Comment by djmobley
6 years ago
Gandi have something of a cult following, but in my only experience with them they literally lost my domain name during an inbound transfer.
Their response was awful and rude and completely unprofessional. I never got my domain back.
Based on that experience, this incident doesn’t surprise me at all.
I’ve always been a little confused about their cult following given their unfriendly terms — arbitrary domain cancellation based on adult material for example — which are fair terms to have if that’s their ethics but it seems at odds with the typical pro freedom expectations many people in technology hold.
They put a rude word on their homepage, that makes them edgy and cool and anti-corporation!
"No bullshit" is up there on my corpro-speak charts right along with "synergy" and "innovation".
Everyone's website says they're "no bullshit". It's all bullshit.
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It was founded by pioneers of the Internet in France who where involved in non-profit/hacker/open source circles, which is where it got its cult following from.
But at the end of the day it's a cheap provider with, ahem, French-style support so I'm not sure what people were expecting out of them.
Any details on this? All I found while searching for this was Gandi explicitly advertising gTLDs designed for adult content...
Do they have that in their terms? Independently of that, do they have a history of doing that?
Why do they have a cult following? I never heard about them and reading all this here, I cannot say I understand why anyone uses them at all.
Edit; I use (and have been for a very long time) namecheap for registration and (recently) Cloudflare for DNS. I used to host all DNS myself, but that became a bit of a pain with many domains as that's definitely not my core business.
They were a freenode sponsor.
I very recently transferred a few domains to Gandi, and they also managed to lose one. I had to contact their customer support and they were able to restore it - it was all very strange. Combined with this incident and their responses on social media I'm getting the feeling that I should move them elsewhere again...
what can you recommend as an alternative?
For domain registrations I use a mix of Namecheap, Cloudflare, GoDaddy and Name.com, and haven’t had issues with any of them.
Gandi is the only domain registrar I’ve had an issue with.
I've been burned by both Namecheap and GoDaddy, along with losing a few domains in the infamous registerfly scam in the early or mid 00s. Namecheap may have been simple cock up, rather than systemic pattern of intentionally fucking over every customer. Avoid GoDaddy at all costs.
I consider GoDaddy to be one of the worst companies in existence, as bad as anyone else you can think of, as free of corruption as current ICANN and as fraudulent as registerfly. Clients looking at available domains have found them immediately registered and squatted at {hundreds}% markup. Their incompetence lost me a few domains, and several freelance clients reported similar -- all of whom were paying vastly over the odds for what they were getting. GoDaddy make Gandi look an exemplar of ideal behaviour for behaving as people are reporting in this HN post.
Their previous CEO had domain squatting and a complete lack of personal ethics as sidelines. That's quite apart from their horrific upsells making a simply renewal a 22 page nightmare of deeply dark patterned "no" clicks against atrocious value "offers".
> Namecheap, Cloudflare, GoDaddy and Name.com
Avoid GoDaddy at all costs!
GoDaddy at least is very customer support focused AFAIK.
https://www.namesilo.com/
ditto
Been using iwantmyname for the past few years. Smooth sailing all the way.
easyDNS for domains
Keeping registrar and hosting separated seems like a good idea.
In the year 2020, it's becoming increasingly impossible to trust anyone to do nearly anything (in my opinion of course).
The courts are too expensive. The culture of taking pride in one's work maybe is disappearing.
For the most crucial parts of doing business/living life, we are required to trust someone else. For example, I can't just go and make my own cell phone tower or ICANN.
And yet I can't even trust those entities to get it right.
Decreasing trust increases transaction costs.
There's got to be a measurable (negative) economic impact.