Note that registrants must comply with CIRA 's registrant agreement before they activate a domain. Activated domains usually take 24 hours to become visible on the Internet. If there are no trademark disputes, your secured domain name will be yours for as long as you maintain the yearly registration fees. After you register your domain, you must find a web hosting company or Internet Service Provider to host your web site for you. Some good areas to start are your local ISP, or choose one of the many free web hosting sites available.
Some people wish to only reserve their domain name for future use.
In that case you need not find an ISP or hosting company. If you already have a web site hosted by an ISP, you can easily set your domain to point to your ISP's DNS so that your existing web site will appear when visitors go to your new domain name. If you already have a FREE web site somewhere, chances are that your provider will not allow you to point your DNS setting to their server. CIRA stands for the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. CIRA has been given a mandate by the Government of Canada to provide and operate the .CA domain name registry.