purposes. I will check out Porkbun.