Really, it is a trade-off between the advantages (displaying professionalism (openness = trust = professionalism); offering opportunities to be contacted) and d

Really, it is a trade-off between the advantages (displaying professionalism (openness = trust = professionalism); offering opportunities to be contacted) and disadvantages (lots of spam, just like being in the phonebook). By making it easy to contact you through your website, you can directly affect how advantageous it is to keep WHOIS records public. Likewise, you can mitigate the disadvantages by having in place efficient methods of dealing with spam. I offer two personal anecdotes. Years ago, when I was maybe 13 or 14 (7-8 years ago), I setup a simple image hosting website. My WHOIS information was not guarded. My spam filter was pretty good, and I didn't mind - keeping in mind that this was a relatively tiny website - deleting maybe the single spam message a week (simply classifiable by their headlines). I did receive a spam phonecall (!) from some no-name domain company, and that did freak me out a little. But I also received an important email - not through the website's form - offering to purchase the website for $400. Considering that the name was worth nothing (something like imagehoster4u.net or w/e), the script was generic, the design horrible and the traffic minimal w/ horrible RPM, $400 was a great offer that proved genuine (big money for me then!).