WHOIS & Domain Privacy

WHOIS is the standard lookup system that shows a domain's registration details: who registered it, which registrar it's with, and when it was registered and is set to expire. Without privacy protection turned on, some of that registrant information is publicly visible to anyone who looks it up.

Yes, and it's free, indefinitely, not just for an introductory period. Turn it on from your domain's Privacy Protection settings.

They serve the same basic purpose, but RDAP is the newer, ICANN-mandated standard gradually replacing WHOIS's older query format with a more structured, secure one. As an ICANN-accredited registrar, NameBright supports RDAP as required.

Some country-code TLD registries set their own policy requiring certain registrant information to stay public, regardless of what your registrar offers. This is a registry-level restriction, not a NameBright limitation.

Use NameBright's WHOIS lookup tool. Enter the domain name and it returns the publicly available registration details. If the domain has privacy protection enabled, you'll see the privacy service's information instead of the actual registrant's.

GDPR Privacy is a separate, account-wide setting for EU residents that hides your personal information from WHOIS output, on top of or instead of standard per-domain privacy protection. Turn it on under My Account > Advanced Settings > GDPR Privacy. NameBright decides eligibility, and if your account doesn't qualify, the page tells you and links you to support.

NameBright occasionally needs to confirm an email address or phone number tied to your domains' WHOIS contacts. Check My Account > Verification for the full list of unverified contacts and fix or confirm each one from there. Verification is tracked per email address or phone number, so fixing one that's shared across many domains clears it everywhere at once.

Your account-level contact information, under My Account > Contacts, is your own contact info as the account holder. Each domain also has its own Registrant, Technical, and Administrative WHOIS contacts, which can be set individually, per category, or in bulk. Editing your account-level contact info gives you the option to apply the same change to a domain's WHOIS contacts, but the two are otherwise separate.