So, further to recent changes at Gandi, I've just got some more info from support which I've included below. I've purchased domains from Gandi, pre-paying for multiple years of service such that some domains I have don't need renewing until 2027. When I purchased that service the offer was inclusive of 2 mailboxes for the duration of the contract, and now they're planning to remove those inclusive mailboxes and start charging me extra for them from next month.
To me, this sounds like a planned and fully intentional breach of contract.
"We'll start charging for mailboxes from next month.
Our current mail offer will end and will be replaced by our new offer: [...]
What’s going to happen going forward ?
Starting from April 6th, you will have the choice to either :
- Keep your mailbox and pay accordingly on a monthly basis.
- Refuse the offer and you can have the choice to delete the mailbox or migrate
your mailbox to another provider. In that case you will have a two months
window to migrate before the deletion of your mailbox
- Forwarding address remains free
How ?
- You will receive ln the 6th of April a mail with a link to make your choice.
How much it will cost for me ?
- It will depend on how many active mailboxes you own. A mailbox costs £2,99 so
if you have 2 mailboxes, you will be billed £5,98 monthly."
As some comments have mentioned the pricing will increase for domain names too, not very explicit in their email on Tuesday evening "Gandi.net - Update":
Domains
We remain committed to offering you the largest portfolio of TLDs,
customized TLD suggestions and best-in-class anycast-level primary
DNS servers. In addition, we will step-up our effort to unburden you
by introducing new managed features:
Advanced and easy to use account security
Proactive notifications on changes and important events
Better rights management
Easier domain transfers with continuity of service
Best-in-class anycast-level secondary DNS servers
You can find the associated new pricing for your domains here[0].
Renewing a .com at these new prices is now £24 per year inclusive of tax and .uk domains £12.
Annoyingly my previous registrar raised prices last year and I thought that, hey, I'll pay a few quid extra and support Gandi as they generally have a decent reputation. Now with this move I'm the fool!
Like others in this thread I've moved to Porkbun, the .com renewals are now about £8.50 and .uk about £5.50 which is much more reasonable and much closer to their cost price.
I'd like my registrar to make a reasonable amount of profit to make staying in business worthwhile but that doesn't make sense when the registrar wants to double or triple the pricing for their bottom line.
Gandi was always a premium provider at premium prices. But I was pitched them, years ago, by someone who knew someone at the company that they were worth the extra price... because there would be no BS. No hidden pricing, no sniping of domains based on searching for them, all that. Everything in this thread, frankly, is a breach of that trust.
I mean they got sold. A company is only as honest as who currently runs it.
Same thing with people saying "I trust company X with my data." Do you also trust the next 4 CEOs and the next 10 governments who will have authority over them?
> I'd like my registrar to make a reasonable amount of profit to make staying in business worthwhile
Ditto. Moved 11 domains from Gandi to Porkbun today. But... for the lot of them, Porkbun was only $9 more than Cloudflare, which charges straight wholesale prices and takes no profit.
I'm glad Porkbun isn't gouging, but less than $1/domain/year markup still feels a bit thin and leaves me worried that I'll be doing this dance again in a few years.
Based on advice here I just tried Porkbun. A not-quite-professional website that prefers making jokes to fixing layout bugs, I try to sign up and the symbols in my password cause it to fail with a 403 (!!). I'm super scared about their technical abilities and general security. Are we going to see another Gandi 6 mo down the line?
Domains are the keys to the internet atm, it would be nice to see someone take it seriously.
Edit: I guess I'll try realtimeregister, since I haven't seen anything negative and they support U2F per Yubikey's catalog.
Edit2: Cool, cool, when you sign up they assign you a non-random password which anyone can use to log in and view your personal information.
Edit3: Others with u2f support that aren't MAMAA: Cloudflare (close), OVH, DNSimple (accounts are $60/year)
I've been using Porkbun for years and it's been great. Good prices, reliability, security, and they don't push nonsense add-on services on you like a lot of other domain providers.
I moved some domains from Gandi to Porkbun before as part of a plan to ditch Gandi and when I asked (almost 3 years ago to the day), they didn't support .uk.
> I've purchased domains from Gandi, pre-paying for multiple years of service such that some domains I have don't need renewing until 2027.
Just in case you did not know: if you transfer to a different registrar, you will not lose the extra years of registration. You can confirm the expected expiration date of 2027 at lookup.icann.org.
As an ex-customer, I'd avoid namecheap. They are expensive and have given me no end of trouble.
I currently use porkbun and namesilo with very few issues so far (about 3 years). You will need to unlock your domain and get an authorization code (EPP Key) from Gandi and then go to your new registrar and select Transfer Domain. Its fairly straight forward.
Recently moved to Porkbun. Can confirm positive impressions so far.
Reasonable pricing. Straight forward webforms. 2 factor. No trying to slip extra bullshit in.
For me the purpose of a registrar is to register a domain. Porkbun might have other capabilities, but for this purpose it was wonderfully singleminded for me.
1. They routinely fail to auto renew domains despite correct billing details and auto renew being on (I lost some domains to this).
2. They support premium domains, so you can be struck by lightning and randomly have the price of your domains dramatically jacked up (had to drop a domain due to this).
