this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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38
Buying a domain - WHOIS/PTR privacy? (programming.dev)
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by anything_but_windows@programming.dev to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hi!

I have noticed that on my domain when i run whois <domain> it returns a lot of information such as registrar name, abuse contact, creation date... even though i paid extra for "whois privacy." Then i found that for other domains whois returns a paltry amount of information such as "Malformed request." or just repeats the domain name and has "status: UNASSIGNABLE". specifically, one .fail domain and one .it domain. HOWEVER, those minimal whois records for the .it and .fail domains still have valid PTR entries that i can lookup publicly online.

HERE IS THE QUESTION: i want to buy a domain for the sole purpose of having a single A record that points to a corresponding PTR record on the VPS provider. however, i prefer to have the whois record be as minimal as the 2 examples i gave above. how are those whois entries so sparse?

I am doing all this with the goal of hosting a tor exit node. any help is greatly appreciated! have a lovely day!

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[–] mschae@discuss.mschae23.de 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The information returned by whois depends on the registry. For example, most registries for European TLDs basically just show whether the domain is registered (I say “most” because I'm not sure whether it's actually all or if there are exceptions, but I know .de is like this). In that case, there aren't even “whois privacy” services available from registrars. For TLDs from other countries or gTLDs, this might vary.

In either case, do note what the other comment says. Whois is not the only way to identify who runs a service.

it returns a lot of information such as registrar name, abuse contact, creation date... even though i paid extra for "whois privacy."

If you didn't pay for whois privacy, it would most likely return your actual name, email address, phone number, and home address instead. “Whois privacy” just means your registrar inserts their information into these fields instead, and forwards any mail they might get to you.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 points 4 days ago

Latest changes in the EU are part of the NIS-2 directive. My private German domains don't show a lot of detail and it's been like that for many years.