I’ve purchased a few domains in my life, but it was always through Google Domains in the past. This weekend I bought a new one through Cloudflare so that I could make a nice subdomain structure for all of my self-hosted apps. That went great - I’m using Traefik and Pihole for the local DNS.

But in the past two days, I’ve gotten 28 spam calls and a handful of text messages from companies who want to design my website, or logo, or something else. I only listened to the first few voicemails but they did mention the name of the domain I purchased.

This didn’t happen when I used Google Domains. Is there something I missed? I knew this information was public, but I feel like I must have screwed up somehow and it put me on a lot of spam lists.

  • pivotpixels@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Idk if cloudflare provided you with an option for privacy protection on your domain but looks like you didn’t get that. Most good domain registrar provides that option for free. At this point you can’t do much about it since your phone number is already out. But you can ask cloudflare support if it’s possible to add it now, so that people in the future can’t get your personal information from whois.

    Also, next time look into porkbun or namecheap. They are pretty good, cheap and provides whois protection for free.

      • mjh2901@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        By domain its actually the people who control the domain .us domain information not cloudflare. Cloudflare has been my goto for a number of years they do a good job masking the information and once you set those settings they do not change them (I am looking at you GoDaddy). I will second Porkbuna nd Namecheap as good options.

      • pivotpixels@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        You can look at porkbun or namecheap, they usually give out a good domain for about a dollar for a year. Good for self-hosting stuff.

        I got some .xyz .site etc tlds for a dollad.

          • pivotpixels@alien.topBEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            That’s why I said they are good for self-hosting. Mostly for you and your family, you can change the tld every year without much effort.

              • pivotpixels@alien.topBEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                Doesn’t take more than 2 minutes to configure. You can definitely look at the tld list or something similar to find domains with cheap renewals but be careful about some of the registrars listed there.