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.
I contacted Cloudflare’s support and had them remove the registration. I picked up a different domain and replaced it pretty easily. I’m sure I’m already on a lot of lists but I’m hoping that the WHOIS information will clear and it will slow down the spam.
Oh yeah, got rid of the damn thing within 30 minutes of registering but it was too late. I assume bots grab that info as soon as it’s posted.
Probably got pushed to the larger system.
There’s more than one entity that controls WHOIS information. Typically as soon as WHOIS information gets published it gets copied into a bunch of different registries so you have to contact them all and have them remove the information