Domain Name Registration Canada

Toronto, Mississauga, Brampton, Georgetown, Woodbridge, Vaughan, Richmond Hill, Web Design & Development Services In Localities Of GTA Toronto Ontario Canada

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Ataraxis Web Design Company

Greater Toronto Web Design, GTA Development, Managed VPS Hosting Canada

Canadian Domain Name Registration Service

How To Find Reliable Reputable Registrars In Canada

Domain Name Registration Defined

Domain name registration is a procedure of selecting and registering a unique alpha-numeric name to assign and couple to an Internet Protocol number (IP address) to provide an exclusive Internet identity.

Control And Regulation In Canada

In Canada all “.ca” extensions are governed by CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. Presently, transactions on a global level are regulated under control of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). They are based in California and appointed by the American Department of Commerce. There has been pressure from international organizations, the European Economic Union in particular, for the United States to relinquish control to a UN governing body more fairly represented by an assembly of countries. However, the USA has resisted such requests.

How Does Domain Name Registration Work ?

Authorities mentioned above do not provide registration services. They are responsible for establishing regulations and procedures that must be adhered to by any one of thousands of ICANN approved private business enterprises. When shopping around you're going to encounter terms such as “buy or sell” but this is misleading because to buy something implies paying a one-time fee to take ownership. In reality there are recurring annual costs that must be paid to private domain registrars to maintain preferential rights to it. Essentially you're actually leasing a name, not purchasing it. A company may purchase registration rights from someone who already has it registered. Regardless they still do not own it. They will still have to pay annual costs through a domain registrar for continuation of registration rights. If someone fails to maintain registration rights at the of end a term by paying associated annual fees they will lose rights to the name and it will be returned to a pool of available resources that anyone else may then claim. Have a look at what I am talking about at CIRA to be released domains weekly list to see examples that are constantly going back into an available resources pool because individuals or companies forget or choose to not re-register them.

How To Find Domain Name Registration Companies In Canada

Domain Name Registration services in Canada are individuals or companies approved and certified by CIRA for .ca names, to facilitate registering, renewal, transfer, or modification of existing information. Here is a current list of CIRA registrars. Large hosting companies are typically also registrars. They often times provide this as a value added service for their clients during the process of subscribing to a hosting plan. It is common practice for hosting companies to offer it free to clients purchasing and prepaying for a minimum one year hosting package. A Country specific list of ICANN approved registrars is available at InterNic Registrar List (www.internic.net/origin.html), be prepared for a slow loading page!

A good indicator of whether a registrar is reliable or not is if they are gaining or loosing customers. If they are loosing customers it may be an indicator of poor service. A tool to verify this trend is Daily Changes By Name Intelligence. Keep in mind that sometimes large percentages of change may be an indicator of a company buyout or merger rather than unhappy customers -- use your good sense of judgment.

Variations In Costs

My advice is to shop around because registration costs vary widely. Cost structures are based on a free enterprise market system. Individual resellers or domain registrars are free to apply whatever price structure they feel is justifiable. Just like most other aspects of open market commerce there are going to be significant variations in pricing. Multi level marketing layers heaped onto a registration process will certainly have an impact on fees. Many sources available are nothing more than systems of automated resellers acting as “middle people” multi level marketers to existing registrars and tag on their markup percentage making costs unnecessarily high.

Are You The King Of Your Castle?

If there is one aspect about leasing domain names that really needs awareness its whose name goes into registration information. If someone is performing it on your behalf be sure they are supplying your personal information; not their own personal or company information. This may become a problem if for example a designer or developer registers it in their name while hosting it on their servers. What if at some point you become unsatisfied with customer service or support and want to change hosting provider? Maybe you've already entered into an agreement with a new provider but upon trying to transfer it you find out it doesn't belong to you!

Whois Privacy

Whois privacy is something to be aware of if you would prefer that your personal information does not become public information. By default most whois information is readily available to anyone on sites such as Whois.net. As an example, a telemarketer may input a URL to be presented with all kinds of ownership contact information. There are ways to prevent this information from being publicly accessible. Some providers or registrars may have an option somewhere on a control panel to set it to private. Its best to take care of this immediately afterward as soon as logging into your account. If such an option cannot be found in a control panel contact your registrar and ask them to help you.

Summary Of Best Practices

It is important to ensure that if a process is performed on your behalf that you provide your own personal or company information. Also, make sure to clarify ownership facts as well as terms or conditions attached to free names. Not all fees are equal. It pays to shop around for less expensive options. I see a few very popular registrars charging as much as fifty dollars a year which is ridiculous. Yet, if they're as popular as they are then there must be plenty of people who have not done their homework. There are good easy to find sources who will only charge about ten to fifteen dollars a year. Ataraxis incorporates this process into an overall project management process and will present you with proof of ownership.