Buy your domain on Spaceship (and pick .ca vs .com)

Buying a domain takes ten minutes. This guide exists because two of those minutes — the checkout screen and the settings right after — are where people get taken.

First: choosing the name

• Shorter beats cleverer. You’ll say this name over the phone.
• Match your real business name as closely as possible; add your trade or city if it’s taken (smithelectricottawa.ca).
• Avoid hyphens and numbers — they’re miscommunicated constantly (“that’s smith DASH electric…”).
• If your exact name is taken everywhere, changing the business’s domain is fine; changing to a worse memorable name isn’t. smithelectric.ca beats thesmithelectricco.com.

.ca or .com? (the Canadian question)

Serving Canadian customers → .ca. CIRA’s research shows Canadians measurably prefer clicking .ca sites; it signals local without saying a word, and registration money goes to a Canadian non-profit. Requirement: you must have a Canadian presence (citizen, permanent resident, or a business registered in Canada) — as a Canadian business owner you qualify.

Selling internationally, or “Canadian” isn’t part of your pitch → .com. It’s the global default and nobody has to think about it.

Torn? Register both — about CA$28/year (US$19) combined at Spaceship — make one primary, and ask whoever sets up your site to redirect the other to it. Cheap insurance against a copycat grabbing your twin.

Want a Canadian registrar that bills only in CAD? CanSpace is CIRA-certified with a C$12.99 sticker renewal — but being Canadian, they add your provincial sales tax at checkout (C$14.68/yr all-in with Ontario HST). Spaceship charged us no Canadian sales tax, so its CA$13.09 is actually the cheaper all-in price — and one account can hold your .ca, your .com, and your email. CanSpace is still a fine pick if all-Canadian matters more to you than a dollar a year.

(US readers: this whole section is just “.com, done.”)

Buying it at Spaceship

Why Spaceship? Fair renewal pricing — the number that actually matters — plus free WHOIS privacy, and it’s run by the Namecheap people, so it’s not a here-today registrar.

1. Go to Spaceship, search your name, add to cart.
2. The registration length dropdown: 1 year is fine. Multi-year is fine too at Spaceship since renewal ≈ registration price — unlike GoDaddy-style promos where multi-year is how they lock in the markup.
3. At checkout, decline:
   • Hosting trial — you’re using Cloudflare Pages for $0.
   • Email trial — decide about email deliberately, with a comparison, not at a checkout screen.
   • Anything about SSL certificates — HTTPS comes free with your hosting.
4. WHOIS privacy is included free — nothing to do. This is quietly one of the best features: without it, your name, email, and phone number sit in the public WHOIS registry, which is where the fake “domain expiry” letters, spam emails, and “we noticed problems with your website” cold calls get your details. Free privacy at Spaceship (and Porkbun) means the phone never starts ringing.

The two settings to change right now

While you’re logged in, before you forget:

1. Turn on auto-renew. The #1 way small businesses lose their domain is a missed renewal email in a spam folder. Auto-renew plus a working payment card makes the domain effectively permanent.
2. Check the account email is one you’ll still read in five years — not an old work address or your web designer’s.

That’s it. Your address on the internet, ~CA$14/year (US$10, and you can choose which currency Spaceship bills you in), no strings. Next: put a website on it.