How to Buy Deleting .ca Domain Names

Published on Feb 2, 2007   //  Marketing Tips
6

CIRA Deleting DomainsIt is still possible to pick up 3 letter .ca and word domains. You just need to know where to look and how to buy them. 

Every 2 weeks CIRA the organization that manages the .ca domain provides a list of the domains to be released. You can see this list on there site here.

 If you look at the list a few great grabs would be:

  • vsv.ca
  • unn.ca
  • gxt.ca

To own a .ca you do need to be a Canadian Citizen, Landed Immigrant or own a Canadian trademark or business.

Once you have found a soon to be released domain from CIRA you can then go one of 3 ways:

  1. You can wait and see if anyone else does grab it. This is the cheapest way but with the most risk.
  2. You can use a tool like our domain hook at BlueFurDomain.com to grab the domain on the renewal day. This does cost money but has minimal risk of not getting it.
  3. You can also use a service like Pool.com. If you do use Pool.com then they will most likely grab the domain before the other 3. They use 100′s of services to request every second to the registrar of deleting domains. If Pool.com does grab it you will have to pay a high fee and possible have to win the auction if anyone else wants the same domain. So the cost for this option can be very high but the risk is low as you know that you can purchase it but you just need to want it more.

Finding the right domain is not always the easiest thing to do but looking at deleted domains may help.

6 Comments to “How to Buy Deleting .ca Domain Names”

  • Dr. Cossack
    February 2, 2007 6:57 pm

    I heard a few years ago that, in order to buy a .ca domain name, you needed to own a business with street addresses located in two different provinces. Is that still true today?

  • blogadmin
    February 3, 2007 9:42 am

    Actually that use to be true when it first was available. The .ca use to be a 2 tier system. You would buy the domain for your specific location in Canada.

    So for us it would have been bluefur.bc.ca.

    To get the domain bluefur.ca you had to be considered a national company.

    That model stopped and sales of .ca have skyrocketed since.

  • Michael Kwan
    February 3, 2007 3:41 pm

    The current system is much better. I remember the days of sympatico.bc.ca and so on. Those were ugly.

  • inspirationbit
    February 4, 2007 9:44 am

    I don’t quite understand why vsv.ca, unn.ca, gxt.ca are considered to be a good grab? In what circumstances the domain gets deleted? Doesn’t it mean that this domain wasn’t a popular one on the first place? On the other thought, I guess some of those domains just never get renewed because the owners bought too many domains and stopped caring about some of them.

  • blogadmin
    February 4, 2007 10:00 am

    3 letter domains are more valuable because there is only a limited amount of them.

  • Leftblank
    February 4, 2007 11:16 am

    And not to forget; they’re pretty easy to remember. Though, I’d personally prefer a longer, but easily readable, domain than an impossible combination of three chracters, but indeed, they’re worth quite a lot. Too bad the .NL is one of best sold TLD’s (not counting the US .com, .net etc) and I’m not a citizen of Canada ;)

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