Comments on: NetSol, .Mac or other host for .ca domains?

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

Marquis — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:30:59 -0800

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!

By: delmoi

delmoi — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:41:59 -0800

That's very weird, but NetSol is a pretty obnoxious company. The vast majority of hosting providers should have no problem hosting any domain.

By: chesty_a_arthur

chesty_a_arthur — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:49:55 -0800

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.

By: heeeraldo

heeeraldo — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:15:42 -0800

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).

By: heeeraldo

heeeraldo — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:17:01 -0800

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.

By: hgws

hgws — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:35:07 -0800

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.