Do any registrars not charge a premium for Whois privacy? I know Hover doesn't have a separate Whois privacy entry price, but the base price at Hover seems to be about the price of a domain + Whois privacy at other registrars.
I wouldn't say free. I would say it's included in the $12/year price of .com registration. I suspect that price is competitive with registrars that have a base price that doesn't include WHOIS privacy and sell privacy as an add-on, though I haven't shopped around in a while. All my domains are registered with Google Domains.
I just enter phone/address information for one of those whois privacy proxies without bothering to pay for them. What's the point of paying? The only thing real on my domain registrations is a gmail contact - the rest doesn't matter.
Back a few years ago, NomiNet used to post you a certificate proving ownership every time you registered a .co.uk domain. I recently found a couple when moving house.
I have some domains in OVH, they do not charge for privacy.
Generally you can check out https://tld-list.com/tld/com for the list of providers which offer free whois privacy for a given domain.
Be careful with OVH, they put your details in Admin-C/Tech-C, same effect as not using their service at all. At least that was my experience a few months back, I then switched to namecheap to avoid that.
In practice, this will usually work, but it does violate ICANN rules. If this ever gets enforced, likely due to a disgruntled party making a complaint, it could backfire.
I shifted my entire domain portfolio from Bulkregister.com to Uniregistry for this issue. Bulk charges $3 per domain per year and I saved thousands a year moving to Uniregisry.
That's what I meant with "I know Hover doesn't have a separate Whois privacy entry price, but the base price at Hover seems to be about the price of a domain + Whois privacy at other registrars".
