From a domain name and a website, how much information can be found out about the owner? Say if I had a domain registered using WhoIs Guard and used that domain for some hosting from somewhere like hostgator and that hosting account was used by multiple domains. How much information could one find out from the domain name and the website (no personal information is on the site)? Could someone find all the other domains hosted on that hosting account? Could they find your hostgator user name? What else could be found out? Thanks.
It is possible to find every domain hosted on a server, most of the time people use services like this one domaintools.com/reverse-ip/ to do so. It simply crawls all the domains it can find, checks the ip that the name resolves to, and then pulls all the ips that match the users input. But, this has nothing to do with your account, just everyone that's hosted on the same server. Thankfully, thats about as much information as people can get without you giving it to them. So, they don't be able to get your hostgator username. Getting whois gaurd installed will protect all the vital info, if none appears on your website. I wish the whois system was different. Having this info available is antiquated, and doesn't belong on the internet today.
It depends entirely on the honesty of the domain owner. I could take a road trip to another county, pay some kid $10 to go into Walgreens and buy me a pre-paid Greendot credit card, and pay another kid $20 to register the domain using bogus information from a library computer after activating the card using the same bogus info.
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Sorry j_Dog, I misunderstood this when I read it yesterday. I must just be used to people asking this with the intentions of tracking someone else down, not whether someone can track them down. Now looking at it from the other angle, people can only find out things about you that are on record somewhere. Depending on what sources of information someone has access to, it's not hard to cross reference details from more than one source and put together puzzle pieces of information about someone to get a bigger picture than is available from any one source. For instance if you use your name to register a domain, people will be able to use a lot of information sources to get a bigger, albeit cloudy, picture about you because names are a relatively common piece of information asked for. Just a name doesn't guarentee anything though because there's people with the same name, which is where more pieces of information like previous addresses come into play. There might be 5 John Smiths, but only two of them who have ever lived in Bung Tuck Egypt, and one who has had a metal plate put in their head. What it all boils down to is how many bits of information among all of the information you've ever given out in your life, are common between the places you've given it too.
Nothing can be found out about you if whois guard is installed. Neither can they find out anything about what other domains you have or your hostgator username. If you did something illegal and the aggrieved party had proof, your registrar may have to disclose information about you.
all whois guard does is doesnt display your information when the whois command is entered or you use a whois service