I just registered a domain name for my wife for her photography business. For any .com domain name, this is a fairly easy, almost trivial process. You find the name you want, click a button, usually labelled “Register” or “Proceed to Checkout”, and then pay some money. Viola, the domain name is yours.
For a .ca domain name, the process is a little more involved. Once you find the name you want, you have to prove why you want it. Apparently, .ca names must maintain a very direct connection to Canada. This means you have to be a Canadian company, part of the government, a Canadian non-profit organization or a Canadian citizen. The next step is to register with CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. This involves going to a completely different website and agreeing to five (5) pages worth of agreement policies.
At the end of the five pages, they have a paragraph which basically says that even if you didn’t read the preceding five, very long pages, you are still agreeing to them, and therefore, legally bound to whatever the five pages said. As you can tell, I did not read any of what I as agreeing to.
Once you register with CIRA and complete that insanely long process, then you can complete your registration. Eventually you pay them some money and you are done. Well, almost. Nowhere during the registration process are you asked to enter DNS information (at least on the webnames.ca website). This you have to figure out for yourself after the fact.
This is the part that infuriated me the most. I think this is Webnames.ca’s attempt to trick you into hosting the website with them. If searched around and finally found the spot to enter my DNS info. This was less then obvious. This ensures that .ca names must be registered by knowledgeable web professionals.
Bottom line, find somewhere else to register .ca domain names with other then webnames.ca. Or better yet, just get a .com domain and keep life simpler (and cheaper).
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