GoDaddy warns clients regarding theft with 3 fresh levels of domain privacy

GoDaddy’s fresh cross-sell warns regarding domain theft.

The prior week I wrote regarding how GoDaddy is now redacting most personal information in Whois records. People who paid for Whois Privacy now have the option of getting an improved “Full Domain Privacy” product or a pro-rated refund.

But it looks like there’s more to GoDaddy’s (NYSE: GDDY) privacy changes. The firm has introduced three levels of privacy and changed some of the details of the Full product.

Basic Privacy Protection is what comes standard now. GoDaddy redacts your personal name, phone number and email address from Whois records.

Full Domain & Privacy Protection redacts your remaining information counting Organization name and state/province and country.  It also adds a forwarding email address like Domains by Proxy did. Clients also get protection from accidental domain expiration and hijacking.

Ultimate Domain & Privacy Protection adds malware scans and blacklist checks. The prior week, the malware scans were included in the Full service.

GoDaddy clients are no longer warned regarding spam when they check out. Now, GoDaddy warns them that there are 170,000 domain theft attempts a year (see picture).

While Basic is free, Full costs $10/year and Ultimate is $15/year.

One thing to keep an eye on is what happens to the expired domain market. If lots of GoDaddy clients convert to Full, their domains won’t expire when they usually would. It’s not clear how long registrants have to renew in case of an invalid credit card, but I suspect GoDaddy adds one year to the registration.