As a website owner, you probably invest a lot of time and energy into painstakingly designing each and every page of your site and also making sure that your visitors find value in the content that you publish online. One aspect of running your website, which you may not think about as often, is the security of both your site content as well as your personal information. While handling site security may sound complex and intimidating, we offer tools that are powerful, yet easy to use. In this article, we will focus on the unique capabilities and differences between two of the most fundamental security features that you have at your disposal – WHOIS privacy protection and website password protection.
What Is WHOIS Privacy Protection?
Whenever you register a domain name, you are asked to provide your personal contact information. In some cases, this data would be available to anyone out there, but thanks to WHOIS Privacy Protection, you can legally hide it without any adverse effects. For more information on how this domain privacy protection works, you can check our article on what is WHOIS privacy protection.
What Are the Unique Features of WHOIS Privacy Protection?
Purchasing domain privacy protection is the only way to ensure that your personal information stays hidden from the public, while still allowing those with legitimate reasons for contacting you to send you a message. And unlike a lot of other security features, every domain owner can protect their WHOIS data, even clients who are using our free hosting plan. Domain privacy protection can be added to a domain name you already own, or you can purchase a new domain along with the privacy add-on. To learn how to activate this feature, you can refer to our article on how to buy domain privacy protection.
What is Website Password Protection?
While WHOIS privacy protection focuses on hiding your personal data, website password protection aims to limit access to pages on your website which contain sensitive or privileged information. To achieve this, each visitor is required to enter a valid username and password. If either of those pieces of information is incorrect, the protected page is not displayed. To learn more about the intricacies of this security feature, you can refer to our article on what is website password protection.
What are the Unique Features of Website Password Protection?
When you set up password protection for your website, you can close off parts of it and make these protected sections accessible only to a small number of visitors. You can also assign unique username/password combinations to each visitor. Since this is a more advanced feature, it is only available if you are using one of our paid hosting plans. If you are already using our paid hosting platform, you can go ahead and learn how to set up website password protection.
Which Security Feature Is More Important?
Leaving your WHOIS information open to the public can have undesirable effects, such as an increase in unwanted advertisements over the phone and via email. In extreme cases, your information may also be used in identity fraud. And because of this reason, we consider WHOIS privacy protection to be more important. As such, we highly recommend limiting access to your WHOIS contact details by purchasing privacy protection for your domain name.
In case your website contains personal information not meant for public viewing, website password protection can be just as important, if not even more so. The good news is that password protection can be applied within seconds and it takes effect instantly.
Are WHOIS Privacy Protection and Website Password Protection Mutually Exclusive?
The great thing about these two security features is that they can be applied to the same website at the same time. There are no compatibility issues or conflicts when your site is both WHOIS and Password Protected. As such, you can confidently hide your contact details while also protecting website pages that contain sensitive information.
Conclusion
Maintaining your site security may not be the most exciting or rewarding part of running a website, however, it is nonetheless essential in the long term. Having your website and WHOIS data secured will bring you peace of mind and can potentially save you a lot of time and frustration as you would not need to deal with security breaches and SPAM callers. Overall, we would highly recommend implementing both security measures as early as possible, ideally while you are still building your website.