3. The name (NameCheap) no longer checks out, they are not cheap anymore.
> 2. They support premium domains, so you can be struck by lightning and randomly have the price of your domains dramatically jacked up (had to drop a domain due to this).
Do you have an example of this as it is against ICANN's rules IIRC.
The only instances I have seen about this were the posts here on HN when someone didn't read the registration price being at a discount compared to the renewal price thereafter.
If there is of course a legitimate instance of reclassification into a premium domain after the fact, you have a big case on your hands.
I did not take screenshots at the time so I can not prove it.
But I remember that I specifically spent effort/time to pick a name that was not marked as premium and double/triple checked before registering. Then about 3 months after I had registered it, it all of a sudden showed as premium in my account.
From my perspective it doesn't really matter much if they made it premium after I had registered it or if it was always premium and they hid that fact and gave me an invisible discount. The end result is the same.
You might need to elaborate on what problems you experienced with Namecheap before promoting two relatively unknown registrars. Although, my only experience with Namecheap was for SSL certs back in the day.
I use NameSilo but am 50/50 on it. Their control panel does not send a "Content-Type" header, which is effectively mandatory, and the support team flat out could not understand what I was talking to them when I was trying to point it out to them. It "worked" in Chrome and Firefox without add-ons and that's as far as their concern ended.
As a long time customer, I would recommend Namecheap. I was trying out Gandi since a couple months. On the bright side, they have a lot of additional international TLDs, but that's about it. Gandi has been noticeably more expensive when comparing equivalent domains.
Strong disagree. Migrated off namecheap after their support left a bad taste in my mouth. Also they had a data breach and did NOT notify me as a customer of theirs.
That article seems to indicate that no customer data was involved... looks like their send-only email key was compromised.
Maybe I'm not paranoid enough, but I think there would be too much noise if every company blasted out emails to all customers any time there was ANY security failure, including failures that do not expose customer data... Sure, they should follow up on your who got phishing emails, but I don't see a need to email every customer.
I've had no issues with NameCheap, but I just register domains, no other fancy services.
Any registrar that receives the transfer will automatically have the extended expiration date. (The expiration date is actually tracked at the registry.)
For reputable registrars, I think you could gather a list from HN comments and then "do your own research" to whittle down the list.
Associating domains with a Google account that is subject to arbitrary automated banning seems like a bad idea to me. It would be fine until it's suddenly not.
We're getting bitten by this in the Netherlands as well. Two domain registrars, PCExtreme and Neostrada, merged with Versio, and Versio is now owned by TWS.
My company has domains registered with Versio (and PCExtreme and Neostrada), but the control panel was showing multiple domains wrongly flagged as 'processing', and actually getting through to customer service takes the better part of day by now. I'm not looking forward to our domains getting migrated due to these mergers.
Start looking for alternative registrars if your domains are hosted by Versio, Neostrada, or PCExtreme! The competent staff of PCExtreme and Neostrada seem to have evaporated in these mergers.
I'm using Infomaniak. I especially like their renewal warranty [0]. It's a few bucks more a year but they renew the Domain even if you are not paying and try to contact you by phone, snail mail etc. They also support IPv6 and DNSSEC.
I used to be on Versio, but moved to TransIP after the acquisition of Versio by TWS.
TransIP is not exactly the cheapest, but they work fine. Vimexx (which is under the same company as TransIP) is cheaper (closer to pre-TWS Versio pricing), but I'm a bit hesitant to trust a 'budget' registrar again.
Not sure if it meets the European criteria but I use a combination of DNSimple and Porkbun and am very happy with them both.
For less common ccTLDs, Gandi is still hard to beat since they support virtually everything. Apart from that, I have no regrets moving... I saw the writing on the wall about 2 years ago and moved virtually all my domains away from them.
Shame because they're good registrars. I wonder why the European requirement though (since the TLDs themselves are ultimately governed by the registries and you can always use your own - or third party, EU based - name servers).
I wanted to purchase a VPS and they took my money before asking for ID. I refused to give them an ID that I didn't have (because I don't have one) and they kept my money and refused to provide service.
So at least don't get a VPS unless you're ready to give ID, heh.
I had a dedicated server for.. 4 months? or something before they suddenly required a scan of my ID before they would let me renew. Really weird and annoying. No abuse complaints or anything awry I was doing with it either :/
Interesting bit of backstory. That reminds me how one of the frequent complaints about Gandi have been its unusual terms of service, having fairly extensive "morality clauses" in there
Trivia time: Laeticia (née Laetitia) was married to Johnny, the famous French rock singer; Estelle was married to David, son of Johnny. Note that Johnny is dead now, Laeticia has been remaried twice but kept Johnny's last name, Estelle is divorced, and David is not the son of Laeticia as Johnny got married several times (David's mother is the French actress Sylvie Vartan).
It sound like they’re hosting at the same place (gandi) where they registered the domain. This is absolutely never recommended, for security purposes. If someone gains access to your hosting account you’ll likely lose all your domain names.
Transfer the domains over to a better more secure registrar. Then set up a server or vps and set up as many mailboxes or emails that you need.
I personally prefer keeping domain registrar separate from dns host separate from server host, and probably email host separate from the others, too, but on the other hand, you now have several different vendors that can ruin your day.
