My current .ca registrar, DomainGeeks, has fallen off the face of the earth at renewal time again. This has turned into an annual event, except this time I haven’t got a response back to my email asking them to push whatever button needs pushing, so I think it’s time to move. (They also haven’t reflected whatever changed at CIRA that’s letting registrars charge $15 instead of $30/year for .ca, so moving makes sense anyhow.)

But that means I have to choose another registrar. Looking around mailing list archives, forums, and Usenet, the wizards are telling me both yes and no (and are recommending Registerfly, which suggests that maybe their advice isn’t so hot anyhow).

So, can any of you recommend me a registrar for .ca domains? I don’t have many needs or requirements, but I do have a couple: the company must be Canadian, because they will be more used to handling .ca and because I’d rather my money stay up here; they must offer bare DNS registration because I don’t want DNS hosting, web hosting, forwarding, or anything other than a form to put in my own nameserver addresses; and they must charge around $15/domain, not the old $30-40.

So far I’ve heard good things about NamesPro.ca, $12.88 and based in Vancouver, DomainsAtCost, $12.95 and in Ottawa, and BareMetal, $12.99 in Victoria. Do any of you have experience with those, or have one you think I should use?

Update: NamesPro.ca is awesome. Transferring everything took about a minute, which is the smoothest CIRA-related transaction I’ve ever seen. After that I noticed that DomainGeeks had set me up two identical CIRA users, so I sent NamesPro a support request wondering how to fix that, and their response took about ten minutes; within an hour I was back to one user. Yay for good customer service!