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I have been using Gandi (1) for the last yen years or so and have been very happy with them. I originally went with them because they were one of the few regist

I have been using Gandi (1) for the last yen years or so and have been very happy with them. I originally went with them because they were one of the few registrars that did the .cat TLD. I liked the experience and eventually transferred all of my domains to them. They are a french company. Their slogan is "No Bullshit," (2) and I think they've done a decent job of living up to that. My only frustration has been a situation where I was transferring an existing domain over to them. I wanted to create the zone file ahead of time so that when the transfer happened, there would be an identical zone file ready to go. But they wouldn't allow me to create a zone file for a domain that hadn't transferred over to them yet. Since I'm not doing anything critical with my domains, it was just an annoyance, but that would be a show-stopper for some. As it pertains to billing problems, they allow you to pre-pay a chunk of money to your account. (They take PayPal.) It deducts from that amount when domains renew. That provides a buffer if you need to cancel your credit card. Also, on the occasions that I have created trouble tickets, they have been responded to in a reasonable amount of time with helpful information. (1) https://www.gandi.net https://www.gandi.net (2) https://www.gandi.net/en/no-bullshit https://www.gandi.net/en/no-bullshit

Anthony-G 4y ago
I’ve been a happy customer of Gandi for 6-7 years. I originally chose them because I operate my own DNS server on my VPS and Gandi made it easy to add a glue record for the primary nameserver and they provide a free secondary nameserver¹ but these features wouldn’t be something that 99% of customers need nor want. On that note, their secondary nameserver suited my needs until I started using DNS authentication for Let’s Encrypt wild-card certificates. Their secondary nameserver only supports requesting a full zone transfer (AXFR) every half hour or so. For some reason, they don’t use IXFR or – what would be more useful to me – DNS NOTIFY. This means that the secondary name server lags behind the primary nameserver by about half an hour. This results in the Let’s Encrypt DNS authentication failing randomly, depending on whether they checked the primary or secondary nameserver for the authenticating TXT records. I plan to move the `_acme-challenge.example.com` to a different zone that doesn’t use the secondary nameserver but I haven’t got around to it yet. Otherwise, I’ve been very happy with Gandi. ¹ https://docs.gandi.net/en/domain_names/advanced_users/secondary_nameserver.html https://docs.gandi.net/en/domain_names/advanced_users/second...
DavideNL 4y ago
Curious… i see .eu, .nl, and .de domains on Gandi cost like 3 times as much (€15 vs €5) compared to for example inwx.com or strato.com. What is the reason, surely there must be some service/quality difference or… something?

Anthony-G 4y ago

I’ve been a happy customer of Gandi for 6-7 years. I originally chose them because I operate my own DNS server on my VPS and Gandi made it easy to add a glue record for the primary nameserver and they provide a free secondary nameserver¹ but these features wouldn’t be something that 99% of customers need nor want. On that note, their secondary nameserver suited my needs until I started using DNS authentication for Let’s Encrypt wild-card certificates. Their secondary nameserver only supports requesting a full zone transfer (AXFR) every half hour or so. For some reason, they don’t use IXFR or – what would be more useful to me – DNS NOTIFY. This means that the secondary name server lags behind the primary nameserver by about half an hour. This results in the Let’s Encrypt DNS authentication failing randomly, depending on whether they checked the primary or secondary nameserver for the authenticating TXT records. I plan to move the `_acme-challenge.example.com` to a different zone that doesn’t use the secondary nameserver but I haven’t got around to it yet. Otherwise, I’ve been very happy with Gandi. ¹ https://docs.gandi.net/en/domain_names/advanced_users/secondary_nameserver.html https://docs.gandi.net/en/domain_names/advanced_users/second...

DavideNL 4y ago

Curious… i see .eu, .nl, and .de domains on Gandi cost like 3 times as much (€15 vs €5) compared to for example inwx.com or strato.com. What is the reason, surely there must be some service/quality difference or… something?