Edinburgh Domain Registration

Register domains from only £10.00 per year OR get a free domain automatically with any annual web hosting plan purchase.

Canvas Dreams offers complete domain registration, renewal, and transfer services for popular domain extensions. Private registration is available for just £10.00 per year on any domain.

Canvas Dreams offers a range of domain registration, renewal, and transfer services, and can facilitate registrations for almost any domain name.

The following are annual registration fees for our most popular top-level domains (TLDs). Please contact us for inquiries on registering domains for other TLDs.

* Includes one-year renewal.

** Requires two-year registration/renewal.

The following provides some insightful background into domain names, how they work, and why they are so important for your online business efforts.

What is a domain name?

A domain name is a natural language title used to represent a computer or web site on the Internet.

The underlying technology of the Internet uses a series of numbers (IP addresses) to locate web sites. This is similar to the way in which phone numbers work. Domain names are important because they provide a simpler means for humans to locate and remember the "name" of a web site, without needing to know its IP address.

Additionally, domain names also serves a powerful role as a brand identity for a web site or company. Just as brands became important to commercial audiences in the middle of the 20th Century, so have domain names taken their place to help establish awareness of company brands on the Internet today.

How do domain names work?

A domain name consists of two major components: the canonical name (e.g. "mydomain"), paired with a top-level domain space, known as a TLD (e.g. ".com"). Together, they create a domain name (e.g. "mydomain.com") which can then be assigned to a computer or web site that is hosted on the Internet. By the term "hosting", we mean that a space on an Internet-accessible computer is assigned a domain name, and is then made accessible to users who access it via a web browser or other application using Internet-based protocols.

For example, when accessing the Google web site in your web browser, your computer is opening a connection to www.google.com, and then displaying the contents of Google's web site in your web browser. Behind the scenes, your computer resolves the domain "www.google.com" to an IP address assigned to a computer on the Internet, then connects to that computer, requests the Google homepage, and displays the Google homepage on your web browser.

What is a TLD?

The primary TLDs in use on the Internet include the famous .com domain space, as well as .net, .org, .biz, .info, .us, .edu (for educational institutions), .gov (for U.S. governmental agencies), as well as a wide range of country-specific TLDs (.fr for France, .es for Spain, .de for Germany, .uk for the United Kingdom, etc.) The list goes on and on. There are dozens of TLDs in operation today. The vast majority are country-specific TLDs, many of which are largely unused due to lack of technical resources or commercial interest on the part of the respective governments assigned those TLDs. A good example of a relatively unknown TLD colliding with Western Culture is .tv, owned by the Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu. While Tuvalu may not seem to have a great need for the Internet, there has been much attention given by other nations to domains that would operate within its assigned TLD space (e.g. "mydomain.tv") because of the Western acronym for "television" (.tv).

The provisioning and usage of all TLDs and associated domains are governed by a group known as ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), a private, non-profit organization created in 1998 tasked with coordinating the assignment and usage of domain names, as well as the numeric IP address spaces in which domain names operate.

What is meant by 'domain name resolution'?

A recent survey by Netcraft estimates approximately 57 million domains are actively used on the Internet today, with many billions of pages and files hosted on those domains. This means a tremendous amount of web traffic is constantly being routed across the global Internet. In the early days, the Internet's architects foresaw the problem of how to handle so much traffic. As a result, 13 primary "domain name servers" (DNS) were set up, across the planet, to be tasked with "resolving" domain names to their respective networks and computers.

In a way, you can think of these DNS servers as global phone directories for all domain names in existence. They contain in their records lists of all the domains that are presently registered, along with IP addresses to the networks and computers in which the domains reside. When a computer, such as your computer, looks up a domain name, its requests are passed all the way up to the primary nameservers, and resolved to the IP space on the Internet where that web site is located.

When a domain is "registered", its information, along with the legal name or company that registered it, is entered into the global DNS servers. From this point on, unless the domain name expires, its information will be stored and remain accessible to anyone who actively searches or or tries to access that domain.

What does a domain registrar do?

To facilitate the assignment and management of domain names, ICANN has independently authorized dozens of "registrars" worldwide to give companies and individuals a means to register and take ownership of domain names. Registrars are given the ability to register domain names on behalf of their own clients. Registrars are also presented the responsibility to effectively manage and care for domains registered under their guise.

A registrar administers the registrations, renewal, transfer, expiration (and deletion for expired domains) of all domains under its management, on behalf of its clients. Many registrars grant individual users the ability to register domain names directly through the registrar's service. Those that do may charge a premium price as compared to if a customer went through one of the registrar's resellers.

How does Canvas Dreams assist with your domain needs?

Certain registrars prefer to deal direct with resellers, who can reduce overhead by providing the customer service layer for individual customers. As a result, resellers operating under these registrars can offer domain registration services and extremely affordable prices.

As an eNom reseller, Canvas Dreams offers domain registration services at lower prices than if you were to go direct through a registrar. While Canvas Dreams could charge a premium and make a small profit off each domain sold, we have instead chosen to provide domain registration as a value-added service, and do not profit from any registration services. Instead, whenever we register a domain on your behalf, we charge you the same amount we are charged by eNom. Our role as reseller is simply to facilitate you in obtaining and managing domain names for your company interests, quickly, easily, and affordably.

Canvas Dreams offers domains for as little as £10.00 per year for .com, .net, .org., .info., .biz, and .us domains, and can register any range of domains under other TLDs. Click here to get started with your new domains.