Buying your domain name
Your domain is your web address, and you buy it from a registrar for about $15 to $25 a year. Pick something a person can say down the phone without spelling it, check it is free as a name and not just as a domain, and register it in your own name on your own card. Expect the first few you want to be gone already.
Written 13 October 2026. Prices are what registrars commonly charge for a .com or .ca and change often; check the current price at the registrar.
Choosing one
Start with how people say it out loud
You will read this domain down a phone line, on the side of a truck, and to someone writing it on a scrap of paper. If it needs spelling out, it is the wrong name. Avoid hyphens, numbers, and any word with two common spellings.
Your trade and your town still work
Plenty of good businesses run on a name that just says what they do and where. It is not clever, but it is instantly understood, and it matches what people type. The risk is that it boxes you in if you expand, so decide whether you will ever want to serve the next city over.
Check it is free everywhere, not just as a domain
Before you fall for a name, search it on Google and Google Maps, on Instagram and Facebook, in the BC business registry, and in Canada's trademark database. A free domain with someone else already trading under that name in your area is a problem you inherit, not a bargain.
Expect the first three to be gone
This is the part nobody warns you about. The obvious name for your trade in your town was registered years ago, often by someone who is not using it. This is normal. It is not a sign that you picked badly.
When the one you want is taken
It usually is. This is the slow part of the job, and it is worth being slow about, because changing it later means changing your signage, your invoices and every link anyone has to you.
Add the town, or the thing you actually do
The strongest remaining names are usually more specific, not more creative. Narrower is easier to rank for and easier to remember.
Change the ending before you change the name
.ca is a good signal for a Canadian service business and the good ones are far less picked over than .com. You do not need both to start.
Do not buy a misspelling of a name you wanted
If you have to drop a letter or add a hyphen to get it, you will spend years correcting people, and some of your traffic will land on whoever owns the correct spelling.
A parked domain is sometimes for sale, usually not cheaply
If the name you want shows a holding page, it may have an asking price. Treat four figures as normal and decide whether a name is worth it before you ask, because asking tends to raise it.
Using AI to get unstuck
Generating names is the one part of this a chatbot is genuinely good at, because the job is volume. Ask for forty, not five, and tell it the constraints: your trade, your town, no hyphens, no numbers, must survive being said out loud. Then throw away thirty-five of them.
What it cannot do is tell you what is actually available, and it will confidently suggest names that were registered a decade ago. Treat the list as a starting point and check every one at a registrar yourself.
Both have a free tier that is plenty for this. We are not paid by either.
Buying it
We use Namecheap, and we set our clients up there, because the renewal price is close to the first-year price and privacy protection is included rather than sold back to you. Any reputable registrar will do the job.
Register it in your own name, on your own card. Not ours, and not your web designer's.
This is the single most important thing on this page. A domain registered by someone else is a business you do not fully own, and it is how people end up unable to leave an agency. If anyone offers to "handle the domain for you", ask whose name it will be in.
What happens next
A domain on its own does nothing. It has to be pointed at wherever your site lives, which is done by changing its nameservers — usually to Cloudflare, which then handles the pointing and sits in front of the site. That is the next job, and it is the one people most often get stuck on.
Pointing a domain at CloudflareBy Nova and Carver Lloyd – Digital Cowboy. Business know-how and AI, working together.
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