SPONSOR What do you look for in your .CA registrar? (10.Viewing)

Hey folks, Marine here from WHC, Canada’s Leading .CA Domain Provider
(And if you haven’t yet, check out our Domain Club!)

I know many of you already use WHC, but we wanted to open up a bigger convo about what makes a registrar worth sticking with (especially for .CA domainers.)

From what we’ve seen, priorities often include:
• Transparent, stable pricing
• Solid tools for bulk management
• Responsive support that understands domaining

At WHC, we’ve built around those values (free privacy, DNS tools, bilingual support, Domain Club, etc.), but we’d love to hear your take:

→ What’s missing in the Canadian registrar experience today?
→ What do you wish more registrars understood about domain investors?


Consider this an open feedback thread. No sales pitch, just honest conversation about how we can make the .CA space even stronger for domainers.

competitive pricing for registrations and renewals.
easy to transfer in and out.
free url forwarding, easy to use domain management area.
Support that gets back quickly (within an hour at most)
variety of domain extensions outside of .com and .ca
the odd sale or promotion once or twice a year.

The main issue I have with WHC right now it I can't renew IDN .com domains and some .co domains on my own, maybe because they're premium. I have to contact Support to set these domains up in my cart to renew. It would be nice if I could renew them on my own, needing the help of Support adds friction and some time to the process. Not a dealbreaker for me but when I've had these domains at Godaddy or elsewhere, the renewal process is seemless.

Thanks for the feedback. Renewals should 100% be frictionless, premium or not. I will reach out for details.

Are transfer-ins/out easy enough or can we do better? What’s your gold standard for this?

transfers work fine at WHC for me, I just gave a list of everything I like to see in general at a registrar.

the renewals are definitely an issue right now for IDN .com's and premium .co. Since I don't have many of them it is just an inconvenience once in a while, but no reason it shouldn't work as any other renewal.

Just check the backlog and see what I left in there ;-) I think I may have also started a similar thread a while back.

Here are some notes from using the registrar lately:

1. Contact Management. I'm pretty sure that was a pitch I never wrote. I found myself needing to find domains that used specific contacts and/or a way to update these and found myself to have to click through many domains to identify which ones were updated and which ones were not.
2. DNS templates - I believe those where requested here before and I know @MapleDots was also looking for the ability to update DNS zone records / URL forwarding in bulk and be able to view it in the domain list, which also leads me to...
3. Export domains & their information.
4. I'm sure we had more on the list. For hosting & domains clients, I still think having a link from the domain details page to the hosting control panel and vice versa from there to the domain details page would be useful.

That's from the top of my head.

Another note - over the last two weeks, I've experienced short time where the client area was down for me. Just right now at this time is another example. I'm not sure if this is because I'm opening 4 tabs for different domains and it kicks off some protection, but it's a bit annoying as it interrupts the workflow and I have to resume it later again. This time is was under 2 minutes though.

I will make my point of what I look for.

I stayed with GoDaddy for years even though they were more money because of the bulk tools.

Control Panel, Control Panel, Control Panel

Did I say it often enough, it means everything to me to be able to do what I need quickly and efficiently and I have to say WHC has excelled in that category, adding many different filters and access to cPanel when you add a hosting package.

I am quite pleased with everything but one of the things I would like to be able to do is to add labels in bulk.

Last thing, if I had a wish list would be a lander with ssl and a means of contact, that would make it an all in one service. So basically if you don't point name servers and the domain defaults to whc and goes to a basic lander with a means of contacting the domain owner.

Hello,
I'd like to know if it will ever be possible to have access to the .quebec Backorder list.

lorlor said:

Hello,
I'd like to know if it will ever be possible to have access to the .quebec Backorder list.

Click to expand...

I don't know anybody who drop catches .quebec, but you can get the lists on expireddomains.net:
Login (might require a free account).

Actually it looks like it's the dropped list, not backorder/pending delete, but it's better than nothing

I'm very happy to see WHC rolling out features this year that had been in the backlog before, it's nice to see that you continue to prioritize improving the domain experience

Not a domainer, may not be your target audience.

I want a low-cost alternative to something like a MarkMonitor/CSC. Domains are identity.

For my employers past and present, there has never been a real multi-custody way to handle domain ownership with a standard of "quorum" to require multiple people to approve changes to a domain.

My understanding is for MarkMonitor/CSC you're talking several thousands a year before you've even transferred any domains over.

Perhaps AWS' Route53 could fit that bill - haven't tried/explored it yet. It's not a tough thing I'm looking/asking for.

Anything done to compensate for the current lack of multi-custody IME leads to one of the two things happening:

1. Multiple people each independently having God mode to the domain(s)
2. Janky processes to require multiple people which expose the business/organization to risk and an inability to recover if things (people) fail in a certain way.

jamesaepp said:

My understanding is for MarkMonitor/CSC you're talking several thousands a year before you've even transferred any domains over.

Click to expand...

Not having used them myself, my understanding is that these type of registrars usually have some sort of fixed fee for access. Plus some of them work with a backend that (at least for some ccTLDs) works with somewhat manual changes that are made by their staff, where the customer requested changes basically go into a ticketing system of sorts.

jamesaepp said:

Perhaps AWS' Route53 could fit that bill - haven't tried/explored it yet. It's not a tough thing I'm looking/asking for.

Click to expand...

I believe Route53 allows you to delegate subdomain access to different accounts by delegating the zone. But that's really just for DNS and likely doesn't fit the requirement of approval for changes etc.

FM said:

somewhat manual changes that are made by their staff, where the customer requested changes basically go into a ticketing system of sorts.

Click to expand...

Which is almost exactly what I'd want. In an ideal world, my employer/org is the registrant of example.net, example.com, example.org, etc. with Contoso as the registrar.

Alice, Bob, and myself are the three authorized contacts with Contoso for our organization. Quorum is 2 people to approve ANY changes to the account including changes to quorum standards, adding/removing contacts, etc. If quorum can't be formed, there'd be a contingency plan created and approved for caretaking and re-bootstrapping account access before any domains are transferred/registered with Contoso.

We wouldn't host the DNS with Contoso, we'd use Azure DNS/AWS Route 53/Google Cloud DNS/etc. Contoso would just be responsible for the nameservers, whois, registry/ICANN/IANA obligations, account, billing, the "quorum" I describe above, etc etc.

If a change to the nameservers for example.net were needed, Alice and Bob could do that change. Or Alice and I. Or Bob and I. Any 2 of 3. We request/approve. Contoso authenticates us and executes the actions according to the account agreement/policy/plan on our collective behalf.

FM said:

I believe Route53 allows you to delegate subdomain access to different accounts by delegating the zone

Click to expand...

I'm not really an AWS user so can't speak with anything resembling experience but from reading (skimming) I've done, I think AWS can be your registrar. So you would think all the usual IAM type rules could apply, but idk if my quorum idea is possible in the way I've described it.

FM said:

Another note - over the last two weeks, I've experienced short time where the client area was down for me. Just right now at this time is another example. I'm not sure if this is because I'm opening 4 tabs for different domains and it kicks off some protection, but it's a bit annoying as it interrupts the workflow and I have to resume it later again. This time is was under 2 minutes though.

Click to expand...

I'm in touch with the WHC team about this.