Your.Online: Gandi continues its development | Hacker News Reader

Your.Online: Gandi continues its development

news.gandi.net

16 pointsrft50 comments

I used to recommend Gandi, now I recommend NOT using it. The "no BS" sounds good but they do the same marketing BS as any others, and some times worse:

- How to delete a domain? Well, you cannot. You are supposed to let it expire, so you get ransaked by all the emails reminding you to renew a domain (a HIGH alert notification by nature which you should never ignore) but now you have to double/triple check every time to make sure it was about a domain you "WANT" to expire. Congrats, you mixed the highest priority emails with the lowest priority ones and trained people to ignore them.

- When buying a domain there's some extra services Heissenberged into your Cart. To be fair, they appear in your cart but I'm not sure if they are added or not, since there's a check and a X next to them, so just in case you have to manually remove the extra BS they (maybe) "add" to your cart.

This is prob no BS but Gandi is a domain registrar, when I log in it takes me to a page full of internal ads (a useless "Dashboard") instead of the domain screen. Please, just take me to my domains, that's like your whole thing.

I've been using Gandi for years and I'm looking for a new registrar. Which one(s) are you recommending ?

Porkbun has been good for me, just a couple domains though.

I've moved a few of my domains from Gandi to Cloudflare, though their selection of available TLDs is somewhat limited and until recently you couldn't register domains directly. I was considering moving back to Gandi from Cloudflare, but looks like I'll have to look around... again.

Me too. Moved everything to Namesilo and it just works. Now, if one wants Full Blown BS, they should choose Namecheap [1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506581

As a long time customer of Gandi, I've never seen "extra services Heissenberged into [my] cart" when buying domains from them. Would be an instant red-flag, but here we are...

Okay they have changed the wording a bit and now it's a bit more clear that hosting was not actually added to my cart, that it's a discount that I can remove for Hosting and not actual hosting (why is a discount even added to my cart though?). It used to be a bit more unclear, and the "trash" icon besides the "X" icon is also pretty weirdly placed IMHO, but yeah at least the wording is slightly better now:

"Your first yearly web hosting subscription is 50% off. This offer cannot be applied to your shopping cart" (then why did you add it???).

https://imgur.com/a/u7Kjgj7

> you get ransaked by all the emails reminding you to renew a domain

Just saw the 'Let a domain lapse' section in the domain overview. It'll stop all non-mandatory reminders of the domain's end-of-life cycle, as they say.

There's no mention of that at all in the "How can I delete a domain?" section though. Guess what normal people (like me) google when they want to remove an domain? "Delete domain gandi" or "Remove domain gandi", which ends you up here:

https://docs.gandi.net/en/domain_names/faq/deletion.html

Oh yeah, they're way behind on that! It took them this long just to acknowledge the new email plans on the website I don't even care any more.

Expect 50 to 200% price increases within a year or so, it is what TWS has been doing with all hosting parties they acquired.

For example, PCExtreme had simple dynamic hosting for 1.95 EUR/month before acquisition [1]. Current pricing after a rebrand is 4.99 EUR/month [2] and in turn you get 1/10th of the storage and traffic.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180831051543/https://www.pcext... [2]: https://www.versio.nl/webhosting

We are changing our brand to your.online but also we're not changing our name or brand.

How is this "no BS"? It feels like someone is being paid specifically to BS. Either you're changing your brand or you're.. advertising a new product? Except the new product is a merger of two companies? But one of them stays autonomous.. I dunno what it is, but it definitely stinks like BS.

I have no real horse in this race, but it'd be nice to know if I need to update my client domains spreadsheet to show your.online rather than Gandi. I'm guessing not but if that's the case why did I just read this article?

Gandi blew trust in its offerings for me with the sudden change in charging for emails.

So I don't use Gandi for anything any more now, and write the odd comment about that, which is a shame as they did seem a decent enough company and provided a service I was happy to pay a little more than elsewhere for.

I have multiple domains on gandi, with the free email, and havent received any notification of this. When renewal is due can I expect they will start charging me?

You only get a year of email so it will be before renewal unless you only bought a year.

I find this hard to parse. Is there even a link to your.online in there?

Are they announcing a merger or a new product?

I'm unsure. If it were for me gandi would stay as they always were, I don't want any change. I've been using them for over a decade and am happy as it is.

Press release says that it's a merger.

>Gandi SAS (“Gandi”) and Total Webhosting Solutions B.V. (“TWS”), today announced their merger and the creation of Your.Online: a leading European online services platform supporting businesses of all sizes in realizing and scaling their online ambitions. Both Gandi and TWS are leading domain name and webhosting companies together serving over one million customers across Europe and the USA.

Almost every acquisition press release nowadays says its a merger.

I used to use Uniregistry, but it was bought by GoDaddy. Previously I used Gandi, but they managed to destroy their reputation really quickly.

Is there any good registrar out there where I could move my domains to?

Uniregistry was really great, I wish GoDaddy didn't buy them.

