Ten million companies offering domain registration. I'm looking to register a .ca domain. Should I just go for the absolute lowest price and leave it at that? Or is there some reason why some offer it for $30/yr and others $20 or $25/yr?

A friend of mine told me you have to make sure you're the administrative contact and not the company you bought it from or that means they own the domain and not you. Is this true?

Originally posted by HellMask

A friend of mine told me you have to make sure you're the administrative contact and not the company you bought it from or that means they own the domain and not you. Is this true?
This part is true. The admin contact is the one who owned the domain.

Look for the following:

1) The company is an actual registrar for .ca not a reseller
2) Make sure that the company has been around for some time
3) Find out if their control panel is friendly
4) Find out if there are any hidden charges

Why would you make a distinction between a reseller and a registrar?

The OpenSRS model is entire reseller based, and they are one of the better .CA registrars around.

-t

oh zit, i signed up last year with doteasy, the admin email address was their email address, not mine, but there was an option in thier cp to change me so-called 'administrator email address' i tried changing that so i can transfer my domain to godaddy, but it didn't show up in the WHOIS.

i hate doteasy.:angry:

DotEasy is definatly not easy.

I personally recommend GoDaddy.com, only $8.95/yr cant beat that.

Freehostingweb.com will take your "bargain" yearly "hosting" fee (which is - in reality - mostly the registration fee) and register your domain name ("for free") but putting themselves as the administration contact, tech contact and any other contact you care to imagine. It will appear that you are registered with Freehosting when in fact you are registered with dotregistrar.com (from memory) and freehosting are resellers.

You are not given any details about the registrar or registration so you can't access your domain name (to move it - if - for example ....oooh ...lets say...you weren't happy with their hosting service) and when you ask them to change the contact details and tell you the registration information - they will refuse to acknowledge your emails and ignore you. (But dotregistrar will eventually take action on your behalf if you sign legal documents etc).

SO - yes it's true that some "registrars/hosts" can attempt to claim your domain as their own (as freehostingweb was - in effect - doing) if you are not named as the administration contact etc. But there are other hosting companies and cheaper registrars that that don't - those who have a few more scruples or a bit more business sense perhaps.

The safest way is to register the name yourself with a registrar who has a solid history and reputation, (in my humble opinion), regardless of the cost.

GoDaddy being cheap is a myth. Sure it is $8.95 BUT if you have mutilple domain names that you want redirect to your main one, that is another $9.95, making the same service that others include for free a total of $18.90.
There are plenty of registrars that do not charge extra for redirection for around $14.

If there is one single most important thing I learned about registering domains, it is to register it with a registrar that allows you the most control over it. The ones where you have to email somebody to make changes leaves you at their mercy. They already got paid for the year, and have no real reason to continue to provide decent or timely support.

That's the company I use to register my .ca domains. http://www.cadns.ca is the website. They let you modify from the site yourself (DNS records, etc.) and on the rare occasions I have a problem I always get support quickly. The cost works out to $26.70 CDN with the GST (I don't know how this works in the States, if you're from there.)

The only thing I don't like about the site is that they assign a password and don't allow what they call "poor passwords" (they're really weird ones). I can understand why they'd want to do it this way since it does increase security; I just hate having to type out a password that looks like my four-year-old nephew typed it. :)

I'd go with NameCheap (http://www.namecheap.com) instead of GoDaddy (http://www.godaddy.com) . Like ATST, there are hidden charges with GoDaddy. NameCheap is a reseller, but an eNom reseller. It has gotten GREAT reviews here at WHT. And they throw a few freebies with their $8.88/year. One of which is NameLock.

Jessica

We recommand www.000domains.com for good price and good service. They are not the cheapest ones out there, but we never heard of unsatisfied customers. We have our domain names registered there.

It doesn't really matter. I reccommend GoDaddy for domain registrations.

What hidden charges? There's no hidden charges with GoDaddy. The purpose of a registrar is to provide a domain name, and that's it. GoDaddy gives you full control over your domain name. Any other features that other registrars include are just extras. If you're using URL redirection or e-mail forwarding, you're using their servers and their bandwidth which costs them money. You could still have those features for free with a domain registered through GoDaddy by using a service like ZoneEdit (www.zoneedit.com)