Amy ElderkinLife is about to get a whole lot easier for those who own or manage .CA domain name portfolios.
On Tuesday October 12, 2010, CIRA (the Canadian Internet Registration Authority) will be migrating to an EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol) platform for .ca domains.
This protocol is favoured and used by other domain extensions such as .COM, .NET, .ORG, etc.
How will the changes impact .CA owners? Keep reading to find out!
Simplified Administrative Contact Updates
Well, for starters, your CIRA account (used to approve administrative contact updates or to transfer a domain) will be a thing of the past. Moving forward, administrative contact changes will be done entirely through your registrar and will not require subsequent confirmation with CIRA making the entire process faster and easier to complete.
Easier .CA Transfers
Registrar transfers will now require an authorization code (called an EPP code) as well as the domain status to be either ‘unlocked’ or ‘ok’. This authorization code can be obtained from the registrar you are transferring away from. After you have obtained the authorization or “EPP” code you can simply return to the Webnames.ca site to initiate your transfer. The transfer process will no longer be require you to login to your CIRA account to approve .CA transfer requests. For those of you with large.CA domain portfolios, the above changes will make bulk .CA transfers much easier to process.
Please note that CIRA will still continue to enforce Canadian Presence Requirements for registrants, though, as well as the other requirements of the registrant agreement.
Grandfathering of 3rd and 4th Level .CA Domain Names
One of the bigger changes though, is how the switch to EPP will affect 3rd and 4th level domains (like abc.bc.ca or xyz.on.ca). These domains will be maintained by CIRA, and registrants can continue to use and renew them; however, be warned that if these domains were to expire and lapse completely, you will no longer be able to re-register 3rd or 4th level extensions.
CIRA won’t be supporting any new registrations of either provincial extensions, nor 4th level registrations of municipal domains (like town.nameoftown.bc.ca) as of October 12, 2010.
If you currently have a top level domain (for example, www.webnames.ca) and want to register your domain in the 3rd level (for example, www.webnames.bc.ca) you must do so before Tuesday, October 12, 2010.
To register a 3rd level domain name, please call Webnames.ca Customer Support toll free at 1-866-221-7878 or email your request to support@webnames.ca and one of our representatives can help process your registration.
Registration Tip! – Mobile internet use has made local search an important trend in search engine optimization. Registering your business name in the 3rd level may help your business rank better against your local and regional competitors!
Also, in the week leading up to the migration, CIRA will not be accepting any modifications to .CA domains that would typically require approval in one’s CIRA account. That means that contact information updates, registrar transfers and registrant transfers will all be disabled starting October 4th, 2010.
To learn more about the upcoming changes at CIRA and the move to the new and improved .CA domain name registration system, go to cira.ca/ca-faq-10-12.
If you have any questions about the content of this blog post or the CIRA registration system transition, please email support@webnames.ca.