I have chosen Gandi.net as my registrar. Whether my choice proves judicious only time will tell. Anyway, you can count on me to report anything worth mentioning.CogitActive
Five years ago, I had to find a reputable, reliable, and reasonably priced registrar for my website(s). Although I based my choice on what makes a good domain registrar (see A registrar), I also considered features beyond domain name registration. Gandi.net’s offer was bundled with services that tip the scales in their favor. Among them, I put a special emphasis on security and privacy features such as WHOIS privacy, Transfer lock, Auto-renewal, Grace period, and Two-factor authentication, among others.
I was also interested in a registrar that would offer dedicated e-mail hosting; I didn’t want to look for a third-party email service. GandiMail was one of the many distinctive features gandi.net had. Their free (as in free of charge when you register your domain name) e-mail service included two mailboxes with 3 GB of disk space each, unlimited aliases, anti-spam and anti-virus protection, and advanced server-side management rules (sieve filters) among other tools.
Five years, or more for the other (very) satisfied clients1, that gandi.net was keeping to their “No Bullshit” tagline, providing the best products and services at the most reasonable prices
indeed. And yet… Their prices were indeed stable (15.60 euros) for several years, but this changed recently with two back-to-back price upsurges – 16.69 euros in 2022 and 18.61 euros in 2023 – leading me to start questioning the reasonable prices
part of the aforementioned statement. When I received an e-mail in June this year, entitled Gandi.net – pricing update
, I started wondering if they had forgotten about their core values.
Gandi, goes from “no bullshit” to “bait and switch”?Antoine Catton
I was far from realizing how bad the content of that e-mail would be.
Dear Customer,
For 20 years, we have strived to provide you with the best tools to manage your online presence. We are constantly improving our platform by adding features and investing in our infrastructure.
Our commitment to you has not changed over the past 20 years and we will, starting this year, strengthen the security of the platform and facilitate the management of our products based on your uses. In addition, telephone support will be introduced to support you in the different stages of your online presence.
We will continue to offer you the widest choice of domain name extensions available, personalized suggestion tools to help you make the best choice of names, but also and above all, by offering you some of the most efficient primary DNS servers in the market (https://dnsperf.com).
Finally, we are committed to developing several new features such as:
• Increase the security of your user accounts, while facilitating their use,
• Set up a proactive notification system to stay informed of the life of your products,
• Strengthen the rights management system of your accounts and organizations,
• Simplify transfer procedures, to ensure better continuity of service,
• Propose a new optimized messaging service, adapted to your needs with:
• A larger storage space for your mailbox (from 3 GB to 10 GB),
• Backup and redundancy services, for greater autonomy in the event of a problem,
• Reinforcement of our anti-spam and anti-virus protection systems,
• An advanced search system in your emails,
• And a security management interface is available for each of your e-mail addresses.
An acceptable justification for yet another increase… But, instead of reading something in the line “For these reasons, we are updating our pricing policy for all of our products …”, the rest of the email was of a completely different nature.
To be continued…
1 Gandi was founded in 1999. ^