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Comment by breput | Hacker News Reader

The text in the link was sent to Gandi users via email today, although they purposefully buried the significant domain registration price increases with the GandiMail bs text.

The actual price increases are listed here[0].

For example, currently a .com domain can be renewed for $17.75/year (tax inclusive - I personally renewed a .com domain for the maximum of 4 years tonight). After the increase this will be $23.99/year (26% increase).

I've been a long time (sometime prior to 2007) Gandi customer and ignored previous discussion concerns[1], but this will be the last time I renew my domains with Gandi. The v4->v5 user interface change was painful at first, but they have fixed most of those UX issues - at least as far as the DNS support, which is all I really use. But their service is definitely not worth the premium.

[0] https://www.gandi.net/static/documents/2023-july-usd-renew-p...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35080777

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They got me, I thought the price hikes were specifically for things I didn't care about, because of all of the gandimail stuff. Without HN I wouldn't have even noticed.

Looking at my last invoice, I paid ~£26/year for a .info domain. If I'm reading this right, it's now ~£36/yr.

That's a ~40% increase.

Glad I renewed for nine years last year.

> Glad I renewed for nine years last year.

Given the speed with which Gandi is circling down the drain I won't be surprised if they annul that renewal at some point later on.

Aren't domain registrations ultimately kept by the registry (e.g. Verisign for .com) not the registrar. If you transfer your domain, you don't forfeit far out expiry dates?

They can't. The registration expiration date is managed at the registry (and they've already paid the registry for all of those years).

Better check this at the registry. I've noticed that this group of companies has a new policy regarding domain renewal: let the client pay at date X and update the registry just within hours before the domain expires. Paying 9 nine years in advance might just result in the obligation of this company to renew the domain 9 times for you, unless you move out of course.... Dark patterns is becoming the standard.

This seems like it would be a violation of the registry's/ICANN's contract. Do you have more info on this?

.com are $9.73 / year on PorkBun, and they renews at $9.73

Not affiliated, just a happy customer.

I love Porkbun too. I don't generally praise companies online, but their prices and UX are just so good and effortless...

I'm fan of Porkbun.com too. Low prices and more important, smooth working services.

I moved to Porkbun after some HN post a few months back, just a single .me domain but it was quick and easy. Happy so far.

Agreed, Porkbun is so reasonable I've purchased extra domains I don't even really need

I can see how for some people, it might make sense to pay the higher prices if they also get value from their email services and/or DNS hosting.

I run my own name server on my VPS so I chose Gandi because they provide free secondary name servers – but then discovered that their secondary name servers don’t support NOTIFY (or IXFR). Instead they make an AXFR transfer on a fixed schedule – that’s too slow for Let’s Encrypt DNS authentication.

So far, I’ve stayed with them because I don’t have many domains registered and I appreciate their commitment to security of user accounts: the ability to lock domains, and MFA support. These are now standard but I also have my account to set up to only allow logins from various IP network ranges.

Edit: Also, their web interface for managing domains was intuitive and easy-to-use (no dark patterns). It was particularly easy to configure glue records for my primary name server.

Same situation here. I don't think I'll be eating these price increases. Never tried a domain transfer before. First time for everything I guess.

$18 for a .com is pricy enough as it is... you can get them for much cheaper.

There are value adds included in the price, such as DNS hosting and maybe email stuff, although some of that is going away along with the price increase.

That is still not worth $17.75/yr

This is on top of them being 100% more expensive for some TLDs than their competitors. Sadly it looks like it's time to find a new registrar.

$17.75 and $23.99 are both insane, I pay $9.15/yr

Holy moly yes those prices are wild. I pay something similar for dot com.

I just looked and dot io is $70 a year! I pay around $40.

Do you happen to know what are Grilles / Grids in the price list?

I also have no clue what these mean, kinda driving me crazy, let me know if you find out

They offer different rates based on the previous purchases volume: https://docs.gandi.net/en/billing/price_rates/index.html

Thanks, I missed that too as I was focused on the email stuff.

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