As a long-time client of Gandi.net (the domain web registrar and hosting company), I was a bit surprised when they were acquired by another company with a somewhat bad reputation, but I gave them a chance nonetheless. Then they doubled their prices for domain renewals.

We manage a lot of domains on Gandi. In the past, their prices were a bit higher, but they offered a good DNS service, and their strategies around renewals and upselling were reasonnable.

Now that I have been moving many domains out of Gandi, I noticed a few dark patterns emerge, similar to what Network Solutions does.

For example, you could previously unlock and transfer a domain on the same day. Now, for “security reasons”, there is a 72 hour delay to unlock a domain. You don’t exactly know when it will unlock. They say it’s max 72h. You might be doing a last minute transfer before the renewal date, and you won’t have enough time to unlock then transfer, so you will end up renewing for another year.

Also note that your domain will randomly unlock, and somehow that is not more secure, because the minute it will unlock, you will jump on the opportunity to do the transfer. Of course, when you do transfer with a transfer code, they still send an email to the domain owners asking them to confirm the transfer (which is fine). So if the account was hacked (as they claim they are protecting against), you could catch it at that point.

And then, once the domain is transfered to another registrar, they still display alerts that your domain is about to expire. Fortunately they don’t try to make you pay for a domain that has already been transfered out, but they tempt you do also renew other domains soon to expire.

Anyway, I’m sad about the money grab. We would have accepted a small price increase, but not a 100% increase. Their DNS service is good, but there are many other registrars with a good-enough DNS service.

We migrated our domains to OVH. Our requirements were: non-US-based, supports multi-org logins (one login per staff) and has an API for automating DNS record changes. OVH is a wee bit clunky, but it works, and the prices are reasonnable. If you prefer a US-based company, we recommend CloudFlare.