Using bundled services from your domain registrar is especially problematic though, because when you switch registrars, you usually lose those bundled services, even though you already paid for them. Often, there's similar services available at the new registrar, but there's a cost to switch, and it's much more difficult to switch because the service provisioning is often tied to the domain process; service at registrar B won't be online until the domain is moved, and service at registrar A may be turned off immediately after the domain is moved, so you have no way to make an orderly transition.
Infrastructure best practices have gone out the window, haven't you heard? Most people who use AWS/$cloud_service use it for everything, best practices be damned. Many new projects start their working thinking about how to scale, before making it simple and before having paying users.
Having a good plan for scaling is absolutely a great move. Changing fundamental architecture later isn't easy. Implementing it all immediately however ..
Sure, I agree, some sort of plan is a good idea. What I've seen many times though is engineers building systems for supporting 100k daily users while the product hasn't even found market fit yet, wasting lots of time on building complicated distributed systems way too early.
Is there not some way to undue that? I'm sure it would be a hassle, but hacking someone's account and transferring their domain name is a crime, it also leaves a very obvious paper trail. Seems like the registrars involved would be willing to reverse transfers under such circumstances.
And until that reversal is done, you've exposed all the users of your domains (including yourself) to security issues, potential data theft, and destroyed your own website's reputation.
I've been running a stolen domain name recovery service for a few years now. Even though hacking into someone's account and transferring the domain name to themselves or transferring it to another domain registrar is a crime, it's never prosecuted (when they come to us the first thing we have them do is file a police report).
The problem is that most domain registrars won't help get your domain name back. Many domains are stolen because they hacked the email address and not the domain registrar account (even though that's how they got access). Most domain registrars don't care at all, and won't help. And there are no current ICANN policies for dealing with stolen domain names. Even UDRP is not set up for dealing with stolen domains. Although we were successful getting one back via UDRP since the business was using the domain previously and we ended up claiming 'commonlaw trademark'.
This is one reason why we've been so successful getting stolen domain names back for clients: we use some alternative methods, such as actually talking to people at the registrars involved and talking with the domain thief, to get domains back.
I'm asking because the GGP wrote "better more secure registrar". Since I'm using Gandi right now (and I don't care about their mailbox offer), I wanted to know if it was really insecure.
GGP said hosting, but I think they mean email hosting. Even if you keep your actual registrar account @gmail or anther third-party, it's not recommended to handle your registrar, DNS, and email in the same place, since a compromise of any of them is likely to lead to compromise of the other systems (eg. an attacker gains admin permissions on the website / backend and uses it to reset your email password and download your email inbox)
I'm sorry but I don't understand what you're saying. The sentence was literally "Transfer the domains over to a better more secure registrar." This is about domain names and registrars and it's implying that Gandi is insecure. Your point about putting your eggs in the same basket is a different point.
Gandi email has been useless from the start. They say right in the contract that they don't back up their email servers. Isn't the host handling chores like backup part of the point of a hosted product? Of course you can and should distrust the host's backups and have your own in addition, but that's way different than the host not doing them in the first place.
Maybe they have fixed that (I don't see it on their site any more) but I have a screen shot of the old contract provision and I complained to them about it in 2017, and they ignored the complaint.
For email it is sometimes useful to only have a host handling things like reputation and crypto/protocols (DKIM, SPF, DMARC, DANE, MTA-STS, etc.) while doing the actual handling of data yourself.
I'm not sure that gandi's email fits that purpose, but specifically for email it can be a bit more tricky to roll your own than things like HTTPS, so having a hosted solution to handle that can help.
I've been using Gandi's free mailboxes since 2019 when I de-Googled, they provide easy setup for SPF/DKIM/DMARC. Not sure about the other two. No significant deliverability issues to report. They offer IMAP and a choice between two web UIs which is all I need.
I'd be more than happy to pay for their service in general, just not under duress. If they'd have given me 6 months to onboard I'd have been perfectly fine with $3/mo for email. If I'm going to be abused with a false sense of urgency and pushed to make a quick decision, I'll just leave.
As a bundled service it was fine, I have a complete copy of my emails on my client(s) anyway so what it really did was give an IMAP interface to use for sending and receiving emails under my domain that dealt with the entire "Google et el are pretty evil about personal email boxes".
Its not worth £3 a month per box when previously the Gandi markup was £4 a year or so for the extra services on top of the raw domain price.
I used Gandi's SMTP servers to relay outbound mail only (through postfix). For inbound mail, I pointed the MX record to my home IP address, where I received it directly on my postfix server.
This avoided my ISP's block on outbound TCP port 25, and it also gave me a reputable sending IP address economically.
Not sure that anyone need a backup if you know how to configure your email clients. Mines gets and keep all the emails so between my smartphone and my 2 laptops + their own backups, I have enough copies.
This is really frustrating. I'm only a small customer but it doesn't seem right that they could take away part of the deal if I have multiple years pre-bought prior to the change.
The email I received is slightly different and doesn't include set dates, it just says "after the first year" which could be tomorrow.
I've emailed them asking for clarification.
I pay for Fastmail, but use several of the gandi basic mailboxes for other reasons. I could live with those disappearing. I hope this doesn't also remove the 'forwarded addresses' though.
