gandi has steadily been moving to unusable pickpocketing since they were bought out by Total Webhosting Solutions, which immediately did the standard venture capital thing of charging the maximum for everything possible and burn any amount of good will. They've presumably been ratcheting up these fees to try and show a profit and it's only going to continue to get worse as people move to competitively priced options. I can't imagine they're attracting many new customers given the landscape.
I started to do the tedium of migrating away once they announced they would start charging for email and regress services that were once provided for free (which was a large selling part for me). I've been very happy with porkbun + fastmail.
It sucks that I had to move off webfaction when godaddy bought them, but at least the old dudes from there started opalstack I could use with a similar experience/price and dedication.
My friend recommended gandi for the domain service, which was fine for the past few years but now this TWS buyout happened. I was worried when enshittification would ensure, and here we goooo.
I think I am gonna check out porkbun, that looks like a decent plan (hopefully they don't succumb to buyouts etc in the future).
Yeah, to be fair Gandi was excellent until the buyout. That free email was such a nice perk
Moved all my stuff to porkbun.
Gandi was looking great a few years ago. Now they just milk their customers, calculating that many will be too lazy to leave. I was surprised how easy it is these days to move a domain. Hope porkbun won’t play the same game on me 5 years from now.
> Now they just milk their customers, calculating that many will be too lazy to leave.
I have to admit... Why even bother moving? I'm not happy with a 60% price raise but it's still complete peanuts to me. And only half of my domains are at Gandi.
It's lame of me but I'll probably just pay.
Why stay? A domain transfer is cheaper than continuing service. What justification do they have for a 60% price hike (which is likely a much higher increase in their margin over the registry + ICANN fee)?
Yeah, in my case it’s not about .com domains. Last year they also removed their free included email hosting and asked some ridiculous price to not delete my mailboxes.
So it’s more that I’m no longer expecting good things to come from them. but, on the contrary, bad things, and a requirement of having to make decisions about things that I thought had been “set and forget”.
Has been discussed a few times on HN already. I moved everything off Gandi after the buyout but can’t say I’m thrilled with my alternative. Domain registration is the business of bottom feeders.
porkbun is good and I felt much the same way until I started working with them. I've also heard good things about AWS Route 53
Porkbun is my alternative to Gandi lol. The last email they sent me contained a dark pattern and PII leakage.
Seriously? I won't doubt you, I just haven't seen that myself. I really hope that's not a sign of things to come.
Any recommendations for the best registrar for someone in the UK?
I'd ideally like custom DNS entries (so I can import my zone from Gandi) and DNSSEC support, but i guess it's not essential.
I’m not aware of any UK-based registrars that rival US registrars such as Porkbun on both price and service, but there’s also no reason not to use those providers regardless of where you’re located.
Why not use Cloudflare. This blog has more details. https://neetohq.neetopublish.com/posts/best-place-to-buy-a-d...
Can't you keep using Gandi for DNS but still switch registrars?
Any suggestions of where to move to? I have several domains with Gandi from back when they were decent, but the prices have gone up so much recently, even before this newest increase.
porkbun is still a classic "good" company of "we just want to do this one thing and only this one thing and it's clear what you're getting"
Porkbun has many services besides domain registration. They presumably don't profit on their registration business, and use it as a loss leader (like cloud flare or Amazon does). Namecheap is what I think of when I think of a primarily registrar focused business.
Cloudflare Domains is the cheapest.
You can also transfer domain to CloudFlare, extend it here and then transfer it elsewhere.
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I'll always recommend Hover. Excellent company
Strong disagree. I forgot to renew a domain a while ago and contacted their customer support. They asked $150 for a domain renewal. Registered domain somewhere else for $10. Moved away from Hover since then.
We looked at Cloudflare, porkbun, Namecheap and GoDaddy. Cloudflare is the best. Detailed write up at https://neeto.com/blog/best-place-to-buy-a-domain-without-ge....
Please post a comment incase you want something else to be added. We will update the blog.
Do you mention that Cloudflare requires that you use them as the DNS host for your domain? That I'd one of the biggest asterisks of Cloudflare's service.
Hover, the Tucows retail registrar, is probably a good one to add.
Lots of folks around here like PorkBun for whatever reason.
https://domainnamewire.com/2024/01/03/the-biggest-20-domain-...
Not OP, but I'm aware that cloud flare requires you to use then as a dns host to use them as a cdn, or related features.. is it also the case that using them as a registrar, you must also use them as a dns host?
Yes.
