Is price the only negative about them? I know the sentiment around Gandi here is negative, but the one time I needed to handle a ___domain issue recently they were super quick on the support. The problem was even my fault for messing up the ID info I'd provided (requirement of the registry for that TLD), but they got me back up and running 20 minutes after I sent their legal team the corrected info.
I use Gandi for dozens of domains. This incident aside, they've been reliable and undramatic, and I don't mind paying a small premium for something as important as DNS.
Has anyone else been impacted by the sale of Gandi to Your.Online [1]? I hadn't even noticed this until the post above, but it at least looks like the acquirer is still a European company.
To add insult to injury they also killed the free mailboxes they used to bundle with domains as standard, so customers who used that feature had to start paying a huge premium for the ___domain itself and pay even more on top of that to retain access to their email.
And their mailbox offering is also overpriced. 5.99€/month (and it use to be pricier! they recently decreased the price) for 10Go and very basic email features. Fastmail is 5€ for 60Go, masked email, and a few other things (not in the EU tho).
at least 10 years or so, i think. I'm grandfathered in to the real cheap plan, even though it "tripled" in price in 2020 or so. I can only have one ___domain, but i get all the other features.
I'm using now a Tucows reseller via eNom.com. So far, it's good although it does not accept my preferred credit card; I had to resort to my debit card for payment (same operator, same issuer bank; go figure). Gandi did not have that kind of issues but then, a 300% price hike certainly made me run from them.
Their web interface is extremely unreliable. Pretty much every time I need to renew or checkout, the web site doesn't work. I have to try over multiple days before I get through the process fully. If you try to contact support, it'll take a few days and you get the worst kind of form responses.
This has reminded me to start migrating domains away, so the timing is good.
What does Gandi provide wrt DNS that is worth a premium? What do they offer that at-cost ___domain registrations & free DNS management from Cloudflare do not?
One could argue the polish of their UI/UX is worth it, but not to me. I moved to Porkbun and found the difference a bit frustrating when trying to migrate from Gandi, but that was one time pain.
We use them for a few dozen domains. DNS only, though, and they are all set to auto-renew.
I basically only have to interact with them when we need to make DNS changes. The web UI seems fine, especially in the advanced view, but our biggest zones are managed through opentofu, so I can see how changing a large zone would be frustrating.
Porkbun is a solid all-rounder. Cloudflare sells domains at cost so they're slightly cheaper than Porkbun, but the catch is that you're forced to use CFs nameservers so YMMV depending on whether you want that flexibility.
For Canadians trying to avoid US registrars - grape.ca. They've been in business since '99, I think they were one of the first CIRA accredited registrars for .ca domains.
It's been going on for years. I've personally tried to report phishing scams to Namecheap and get the laziest action on it (for example, I report 30 domains, and only one gets taken down and the rest + the account stay active) or totally ignored altogether after one or two exchanges. This laziness in response despite their platform being abused this heavily suggests they don't want to give up the revenue they're getting from it. The CEO is incredibly defensive about it and suggests that the security theater is evidence that they actually want to do something, but it's been years and they're still heavily used. This is despite not being the cheapest out there, which suggests that scammers prefer it for other reasons.
Piggybacking on this comment, what about alternatives for good/basic shared hosting? (i.e., PHP, MySQL, etc.) I've got a few WP sites that I maintain where I need keep something reliable, secure/trusted, and relatively low-cost.
Amazon/AWS Registrar. They're a reseller for Gandi, but of course everything is managed through AWS and the pricing is at-cost instead of the rip-off that Gandi is now.
Well, they’re French. Was it an accident? It’s a matter of taste I guess, but if it was realized the acronym for my company was one letter off from one of the most iconic civil rights leaders of the 20th century, I’d probably prefer not to play off the edge of the name being highly recognizable.
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