This is why I live in a society that enforces contracts through a court system.
In a functioning society you can’t sell someone a year worth of prepaid car washes and then decide they need to start paying you again 3 months into your contract.
Will be interesting to see if this touches the courts and, if so, how it plays out.
Contracts are only as good as the wealth, power, and ability you have to fight in court and ensure they get enforced. Which is why they 1. usually have lopsided boilerplate terms that protect only the powerful party, 2. are usually largely written by the wealthy, powerful corporation, and 3. usually only enforced against the relatively powerless consumer.
In the ideal fantasy world, contracts are supposed to be "meeting of the minds" between parties of equal power and benefitting parties equally. But when I think of "contract" today, I immediately think "weapon used by a company to beat up a consumer".
One of the first things you learn about in contract law after the elements of contract formation is the idea of unconscionability, but it's often construed by courts in such narrow terms that consumers who are pressured or tricked into handing over their money have little recourse.
"We can change these terms at any time, and your agreement is indicated by your continuing to exist. Also if we violate these terms you can't actually take us to court but we'll pay our buddy Arby to decide if you have a valid point"
From a non-professional prospective, one of the problems with unconscionability is that even terms that are blatantly opposite to prevailing law are highly misleading. This further disenfranchises individuals from the legal system, obscuring our rights even further. I'd personally like to see blatant examples of such start getting policed as something akin to giving improper legal advice.
Not a lawyer, but Gandi is based in France, and I don’t think they recognize mandatory arbitration (or choice of law) clauses in consumer contracts there.
Yeah, I was making a general point. I used to use Gandi some time ago. I forget why I drifted away from them. I think I only had one domain there, which I then let lapse rather than renewing. Given what I remember of their rep I'm surprised about this news, but I guess that's the constant churn of "creative" destruction. Enjoy the reasonable vendors you've figured out this year, because next year your own reliance will be an asset to be sold and arbitraged away.
In California at least, a small claim is pretty efficient as long as the claim is more than the modest filing fee. They can't hire an outside lawyer to handle it, either. If they have an inside one they can use that, but anyway.
I've had great success this way against United Airlines, Toyota, and other bigs.
The sweet spot for companies is the low tens of thousands. At that level, you're disqualified from small claims and it's not really worth an actual lawsuit. It's a very narrow band, though.
Here in Indiana, in many jurisdictions companies have to hire outside counsel to go to small claims. This means that it can be quite expensive to litigate for businesses against legitimate small claims.
Here in California we have several levels. There are different classes of small claims, there are limited civil claims and then unlimited civil for over $25,000 though some counties have special programs for unlimited claims under $50,000.
If you stay in small claims, usually you get an in-house paralegal that just wants it to go away. Over $50,000 you get outside counsel that wants to bill the file.
Depending on how many domains he's registered and how much the value of that service for the remaining years is, this may be eligible for small claims.
Seeing how Nintendo and the courts screwed around with the stick drift class action lawsuit (the parents can’t be in the class since their kids use it, yet the parents were the ones bound by the forced arbitration), and how clickwrap EULAs have become largely accepted as fully binding in courts…
I reached that by accident. Service B for DNS was just a more pleasant product to use than service A, and service A didn't offer certain features I needed for emails.
To bring it back on topic, this made it easy when I switched service A from Gandi to something else a year or two ago because a few things I was seeing from them "smelled funny." I don't remember the details, just that I wanted to switch.
DNSControl[1] or another similar tool also helps a lot when moving. My DNS records are configured by a small JavaScript file in a git repository, and I can very easily point it at another DNS provider.
Honestly I think it depends where you are deploying to. I was previously using Netlify DNS for instance since most of my domains had static websites hosted on Netlify, this meant that they could manage quite a lot of records for me, I was also a fan of having CNAME-flattening which isn't available at domains.google (for reference I'm using the .dev TLD which is owned by the Google Registrar), but I've recently switched to using Google's name servers and even though I have to use a hard coded IP for the Netlify load balancer and I lost CNAME flattening I'm pretty the DNS requests are going MUCH faster (as in a few tens of milliseconds faster LOL). The reason I'm using Google's name server is because Netlify DNS doesn't support DNSSEC which for me is simply absurd in 2023.
Anyways, if you don't have a specific reason to pick any specific nameserver go with the easiest one or if you want to have the most features and portability go with Cloudflare.
Almost none of the most popular/important zones on the Internet aren't signed, so there is little impetus for providers to support DNSSEC. IPv6 is a more annoying lapse.
You don’t need to. Your registrar tells the registry which nameservers you’ve chosen. You specify the nameservers that belong to your DNS provider, which causes DNS clients to query that DNS provider.
There’s nothing stopping you from paying for service with a DNS provider for a domain you don’t own, but nobody will actually query those nameservers for your domain, so it doesn’t matter.
DNS Made Easy - perhaps too costly now, and not the best, but I use them since 10 years and had no issue with them. But might be oversized, I've started to use them for a startup b/c they had failover to point to another load balancer if one balancer/data center is down.
If you believe every acquisition PR saying “but nothing will change at all, we’re committed to run $bought_company as an independent entity” then I have a bridge to sell you!
