Choosing a Domain Name You Won't Regret in Three Years

A domain name is the one thing you buy at the start of a project that you can't quietly swap later. Hosting, designer, logo, the entire website — all replaceable in an afternoon. The name in the address bar ends up on your van, your invoices, your Google listing and four hundred business cards in a drawer. And most people choose it in about eleven minutes, somewhere between "that one was available" and "my nephew says .com is better". So here is the version I give clients before they buy anything: how to pick one, what it honestly costs over five years rather than on day one, and the three boring ways people lose a name they've been paying for since 2018.

How do I choose a domain name for my business?

Pick the shortest name a stranger can spell after hearing it once on the phone. Use your business name rather than keywords. Skip hyphens and numbers. Check it isn't already someone's registered trademark. Then buy both the .ca and the .com so nobody parks a lookalike beside you.

That's the whole method, and the reason it's so short is that almost every domain regret I've watched play out came from breaking one of those five rules, not from missing some clever trick. The name doesn't have to be brilliant. It has to be sayable, spellable and still correct in five years.

The keyword thing deserves burying properly, because someone will try to sell it to you. In ten years of building sites I have never once seen a keyword-stuffed address outrank a better page because of what it was called. What I have seen is toronto-best-plumbing-services24.com being read aloud down a phone line three times and still typed wrong, and a landscaper stuck with gtalawnmowing.ca the year he started doing snow removal.

.ca or .com — which one should a Canadian business buy?

If your customers are Canadian, use the .ca. It reads as local before anyone has read a word of your site, and the short names are still genuinely available. Buy the matching .com too if you can and point it at the same site — that's roughly another $30 CAD a year and it ends the argument permanently.

There's a structural advantage to .ca that nobody mentions: you can't just buy one. CIRA, the organisation that runs the .ca registry, enforces Canadian Presence Requirements — the holder has to be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident, a company incorporated in Canada, or fit one of a short list of similar categories. That single rule is why the .ca space is calmer than .com. An overseas domain investor can't casually sweep up every plausible Ontario trade name, because they aren't allowed to hold them.

If you sell to Americans or ship worldwide, flip it: lead with the .com and keep the .ca pointing at it. The rule is one address that everything uses, and the other one redirecting. Never run the same site live on two addresses — that's two versions of every page competing with each other, which is a mess I've had to untangle more than once.

The four-check name test

Before you buy anything, run the shortlist through these four. Each one takes under two minutes and each one has saved somebody real money.

1. Say it once on the phone. Read the name aloud to somebody who has never seen it written down and ask them to type what they hear. If they ask "is that with a hyphen?" or "one word or two?", the name has already failed. This is the single best test there is, and it costs one phone call.
2. No hyphens, no numbers. Both are unspeakable. "Four" or "4"? Hyphen or space? You will spend the next decade clarifying it on every call, and the version without the hyphen belongs to someone else who now gets your traffic.
3. Search the trademark register. Run the name through the Canadian trademark database before you buy, not after you've printed signage. A domain registration gives you no rights over somebody else's registered mark, and this is the one mistake on the list that can arrive as a lawyer's letter.
4. Buy the .ca and the .com together. Two registrations is about $55 CAD a year. Discovering that a competitor bought the other extension is worse than that, every time.

An honest confession about my own: leadlls.com fails check one. Nobody spells "lls" right on the first attempt, and I spell it out on every single call. I keep it because moving now would cost more than the annoyance does — which is exactly the trap I'm trying to keep you out of. The eleven minutes you spend on this decision are the cheapest eleven minutes in the whole project.

What should a domain name actually cost?

Budget about $20–35 CAD a year for a .ca or a .com, and treat that as the entire product. There is no premium version of a domain. Anything above that range is either a different service bundled in, or a markup that someone is hoping you won't compare.

I can show you the wholesale side because I resell domains through a separate hosting company of mine, so I see the registrar invoices as well as the customer ones. These are the real numbers from August 2026:

There is nothing scandalous in that table. A registrar has to cover support, billing and a payment processor, and a 20–30% margin on a $15 product is not where anybody gets rich. I'm showing it so you can tell the difference between a normal markup and a $75-a-year "domain management" line on an invoice, which is a markup with a costume on. Privacy is the other one to watch: it hides your personal details from the public registration record, it's genuinely worth having, and many good registrars now include it at no charge. That whole checkout genre gets a full treatment in the hosting cart trap.