What's the latest with Namecheap? I use/like them (and Gandi) but I'm not a very active user so maybe things have changed over the years.

See for yourself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506581

I've been a happy user of Fabulous.com for almost 2 decades now. Pretty happy, but it's designed for large domain name holders. I don't recall getting any ads ever. Easy to manage a lot of domains and if you qualify for low pricing, it's fantastic.

Like I frequently¹ advise²:

Don’t look to large, well-known registrars. I would suggest that you look for local registrars in your area. The TLD registry for your country/area usually has a list of the authorized registrars, so you can simply search that for entities with a local address.

Disclaimer: I work at such a small registrar, but you are not in our target market.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095499

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507784

I don't really use local TLDs though.

Then you’ll have to use some other way to find local registrars in your area.

CloudFlare. They provide domain names at wholesales rates (no commission in between). No upselling, no spam emails. 've Been a happy customer since the time they introduced their domain name registration (and transfer) services.

> Cloudflare Registrar is only available for customers that use Cloudflare as their authoritative DNS provider (also known as a full setup).

No thanks.

I did the dance at the last Gandi article. There's one answer: Dnsimple ($60/year).

Cloudflare doesn't allow you to point NS elsewhere, which sucks if you're moving stuff. Porkbun died on symbols in my password (figured it out via trial and error) and their marketing is kind of juvenile. realtimeregister exposed my personal info. I think OVH might also support 2FA but I didn't try them.

I don't think there's any others that allow security token 2FA.

Thanks for the recommendation, but it's extremely expensive just for domain registration. I have about 50 domains, and I run my own DNS, so I wouldn't make use of their DNS solution anyway.

I mean, I agree. But at this point I just didn't want to deal with sketchy providers any more, so $60 it is.

What is your.online? Is it https://your.online/ ?

> We unite teams of local builders who can realize and scale any online ambitions globally.

> Your.Online is a team of pioneers from all over the world united by the passion of helping businesses succeed online. Our teams of local experts provide highly standardized managed services to high-intent customers to reach their full online potential. We cherish our successful track record in acquiring, developing, and empowering strong local brands to lead their markets.

> What we believe in: A world where all online possibilities are made possible.

...what?

Your online what? That name is super weird.

Maybe they thought it's spelled "your" instead of "you're".

Hilarious if true

Ye, that would be funny...

I think a better name could have been ur.online, but maybe .online doesn’t allow two char tld.

With that being written, "your" wasn't the best choice from my point of view.

"Your online" domain name and webhosting services, I guess.

>Both Gandi and TWS are leading domain name and webhosting companies together serving over one million customers across Europe and the USA.

Wait until you see me register "mine.offline".

Seriously though, that's what us, native french speaker, do: we cannot translate even the simplest of the simple sentence to english.

"you're online" or "yours, online" would have made some sense but, no. It had to be "your online". Because we speak french.

After using Gandi for a brief moment I switched to Namecheap many many years ago and never looked elsewhere. Everything just works, they don't send random marketing emails to upsell something and it just feels like a boring company. Which is exactly what I'm looking for in a domain registrar.

I never had any issues of the like with Gandi.

This "merger" has me concerned, but if their TLD offering doesn't change at all, we're still good imo.

sorry, after the mid-term contract email change I moved all my domains

and won't be coming back

Where did you go to? I'm in a similar boat.

Personally, moved most domains I manage to Cloudflare or Porkbun a while back, and use Zoho for emails

I'll be moving my domain to Porkbun and my emails to zoho to start with, then decide what to do later on.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Can someone recommend a registrar that has all the tlds that Gandi supports? I actively use .gg, .ch, .ai, .be, .eu…

Check Porkpun, Namecheap, and Namesilo.

Only namecheap supports .ch of all those. And namecheap doesn't support .be :/

Wouldn't it be more suitable if they name it "yours.online"?

I find "your.online" very weird name.

My guess when I read your.online was that it is similar to Apple’s “find my”.

Find My from my understanding is basically a way to put three apps in one: find my {devices, people, items}.

So I read find my as find my ______. Not sure if this is the intention but my guess is your online could mean your online ________? Like your online identity, your online brand, your online business, your online services?

> Find My is an asset tracking app and service provided by Apple Inc.[1] that enables users to track the location of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS devices, AirPods, AirTags and a number of supported third-party accessories through a connected iCloud account.[2] Users can also share their GPS locations to others with Apple devices and view the location of others who choose to share their location. Find My was released alongside iOS 13 on September 19, 2019,[3][4] merging the functions of the former Find My iPhone (known on macOS devices as Find My Mac) into a single app.[5][6] On watchOS, Find My is separated into three different applications: Find Devices, Find People and Find Items.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Find_My

Btw, off topic but I’ve never heard of this other entity Gandi is merging with and the only reason I even know about gandi is it is in the install and set up steps of Mozilla thunderbird.

customer here: Next time I renew my domain, hope they finished the noscript/basic (x)html port of their admin web interface.

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