NetSol, .Mac or other host for .ca domains?

March 27, 2008 8:30 AM

My friends have a webhosting account with Network Solutions. NetSol seems to be saying that you cannot point a .ca domain-name to that account. Is that really true? Are .Mac accounts compatible with .ca domains? If the answer to both is no, can you recommend a webhost for .ca domains? (They have already bought the domain.) [NB: I don't want to just use a page forwarder - that is, I want www.mysite.ca/blogs/newblog etc urls to work.] Thanks!
posted by Marquis to computers & internet (5 comments total)

That's very weird, but NetSol is a pretty obnoxious company. The vast majority of hosting providers should have no problem hosting any domain.
posted by delmoi at 8:41 AM on March 27

It doesn't look like NetSol sells .ca domains, so while it's possible that you could point an externally registered domain to a NetSol hosting account (I am not clear whether that's the case from their site), it would be simpler to register with a host that sells .ca names. Recommending a host is difficult without knowing what their needs are (space, reliability, scalability, affordability, etc...) and what they'll be using it for.

CIRA (the Canadian Internet Registration Authority) provides a list of .ca registrars; you might want to poke around there. Some additional resources are http://www.thewhir.com (Web Hosting Industry Review) and http://www.webhostingtalk.com (Web Hosting Talk). Keep in mind that the forums on the latter are full of data points rather than representative experiences, but maybe they'll be helpful anyway.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 8:49 AM on March 27 [1 favorite]

my previous related AskMe.

as for a host, I use SiteGround for my hosting and I'm happy with it; the customer service is really good and they offer free installs of useful blog/CMS software (like Wordpress and Joomla).
posted by heeeraldo at 11:15 AM on March 27

it occurs to me that "really good" doesn't mean a whole lot.

In my experience, Siteground customer service is super responsive no matter the time of day, keeps you informed about the progress of any requests as they move through the system, and has never taken more than 24 hours from first question to issue resolution.
posted by heeeraldo at 11:17 AM on March 27

In answer to the .Mac part of your question, any domain that you control can be used for websites published with iWeb '08 to dotMac. It uses CNAME, but I'm not sure if that equals mere page-forwarding or not.
posted by hgws at 12:35 AM on March 28