Company A never buys company B to let it do its thing.
GP and others who believe that should google "our incredible journey" - and look at multiple hits, not just the first few. It has become a meme by now.
>Even last week they were saying nothing would change
If you want to be dishonest but not explicitly lie, there are almost always ways to do it. For example, "I believe access to healthcare is a human right" to a normal person sounds like the person is saying that healthcare is a human right, but "access" can mean anything at all and in reality they are saying nothing.
I would not be surprised at all to find that similar inconspicuous weasel words were used.
The submitted title was "Domain registrar Gandi gets bought out, screws existing customers". The latter bit is linkbait so I've edited it (as the site guidelines request - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). But I realize the OP isn't just complaining about price increases, so if someone can suggest a more accurate and neutral title, we can change it again.
OP's original issue had to do with changes to Gandi's included email service specifically.
Perhaps the title should indicate that Gandi is rugpulling email accounts from people who have prepaid for domain registrations.
They haven't told me I'm losing my mailbox yet but I'm on the lookout.
The free mailbox was honestly one of the biggest reasons I chose Gandi, and I would not mind paying for it at all - preferably not under duress though!
I have been a Gandi customer for 5+ years, and I have bought domains til 2026, and I rely on their free email. But I haven't received any communication about changes in pricing.
Same here, I'm registered until 2025 and make heavy use of the free mailboxes. I thought this was a good move because by registering a domain I became a paying customer, even if I was also using free-tier services.
Haven't heard any communication from Gandi yet but maybe I can update here if/when it happens.
Maybe I wasn't clear when I said "and I rely on their free email". I do use the free email with every domain I buy with them, but haven't received any communication asking me to pay for them.
I honestly cannot believe the hubris. A 20% price hike and removal of features mid-term. If I don't pay for the email accounts I apparently didn't pay for, I will lose my business email accounts. I get the impression I should just have stuck with : <official sounding>_<country> @ gmail.com and moved on with my life. Maddening.
That comes with its own set of issues when google decides to block your account for reasons only known to their algorithms and there are no humans to talk to. You end up locked out of your business email with no recourse.
Smaller commercial email providers are probably a good balance of competence and reliability (their email service is their revenue source) and better customer service (they have few enough customers that they care more about each of them). Fastmail is often brought up in this category. I think Zoho is pretty good too if you're looking for more of a complete G-suite like offering with other applications. Both of these companies also increasingly feel like more competent or at least better-run software engineering organizations than Google.
Having your own domain you control the MX record. If google locks you out, you can still move to another host for your email on the same day. You don't get your historical email (unless you backed it up with offlineimap or something like that) but at least you still have access and control over the address. Using @gmail.com for your business (or even personal email) is asking for trouble given how notorious google is at locking people out with no recourse and for mysterious reasons.
The problem with Google is that if your account gets blocked/banned for whatever reason, you can just say goodbye to it. Minor companies like Gandi do have human customer service, so there's always the chance to recover the account (and move on to another service one you make a dump of your data and all).
You still own the domain and are free to setup another hosting with the same address. With Gmail if you're banned it's over you lose access to everything and have to manually reach to all your contacts.
For a small business expense and the annoyance of having to extend effort to change something that just works, it was a pretty sensible decision. Now I've got to go down the rabbit hole of playing the free market game for what should just be a damn simple thing. Why is web hosting & email so difficult in 2023!?!
They were awesome. I have been with them over 15 years. But I fear it's time to move on. Still looking for an EU registrar that has modern 2FA (FIDO2) and is large enough to not be a target for takeover anytime soon.
I have quite a few domains with Gandi, using their email service on a few because I'm lazy and it's free. Not sure when (or if) I'll receive notice of this change. Maybe it's regional? Seems most of the comments show £ as currency.
This is going to burn all of their goodwill they accumulated with the "no bullshit" slogan. I will be swiftly moving all my domains, likely to Porkbun.
I've seen the name around recently on HN and people never seem to have much to say other than they use it and it's well priced -- which means to me it's "boring" and that's exactly what I'm looking for.
A boring company who does 1 thing and does it so well that people dont say good or bad, it's so boring they barely notice it because it gets out the way.
I personally use Namecheap and Name.com for a few other domains. My rule of thumb is domain registrars only get to manage my domains. Registrars love to upsell you on email and hosting but in my experience that's where all the bullshit starts. If you just buy a domain, you could go to place like GoDaddy and probably have a decent experience.
EDIT: Just like I said, in the original thread they are talking about Ghandi screwing customers on email inboxes. Follows my rule of "anything outside of domains and the bs starts".
> My rule of thumb is domain registrars only get to manage my domains. Registrars love to upsell you on email and hosting but in my experience that's where all the bullshit starts.
That’s the Unix philosophy applied to service providers.
The same logic applies to why you should have a separate cable modem and WiFi router.
> If you just buy a domain, you could go to place like GoDaddy and probably have a decent experience.
No GoDaddy sucks even as just a registrar because even configuring NS records to host your DNS elsewhere is a terrible UX.
If you search on hacker news there are some people including me who have bad experiences with namecheap, as they threaten to cut off domain itself easily when they get complaints. I am not talking about hosting, but the domain itself.
For any large enterprise client, I recommend against using them.
