First off, I’d like to give credit to this discovery to my friend Bryan Larrick.
I use Dreamhost for all my hosting, as well as the hosting I use for all my clients. They have unbeatable pricing, good support, and in the event that something goes wrong, they’re the first ones to admit it on their support blog. They’re also pretty accommodating if you have particular custom settings you might need in PHP (I’m still on a shared server environment so I can’t tweak my server settings since it’s not a dedicated box). One thing I’ve never taken advantage of is their domain registration service.
For the last 7 years I’ve used Register.com for all my domain registrations and I’ve pointed all my clients to them as well. They’re more expensive than other places, like GoDaddy, but I didn’t care, because they were reliable. Within the last few years they also started offering privacy protection for an additional charge but I’ve never used this extra service.
Then my friend Bryan emails and says since moving his domain from Register.com to Dreamhost, the amount of SPAM he gets has almost stopped.
No way, I think.
Since I have an account with Dreamhost and domain transfer is free, I figure, what the hell, I’ll do a little experiment with thecombustionchamber.com and make Dreamhost my registrar. So I make the switch, making sure to have Privacy Protection CHECKED.
It’s been 2 days and already the amount of SPAM I get has significantly dropped.
Now chances are I could have done the same thing will Register.com, but I would have had to pay another $10 a year on top of the annual $35 renewal fee. At Dreamhost it’s free. Even if you don’t use Dreamhost for hosting, domain registration will only put you back about $10.
Thanks for the heads up Bry. I just hope this low SPAM environment lasts.

Where ever you may work, I hope you don’t have to deal with either of these 2 Words of the Day:
boondoogle – A Boondoggle is a North American term referring to the performance of useless or trivial tasks whilst appearing to be doing something important. (Google definition)
kludge – Pronounced “klooj.” With computers, a term used to describe a piece of hardware or software that basically operates properly but whose construction or design is severely lacking in elegance or logical efficiency. (Google definition)