[HN Gopher] Gandi March 9, 2025 incident postmortem
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       Gandi March 9, 2025 incident postmortem
        
       Author : wilsonfiifi
       Score  : 37 points
       Date   : 2025-05-05 11:10 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (news.gandi.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (news.gandi.net)
        
       | jsheard wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | shinryuu wrote:
         | Just transferred away the other day.
        
         | sampullman wrote:
         | There aren't many registrars that support one of the TLDs I
         | use, but I've moved everything else.
        
         | kettleballroll wrote:
         | What alternative can you recommend?
        
           | SG- wrote:
           | https://porkbun.com
        
           | jsheard wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | gpjt wrote:
           | Another one leaving for Porkbun here.
        
           | nicoburns wrote:
           | Namecheap are reliable and well-priced
        
             | someotherperson wrote:
             | But their ethics are rock bottom. So maybe use of the many
             | competitors mentioned here instead of giving money to this
             | outfit.
        
               | sillysaurusx wrote:
               | Any proof? Or... anything?
        
               | nicoburns wrote:
               | Do you have more information on this? First I've heard of
               | this.
        
               | someotherperson wrote:
               | 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/const
               | ant...
               | 
               | 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...
        
           | VWWHFSfQ wrote:
           | I've been using Tucows/Hover since forever. never even a
           | single problem
        
           | Sanzig wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | Faaak wrote:
           | infomaniak: swiss & cheap
        
           | srhngpr wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | pinebox wrote:
             | nearlyfreespeech.net
        
         | kgwxd wrote:
         | 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?
        
           | internetter wrote:
           | Cloudflare (at cost), or porkbun
        
           | noinsight wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | wyan wrote:
           | OVH is pretty fairly priced, includes the DNS zones, and is
           | EU based
        
         | avsm wrote:
         | 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.
         | 
         | [1] https://your.online/press-release/
        
           | keehun wrote:
           | 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?
        
             | Forbo wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | tobltobs wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | jsheard wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | maeln wrote:
               | And their mailbox offering is also overpriced.
               | 5.99EUR/month (and it use to be pricier! they recently
               | decreased the price) for 10Go and very basic email
               | features. Fastmail is 5EUR for 60Go, masked email, and a
               | few other things (not in the EU tho).
        
               | genewitch wrote:
               | 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!
        
               | kemotep wrote:
               | 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?
        
             | sombragris wrote:
             | I am transferring all my domains away from them. This is
             | too much of a hike.
        
               | rom16384 wrote:
               | What registar do you recommend? I used Gandi because it
               | was a no-nonsense registar, even if a bit more expensive.
        
               | homebrewer wrote:
               | Cloudflare sells domains at cost, if you can stomach
               | them.
        
               | arcanemachiner wrote:
               | Porkbun is cheap as well, and has the bonus feature of
               | not being Cloudflare.
        
               | pengaru wrote:
               | I've been happy with https://www.dynadot.com/ lately
        
               | sombragris wrote:
               | 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.
        
           | a2tech wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | ademarre wrote:
           | 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...
        
         | ziml77 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | urtrs wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | paulv wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | insane_dreamer wrote:
         | 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).
        
       | thegeekpirate wrote:
       | https://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).
        
       | workfromspace wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | latchkey wrote:
       | Switching to ceph probably isn't the flex they think it is.
        
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       (page generated 2025-05-05 23:02 UTC)