Right now, I am on Gandi and only use them for domain, even reading this I'd still pick them over namecheap.
I'd say Google. They have incentive not to play games like this as that could jeoparadize their control of .dev and they don't need to juice profits on a minor service.
What? With Gandi and others you get screwed by paying more. With Google you get screwed by losing your account completely not matter if you are willing to pay a million to recover it. Google is the worst by far.
Their lack of support, or rather their "support fails" and their VP and C-suite level hacker news readers consistently offering personal assistance to high profile incidents on HN kind of made them a negative running gag here.
The story on Mastodon is that they are axing free mail boxes that you'd get with every domain registered at Gandi, even if you had paid several years up front.
The original post was someone having registered their domain for many years in advance and Gandi planning to yoink the included email service and replace it with one that they would have to pay extra for
I'd be a lot happier as a long-time GANDI customer if there was any mention of this whatsoever on https://news.gandi.net ... nothing there since 2022. :-(
I didn't get an email, there's no news, and AFAICT this story hasn't been picked up by any other news outlets at all (nothing on Google News at least). There are a couple individual anecdotes, and off topic discussions about domain prices.
Gandi obviously has issues, but is the thing about email real? Are there _any_ sources that can confirm it?
I generally open up https://tld-list.com/ (which lists most registrars for any given TLD, along with the prices). I then choose the cheapest non-shady looking one. Porkbun, NameSilo, and Epik are fine options usually.
ycombinator.com itself is on 81 "Gandi SAS", although they use AWS DNS, so chances are it's through Route53 (since AWS isn't an ICANN registrar, they have other registrars actually handle the registry ops)
Might have to do the same. Been ok with paying slightly higher prices for reliability but I wouln't bet on the latter if they start pulling shit like this even if it doesn't affect me directly.
That's surprising. It seems like it's only partially true:
> AWS provides the Domain Name Registration Services through ICANN-accredited registrars. AWS currently provides Domain Name Registration Services through Gandi SAS , Mesh Digital Limited, Amazon Registrar, Inc., and other ICANN-accredited registrars (the “Registrar”), and your use of the Domain Name Registration Services is subject to their terms. You can identify the Registrar of record for any Registered Name by performing a WHOIS query here . AWS reserves the right to use any ICANN-accredited registrar as the Registrar.
> AWS currently provides Domain Name Registration Services through Gandi SAS , Mesh Digital Limited, Amazon Registrar, Inc., and other ICANN-accredited registrars
The catch is that you must use Cloudflare's nameservers [0]:
6.1 Nameservers. Registrant agrees to use Cloudflare’s nameservers. REGISTRANT ACKNOWLEDGES AND AGREES THAT IT MAY NOT CHANGE THE NAMESERVERS ON THE REGISTRAR SERVICES, AND THAT IT MUST TRANSFER TO A THIRD PARTY REGISTRAR IF IT WISHES TO CHANGE NAMESERVERS.
People generally use 3rd party Nameservers when their Registrar is unreliable or "old school".
Most dot-com era web companies used Network Solutions back in the day - and many still use them. However, DNS updates sometimes take hours, their interface is cumbersome, etc.
It's become quite common to use someone like Cloudflare for Nameserver/DNS duties (among other things) and keep your registrar where you like.
DNSimple is excellent. I don't recommend using Route53, while their GUI and features are good they charge per DNS query. I had someone trying exploit that and ended up with a 100x higher bill than normal in one month. It is impossible to do anything about it except purchase AWS Shield Advanced which costs $3000 per month.
I love EasyDNS - not the cheapest, but the service is EXCELLENT. Over 10 years or so, I've had to call support a couple of times to setup new features, and not only do they answer the phone - but you get a real engineer!
It costs me about $40/year for domain (.org), dns, backup MX/mail spool, and a couple of other bits and pieces. It's been well worth it for the piece of mind.
I've only got just one, but I'm pretty happy with Google. I mean, I know it's Google so there's always the worry they'll get bored with the product, but it works fine and has integration with my Asus router so I can dynDNS my home for my kids' minecraft server.
Isn't the biggest issue with Google that your account could get banned for whatever reason, and then your chances of recover it are under 0.001%? That's the biggest fear imho.
I’ve been using https://hover.com (domains only) for over a decade and have had zero issues. They never bother me and only email for things I’d want to be notified (e.g. domain expiring).
Do they have better invoices? Namecheap (~20 domains there) is a pain when it comes to invoices (they don't send them to you, it's not clear where to find them in the UI, they mix it with transaction receipts, the name of the PDF is off etc.)
Has anyone felt that GoDaddy is doing the same thing? They just switched to Microsoft for domain hosting and email, and it's a mess, and it seems as if all of the free mailboxes are gone including, free forwarding.
Yes, they dumped their basic free email for a 30 day trial of Office365 and an offer to pay monthly for Office365 through them. That's why I moved from GoDaddy to Gandi, so that's annoying.
Thanks for confirmation.
I've been fighting the settings for a few days, in multiple domains. It's not clear. Does look like all free emails are revoked.
Too bad.
This seems short sighted. For just one mailbox per domain, 2.99 per month is 35.88 per year. This will wipe goodwill from an existing loyal customer base very quickly#.
