Gandi March 9, 2025 incident postmortem
news.gandi.nethttps://tld-list.com is the the place to go when needing a domain (although it seems they're having some site issues at the moment).
The last good thing Gandi did for me is to convince (more like force) me to migrate to Fastmail. I wish I've done that before.
Does anyone here even use Gandi anymore since they got acquired and hiked their prices to the moon? They want $40/year for a .com now, it's absurd.
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 asked for the authorization code to transfer my domain as it would not appear anywhere. They replied after 10 days. Also the code was wrong.
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.
Gandi was sold to a private equity firm in a leveraged buyout in 2019 [0,1]. Nothing good has happened with Gandi since.
[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/montefiore-investment...
[1] https://news.gandi.net/en/2019/02/futureofgandi-the-adventur...
I wouldn't mind a "small premium", but 300% price increase is robbery. Can't imagine that this kind of greed doesn't affect their quality of service.
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).
I used to pay $5/yr for fastmail but that plan is now $15/yr, but I only get 0.5GB of storage.
So it's like $1.05/month!
I pay $5 a month (50 a year technically) for fastmail and get a 50 gb mailbox and 10 gb cloud storage. How old is your account?
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 am transferring all my domains away from them. This is too much of a hike.
What registar do you recommend? I used Gandi because it was a no-nonsense registar, even if a bit more expensive.
I've been happy with https://www.dynadot.com/ lately
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.
Cloudflare sells domains at cost, if you can stomach them.
Porkbun is cheap as well, and has the bonus feature of not being Cloudflare.
They use cloudflare for DNS, so you'll have to provide your own DNS servers or buy them from somebody else.
interesting. Thanks for the heads up.
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.
There aren't many registrars that support one of the TLDs I use, but I've moved everything else.
A quick whois lookup of ycombinator.com returned the following:
But yes, I would not use Gandi in 2025, unless someone is pointing a gun at my head and making me choose between Gandi and GoDaddy...Domain Name: YCOMBINATOR.COM Registry Domain ID: 147225527_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.gandi.net Registrar URL: http://www.gandi.net Updated Date: 2025-02-14T02:53:36Z Creation Date: 2005-03-20T23:51:07ZWe 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.
Used them for years with zero issues--I'm happy with the stability (though I wasn't aware they'd been bought out or raised their prices).
Just transferred away the other day.
What alternative can you recommend?
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.
I've been using Tucows/Hover since forever. never even a single problem
Namecheap are reliable and well-priced
But their ethics are rock bottom. So maybe use of the many competitors mentioned here instead of giving money to this outfit.
Do you have more information on this? First I've heard of this.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/1duy4cn/constant...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30603615
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/05/why-do-scammers-love-namech...
And last but not least: https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/ncsc_active_cyber_def...
Any proof? Or… anything?
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.
nearlyfreespeech.net
infomaniak: swiss & cheap
Another one leaving for Porkbun here.
I was just about to grab a few domains so, of course, my previous go-to has since turned to poop. Are there any good registrars left and, if so, who?
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.
Cloudflare (at cost), or porkbun
OVH is pretty fairly priced, includes the DNS zones, and is EU based
Switching to ceph probably isn't the flex they think it is.