Comment by motrm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by motrm | Hacker News Reader

As some comments have mentioned the pricing will increase for domain names too, not very explicit in their email on Tuesday evening "Gandi.net - Update":

  Domains

  We remain committed to offering you the largest portfolio of TLDs,
  customized TLD suggestions and best-in-class anycast-level primary
  DNS servers. In addition, we will step-up our effort to unburden you
  by introducing new managed features: 

    Advanced and easy to use account security
    Proactive notifications on changes and important events
    Better rights management
    Easier domain transfers with continuity of service
    Best-in-class anycast-level secondary DNS servers

  You can find the associated new pricing for your domains here[0].

Renewing a .com at these new prices is now £24 per year inclusive of tax and .uk domains £12.

Annoyingly my previous registrar raised prices last year and I thought that, hey, I'll pay a few quid extra and support Gandi as they generally have a decent reputation. Now with this move I'm the fool!

Like others in this thread I've moved to Porkbun, the .com renewals are now about £8.50 and .uk about £5.50 which is much more reasonable and much closer to their cost price.

I'd like my registrar to make a reasonable amount of profit to make staying in business worthwhile but that doesn't make sense when the registrar wants to double or triple the pricing for their bottom line.

Shame, but there we go.

[0] https://www.gandi.net/static/documents/2023-march-gbp-renew-...

Gandi was always a premium provider at premium prices. But I was pitched them, years ago, by someone who knew someone at the company that they were worth the extra price... because there would be no BS. No hidden pricing, no sniping of domains based on searching for them, all that. Everything in this thread, frankly, is a breach of that trust.

I mean they got sold. A company is only as honest as who currently runs it.

Same thing with people saying "I trust company X with my data." Do you also trust the next 4 CEOs and the next 10 governments who will have authority over them?

I fully agree, I paid more for years because they provided email hosting, and more importantly they were seen as trusted all around.

Now with this move I have no reason left to pay extra, I'll renew somewhere else.

I'm a bit upset that I learn about this on HN too, I wonder when I'll get an email. They didn't even update their own website yet.

> I'd like my registrar to make a reasonable amount of profit to make staying in business worthwhile

Ditto. Moved 11 domains from Gandi to Porkbun today. But... for the lot of them, Porkbun was only $9 more than Cloudflare, which charges straight wholesale prices and takes no profit.

I'm glad Porkbun isn't gouging, but less than $1/domain/year markup still feels a bit thin and leaves me worried that I'll be doing this dance again in a few years.

Based on advice here I just tried Porkbun. A not-quite-professional website that prefers making jokes to fixing layout bugs, I try to sign up and the symbols in my password cause it to fail with a 403 (!!). I'm super scared about their technical abilities and general security. Are we going to see another Gandi 6 mo down the line?

Domains are the keys to the internet atm, it would be nice to see someone take it seriously.

Edit: I guess I'll try realtimeregister, since I haven't seen anything negative and they support U2F per Yubikey's catalog.

Edit2: Cool, cool, when you sign up they assign you a non-random password which anyone can use to log in and view your personal information.

Edit3: Others with u2f support that aren't MAMAA: Cloudflare (close), OVH, DNSimple (accounts are $60/year)

I've been using Porkbun for years and it's been great. Good prices, reliability, security, and they don't push nonsense add-on services on you like a lot of other domain providers.

> Porkbun [...] .uk about £5.50

Porkbun do .uk domains now? TIL!

I moved some domains from Gandi to Porkbun before as part of a plan to ditch Gandi and when I asked (almost 3 years ago to the day), they didn't support .uk.

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