I have 4 domains, each with 2 email addresses. I do not want a 287.04 per year bill, and nor do I want my domains being held hostage for this. I will look to migrate away immediately.
But, I have emailed Gandi to ask them to confirm, since the website doesn't yet reflect this news, and it's not the first time they may be victim of disinformation (action perhaps indicitative of trust built using Gandi).
From their statement it is not really clear if these changes affect new contracts (most probable) or are retroactively extended to existing contracts (not probable).
FTR: I have 20+ domains at Gandi and never used their mail service (I run my own e-mail Server for all those domains since many years) so this change does not affect me.
Check your domain expiration in the whois. For most registries, the domain should keep its expiry, but you would need to pay one year extra when moving them.
As a us customer I have not received any emails about this. I reached out to them asking about it. They gave me the same boiler plate code. Sent back another email say thats basically fraud in the us.
their response
`My bad. I assume the mail you sent was after reading a communication made for
clients paying in £.
You're not impacted by this communication.
We’re currently reviewing our general conditions and pricing policy in each
currency given the fluctuation for the latter which means changes won’t likely
be the same for each currency.
Should a change occur for you; you'll receive a mail from us.`
I asked them to confirm the free email isnt being removed for US customers yet, and if it does a email will be sent out.
their reply
`I can only confirm what I shared with you above.`
inwx supports basically every TLD I've looked at and the acme.sh support will be based on where you have your DNS which can be separate from your registrar (I've used acme.sh on cloudflare, rage4, and many others. I've also used it with a local bind9 DNS server)
Does something exist out there which is equivalent to a domain name for a website (or an any entity) which is independent of a external entities, like DNS or DNS like servers.
I know that in some sense public/private keys in asymmetric cryptography mimic that feature (the public key being the address of the receiver), but is there anything out of the box? Does Tor have a similar feature?
I do understand that this equivalent to which I'm alluding to, may be an unintelligible string of characters, unlike current website user friendly names. I also understand that the underlying ip address change can be a challenge , but probably not an insurmountable one.
When you type a .onion address into your Tor browser, unlike with a regular domain, you are not looking up an IP address on a DNS server. Instead, you are asking a Hidden Service directory, which anybody can volunteer to run.
Not that this isn't a travesty. But it's worth pointing out that my first thought was: I need to bookmark this page to cite every time we end up in another giant front-page argument about "I don't use GMail because I don't trust Google; I have my own domain with some tiny provider with human support where this can never happen."
Meh. The specifics here seem pretty damning, though. Most likely the new owners just didn't understand the older contracts and started rolling out the new business model without review. The end result will probably be just a refund for the affected accounts.
> I need to bookmark this page to cite every time we end up in another giant front-page argument about "I don't use GMail because I don't trust Google; I have my own domain with some tiny provider with human support where this can never happen."
This is about them changing the pricing of their service. The part about doing it to customers who have paid in advance may be fraud, but it's still miles better then google randomly locking you out of your account without recourse. You don't have to use Gandi for your email (why would you even except for it being "free" which you now have learned it is not) and you can transfer your domain to another registrar.
Crap, I was about to move there because the namecheap CEO is too impulsive and still waiting for the explanation of their "third party getting hacked" a few weeks ago. Where do I go now?
Hover has been about as no nonsense as it can get. Not the cheapest, but I'd rather pay a few extra dollars a year to not have to deal with this in the future. I swear I'm the only person I know not constantly switching domain registrars, because I don't want to waste time sweating over maybe tens of dollars a year for something so core to my operations.
The one time many years ago I had to call support for a question a human being answered in 2 rings.
Tucows (which owns Hover) has been around for 30 years. It's likely they'll be around for a long while still.
Name.com is more expensive, but I've never been surprised. Normal ticketing if you do have an issue. No inane chat support, less bloated site and they've never attempted stunt billing.
Sad to see Gandi worsening. It was a fantastic registrar that I recommended to everyone. Now I’m in the process to move everything to cloudflare and porkbun
Just recently I moved a .pn domain (required gandi corporate subscription) to Gandi and they’ll charge me almost double of the at-cost for renewal as the base fee, excluding the corporate subscription. Inquired about this and asked for a refund because I wasn’t satisfied with the service, but that sadly wasn’t granted to me either
I've bought a strangers domain name with a deal to keep hosting their two e-mail addresses. Just set up everything last year and can't easily move off. It now seems that this deal is going to cost me a lot more. I prepaid until 2029.
Their tagline "No Bullshit" seems to no longer apply. I was a good client for over 10 years. Shame, that they don't have a japanese office, but maybe I can do small claims court in taiwan.
I run my own mail server and it is not an easy task.
First you need an un-tainted ip-address/network. Then you need to get it all right with spf, dkim, dmarc, dane etc. One mistake or misconfiguration and emails from your server will at best end up in the junk folder.
Not to mention the server maintenance.
Even if you think you got it all done, you will not be welcome at all recipients (I'm looking at you Microsoft).
It's quite a pain, but I still keep at it because I have the interest and time.
Dont know if its related to the recent changes but I opened a support request that has been open for 3 days now with the only reply being we've transfered you to a different part of the support team. it is related to moving registrar which i can see not being the highest priority but still quite frustrating.
netim replied within 30 minutes of me opening a ticket related to the same issue for context.