Why year one is $1 and year two is $32

The first-year price is an advertising budget, not a price. Registrars run rotating promotions to win the registration, because they know how rarely anyone moves a domain afterwards. The number that decides what you actually pay is the renewal, and it's typically two to three times the intro.

One .com, five years, at Canadian retail: a dollar to get in the door, then four renewals at about $32. Roughly $129 CAD for the five years — around $26 a year, which is completely reasonable. It's only a trap if you budgeted from the dollar. So when you compare registrars, compare the renewal column and ignore the big number on the front page.

Multi-year registration is worth doing for a name you're committed to, but buy the years for peace of mind rather than for SEO — I've never seen registration length move a ranking. What it does is remove four future chances to forget, which is the actual risk, as the next section explains.

How do people lose a domain they've paid for since 2018?

Three ways, all boring. The card on file expired and the reminder went to an inbox nobody reads. The domain was registered in somebody else's name. Or auto-renew was never switched on at all. The name then walks down a fixed ladder, and catching it late costs many times what the renewal would have.

Those windows are the typical shape for .com and .net; the exact dates come from your registrar, and ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy sets out the notices they must send you. A .ca runs on CIRA's own rules instead, so confirm the dates rather than assuming they match. The important part isn't the calendar anyway — it's that everything stops on day zero. Email included. A client of mine once discovered a lapse because quotes stopped arriving, not because anyone looked at the website.

Nobody loses a domain dramatically. They lose it because a Visa expired and the warning went to an accountant who left in 2021.

Now the part I found the hard way, one evening in August, going through all seven domains I'm responsible for. Two of them had auto-renew switched off — both the ones that had been registered through a registrar's API rather than by a human clicking through a checkout. Nothing had flagged it. If a system registered a domain on your behalf, assume auto-renew is off until you have personally seen the toggle in the registrar's own control panel.

The same evening turned up a second one. My billing system had the wrong expiry date on four of the seven, each about a year early, because transferring a domain in adds a year and nothing had gone back to re-read it. Harmless in that direction — it would have renewed early — but it makes the point: the invoice is not the source of truth. The registrar's own domain list is. Open it once a year and check three columns: the expiry date, the auto-renew toggle, and whose name is on it.

Register it in your own name — this is the part people regret

The registrant on the domain should be you or your company, with your email address on the account and, ideally, your card. Your designer can have access without being the owner. Those two things get blurred constantly, and the difference only becomes visible on the day you want to leave.

I've written the full version of this in who really owns your website, so I'll just add the timing detail that catches people: changing the registrant's details on a domain can lock it against transferring for 60 days. So the moment to fix ownership is now, while everyone is still on good terms — not the week you've decided to move on. If you're currently choosing who builds the site, the questions to ask a designer's old clients covers what to ask about this before money changes hands.

For what it's worth, my own arrangement is deliberately dull: the client registers the domain in their own name, or I register it and transfer it to them, and either way they can lock me out of it any afternoon they like. That's how it should read on any website project, and it's a fair question to ask before you sign anything — the answer takes ten seconds and tells you a lot.

What if I already have a bad domain name?

Usually, keep it. Changing a domain isn't a rename, it's a move: every link, listing, citation and QR code pointing at the old address has to be redirected, and Google needs weeks to re-attribute everything. Worth doing for a real rebrand. Rarely worth doing because you'd prefer something shorter.

If you do have to move, it's a defined job rather than a gamble — Google documents the process for a site move with URL changes, and the honest expectation is that positions wobble for a few weeks while the old address is re-pointed. Redirect every old URL to its real match, keep the old domain registered for years afterwards, and update your Google profile and directory listings the same week. That's the whole of what a website migration is; the failure mode is always the same, which is somebody redirecting all forty old pages to the new homepage and wondering where the traffic went.

One thing genuinely not worth agonising over: whether the name describes what you do. Your Google Business Profile, your page titles and your service pages do that job far better than an address ever could. If you want to see how the descriptive work is actually distributed across a site, the industry pages here are the same business under twenty different search intents, all on one unremarkable domain.

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