Need some help with domain registration.

RKM · Feb 25th, 2008, 08:03 PM

Seeing as how I know very little about this subject I thought I would ask someone more versed about it.

I have a friend who wants to register a domain name for a website and would like to know what is a reputable company to do business with. As far as I know they are just going to host this site on .Mac so they would need URL forwarding also.

Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

PS Canadian companies are the preference here if possible.

CanadaRAM · Feb 25th, 2008, 08:06 PM

There not the bargain basement cheapest, but for great service I always go to BareMetal: the web-hosting specialists;

rgray · Feb 25th, 2008, 08:24 PM

Also not the absolute cheapest but I always go Domainsatcost.ca - service has been great and it is a Canadian company.

kps · Feb 25th, 2008, 09:35 PM

I registered with Netsol originally and moved my registration to GoDaddy after the Netsol fiasco a few years ago. GoDaddy is reasonable and has a good reputation and has URL forwarding.

krs · Feb 25th, 2008, 09:41 PM

I'm in the same boat as RKM's friend.
I want to register a few different domain names for various members in the family and have someone host small small private websites - like a dozen pages each max.

To just register each domain name with 'Domainsatcost' for instance is $12.95 per year per domain name or I can go with a web hosting site like the firt one on this list:
Web-Hosting-Reviews.ca
which has an introductory hosting price of $3.95 per month for the first year and that includes up to 10 "free" domain names.
What's the downside of going with the "free" domain registration of a hosting site?
Does the domain name not belong to you after it gets registered or can't you transfer the web hosting with that domain name to another host later?
I assume there is some fixed fee charged by the actual domain registrar which any of these sites have to pay.

cap10subtext · Feb 25th, 2008, 09:53 PM

I'm using NetFirms at the moment, pretty much threw a dart, but they seem to be okay. It's $6.95 per year but doesn't include many bells and whistles (does allow CNAME and Arecord though). I noticed in the original post you said you were hosting at .mac while registering you domain elsewhere.

Homepage.mac.com doesn't allow CNAME which is probably what you want to do with your domain forwarding, only web.mac.com does (meaning you type in www.yourdomain.com instead of web.mac.com/username). The difference is you have to have iWeb create the directory iDisk/web/sites and store your files in there. If you only use iDisk/sites your page will show up at homepage.mac.com.

Don't know if it matters but I found out just recently that .mac doesn't allow server side scripting like php though (which is really annoying for me).

Hope some of this helps when you do choose a domain.