To be fair, they have done a good job with that motto for a long time. I've been with them for 10 years and have recommended and praised them for being "no bullshit" on a few occasions, both here on HN and on reddit.
Is migrating domains from Gandi to somewhere else easy/possible? I've had the same domain for years, I used to pay like $20 for five years, but then I forgot to renew, and because I let it expire for a few days, now they are charging me $100/year! Sour taste in my mouth about them even before this...
> I let it expire for a few days, now they are charging me $100/year!
It sounds like your domain name entered the redemption period. The high fee to restore a domain in the redemption period is mandated by the registry, not the registrar. So Gandi is not price gouging; they are required to collect that fee for restoring the domain.
You can’t migrate an expired domain. If you’re still within the redemption period to renew the domain by paying a higher fee, you should choose that (unless you believe nobody else will be interested in that domain name once it becomes available for anyone to purchase).
Once you renew the domain, there is an immediate 60-day (?) period when you cannot transfer the domain elsewhere. So you’d have to wait for that duration and then transfer. You won’t lose out on the expiration date though.
When you transfer the domain to another registrar, you’d have to pay a one year renewal fee, which will extend the ownership of your domain by one more year than what it was before.
Yes, I did it for one domain years ago, it was easy, and it can be done can be done completely online.
Contrary to the other reply, I do NOT recommend calling and doing it over the phone, as in my opinion that will just be slower and prone to accidents by adding a human into an otherwise automated process.
Moving from any registars is possible [1] the process is fairly easy and takes a couple of days . You would need access to admin emails you provided for verification.
The process is free as in gandi won’t charge you to migrate but newer registar might , and also if you DNS or other services the new service provider will likely charge for those.
[1] for .come .net .org and many other popular ones it is, however for some of newer Top level domains (TLD) they may have only one domain registrar and you cannot move. .dev is owned and operated by google alone.
Gandi afaik does not have exclusive access to any significant TLD so it shouldn’t be a problem
> The process is free as in gandi won’t charge you to migrate but newer registar might
The new registrar will charge a fee and the expiration date of your domain will increase by one year. The transfer fee should be roughly the same as the registration and renewal fees. If anything looks fishy, compare with another registrar (starting with common registrar recommendations you see at HN)
One can migrate any of their domains from any registrar to another registrar. I do not have a Gandi account so I don't know where in the UI to find this, but you would need to go into the properties for each domain and first unlock the domain and then get the unlock/transfer code. Use that code in your new registrar to move the domain(s). It is best to do this over the phone with the new registrar to ensure a smoother migration.
I confirm that I received email from Gandi about it a couple of days ago, which is annoying because that's why I moved from GoDaddy to Gandi. It said:
> "What hasn’t changed over the last 20 years is our commitment to serving you, and we will continue doing that every day. In order to serve you in the best way in the future, we are announcing changes to our pricing policy effective April 6th 2023. [...] To ensure we can maintain the highest standards in the future we will stop free mailboxes beyond the first year, and price it at £2.99 per month for standard mailboxes and £5.99 per month for premium mailboxes and we will expand the e-mail offering with [...] Better anti-spam and anti-virus protection"
(Which I'm sure has nothing to do with the uptick in spam I've been receiving the past month or so).
So I guess I will be looking for a new email provider. I have a couple of domains with emails + a lot of custom aliases. Don't care for a web UI since I'm using an email client.
Anyone hosting with runbox.com? What can you tell me about it?
I use Migadu and aside from the meh webmail client that's provided for you (which I can't really complain about), the service is impeccable for individual users.
One of the comments on the mastodon site references bookmyname.com as an alternative with free email boxes (1G). They’re site looks pleasingly last millennium and also says powered by FreeBSD (also pleasing!)
i switched from gandi to porkbun a few years ago and cant recommend them enough. the least crufty domain and dns management site ever too, simple as it should be
My main complaint with gandi is the status page is a lie. Take now for example. You can check email but can’t send. Status page says all is well. Happens a lot.
For good or bad, Google domains does include email forwarding services... Though not sure how much I trust Google for domain registration in the long term.
So, further to recent changes at Gandi, I've just got some more info from support which I've included below. I've purchased domains from Gandi, pre-paying for multiple years of service such that some domains I have don't need renewing until 2027. When I purchased that service the offer was inclusive of 2 mailboxes for the duration of the contract, and now they're planning to remove those inclusive mailboxes and start charging me extra for them from next month.
To me, this sounds like a planned and fully intentional breach of contract.
"We'll start charging for mailboxes from next month. Our current mail offer will end and will be replaced by our new offer: [...]
What’s going to happen going forward ?
Starting from April 6th, you will have the choice to either : - Keep your mailbox and pay accordingly on a monthly basis. - Refuse the offer and you can have the choice to delete the mailbox or migrate your mailbox to another provider. In that case you will have a two months window to migrate before the deletion of your mailbox - Forwarding address remains free
How ? - You will receive ln the 6th of April a mail with a link to make your choice.
How much it will cost for me ? - It will depend on how many active mailboxes you own. A mailbox costs £2,99 so if you have 2 mailboxes, you will be billed £5,98 monthly."