Cloudflare Registrar is only available for customers that use Cloudflare as their authoritative DNS provider
https://developers.cloudflare.com/registrar/get-started/regi...
These cloudflare dns policies make it painful to use their services.
I have a client, I'd like to migrate some stuff to cloudflare from AWS. But I'm just not going to do it unless I can migrate very incrementally.
And I can't migrate to their registrar without their DNS, and I can't migrate to their CDN without their DNS on my root-domain. Ugh! I really want to be able to give Cloudflare a try, but this really just isn't feasible.
I'm surprised at the lack of love for Route53 domains. By far the least maintenance registrar, good prices, Route53 hosting itself is great too with rock-solid-stable SDKs for programming it, good tooling support for LE.
Completely set and forget with auto renewals.
Route53 domains uses gandi as a registrar, so their prices go up when gandi’s go up
Free idea:
A site with all the domain costs per hoster, then allow the user to state what number of domains they have (e.g. 3 .COMs, 12 .IOs, 4 .ORGs, etc.) and have the site spit out the costs of registration and hosting per web host, sortable by final pricing.
Cloudflare does them at ICANN cost and you get access to easy integration with all the cloudflare stuff. Free whois anonymization, email routing, pages, etc.... Porkbun is also decent. Namecheap jacked up their rates also.
And Cloudflare gets to demand you pay $150,000 within 24 hours or they'll delete your domain name. No thank you.
Do you have a source for this?
Likely https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808
We only have one side of the story, and it seems like Cloudflare could have communicated better. But I have no sympathy for anything related to gambling.
A $112 for .io tld?! I remember it was 20 something back in 2014!
We just moved all our domains and client domains off of Gandi, and we were a tier D reseller. Very sad to see this level of blatant price gouging after all these years.
Since I'm buying my VPS from OVH, I also bought the domain here. Was this a blunder? Their .net are 13 then 18 €/year (incl. the 20% VAT).
It is not a bad idea. You can always transfer if you find a better price or service. I like Namecheap personally.
Meanwhile, I went for coffee at three different places in a row that used new TLDs. .bar .coffee and... .cafe perhaps?
There's a shift happening.
Is name cheap still good
They can make it pretty hard to find the actual renewal price on domains in some cases.
If the domain is currently being sold at a "normal price", the search page will show the normal registration price and the renewal price. But if there's a promotional discount for the domain, the search page will show the promotional price and the normal registration price (to show how much of a savings you're getting), with no mention of the renewal price.
It's been a few years since I bought a domain from them so this could have changed since then.
They recently increased their domain renewal pricing, and as others have said they don't make those prices very easy to find. I moved some .co.uk domains to them a couple of years ago and was surprised when my first bill came in. Their prices look ok for the first year but less so after that.
Having said that they are easy to use, and I've never had a problem managing my domains through them.
Hasn’t been good for years
In what way?
I usually go with them, better prices than most places decent search and a functional UI. Not amazing but neither is anyone else I've found.
Yeah seems fine. Some people got upset that they were boycotting Russia or something, but those people can be ignored.
It's perfectly reasonable for current customers and potential customers to be concerned and cautious when a company shows a willingness to resort to knee-jerk reactions, especially when such reactions can suddenly harm the customer and are due to something that the customer has no control or influence over.
The company involved doesn't matter, and the reason for the knee-jerk reaction doesn't matter. It's a business practice that all customers should definitely watch out for and take seriously, even if they haven't been affected by it (yet).
Knee jerk reaction? Their country almost got toppled by a dictatorship.
Namecheap at the same time said it had over 1,000 employees located in Ukraine, comprising most of its support staff, mostly in Kharkiv (which was a major location of fighting).
How were their customers harmed? They could have transfered their domain within the two week grace period.
I see no need for them to worry.
Any customer they'd want to have understands that it wasn't a knee-jerk action by any stretch. Rather that it's just something that (responsible) companies have to do once they realize that overarching conditions have emerged that make it simply untenable to keep doing business in certain environments -- completely irrespective of the conduct of any business or individuals in that environment.
Like when there's just too much corruption in a certain country. Or that country starts going on old-school (and very large scale) military campaigns against its neighbors.
So if anything their better customers will not only instantly understand their decision, but will hold them in incrementally higher esteem for it.
It's weird. Usually when a company announces an ethical stance to avoid doing business in ways that support unjust wars, we applaud it, but when a company actually stops doing business in a way that would send money to continue unjust wars, we suddenly decry it.
Oh yeah, no, that's ridiculous. I'm moving.