.ca domain renewal

Howdy,
I'm planning to move my website to dreamhost.
My domain (.ca) expires in april, and I'm wondering what I should do about renewing it. Currently, the site is hosted at doteasy, and i initially registered the domain name at doteasy.
My question is: since dreamhost can't register a .ca domain, what do I have to do to renew it?
do I:
a) renew it at doteasy before I transfer the hosting to dreamhost?
b) renew it somewhere else? (and how does that work?)
c) none of the above

and then:
when the domain expires again, and provided I'm still hosting with dreamhost, what do I have to do to renew the domain again (I guess this only applies if I renew the domain at doteasy...i think...)

any clarification appreciated.

thanks! looking forward to dreamhosting...

you can't transfer .ca domains to dreamhost afaik. What you would need to do is renew the domain at doteasy and just point the DNS to dreamhost.

-aaron

pardon my thickness....
if I renew my domain at doteasy, then transfer my hosting to dreamhost, what happens in 2 years when the domain needs to be renewed again?
If I'm no longer hosted at doteasy, will I still be able to renew my domain there? Domain hosting at doteasy includes their $0 hosting...but I won't be hosting a site there...clearly I'm not understanding the finer points of domain hosting vs web hosting.

to be clear: can I in fact host a .ca domain at dreamhost?

can someone explain this from the ground up?

thx

doteasy is your registrar and will always be (unless you change for another .ca registrar but there is no reason if you are happy with them).

Dreamhost is your hosting service.

You can host (about) ANY domain in Dreamhost.

Simply specify dreamhost dns (ns1.dreamhost.com, ns2 & ns3) at doteasy and it will be hosted on dreamhost.

as moua mentioned, you do not need to transfer the domain to DH. And I don't think DH handles .ca domain names.

What you can do is to renew the domain name with your current registrar and host the domain in DH. To host the domain in DH, modify the dns like

ns1.dreamhost.com
ns2.dreamhost.com
ns3.dreamhost.com

You should do this with your current registrar. For more info, you may want to refer to http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/KB_/_Domains_/_Transfers_/_Transfer_Hosting

Hosting and registration are separate services. It's no big deal to register one place and host at another, it's just that the registrars would not be unhappy if you hosted with them (and try to make it so easy grandma could do it).

Wholly - IS NOT MY PROMO CODE. Even worse, I don't get any credit for it. Use WhollyMindless for full credit. I'm really disappointed in someone.

thanks-i understand it now.

Now, to make the hosting transfer without doteasy getting pissy, that's another story....

I'll post again in April or May at zero hour.

thanks again. I'll use someone's promo code from this discussion.

In reply to:

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Now, to make the hosting transfer without doteasy getting pissy, that's another story....

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Dunno about doteasy but I have a number of domains that I registered over at Bluehost and which I host here. Both Bluehost and DreamHost control panels let you change the nameservers for the domains that are registered with "their" registrars. You might check whether doteasy has the same!

Note that they might actually like that you're keeping them as registrar as it's probably very profitable for them to be registrar but not host.

What you might do is look for a cheaper .ca registrar. It seems to me that doteasy isn't the cheapest - particularly on their "free" hosting plans.

I have my domain registered at godaddy, had it there for 2 months, then registered it here, I've had my registration run out twice and each time I called at godaddy and they simple renewed it, and asked me for hosting, when I said no they said ok and left me be. The domain still stands today.