[tikkun]

There was a thread about alternatives on HN [1]. The top mentioned ones were: Porkbun, Namecheap, Dynadot, Cloudflare, Nearlyfreespeech, Gandi.

I've used Porkbun, Namecheap, and Gandi. Namecheap is my preferred. Porkbun is fine, Gandi I would prefer to not use again. I haven't tried Dynadot or Cloudflare's domains (but I love Cloudflare's DNS).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37099102

[pdw]

Gandi was sold earlier this year. The new owners do not have a good reputation.

[rapind]

Wasn’t Gandi’s whole schtick an ethical thing? Then they sold out?

[mypetocean]

Not saying this is what happened necessarily, but sometimes as a startup, you find yourself in a position where you must either sell to someone/anyone or the business must shut down (and you're left with the debt and with long-loyal early employees/friends whose equity you were never able to pay off).

I was a founding member of a social enterprise startup which ended up in a position very similar to that.

In our case, we were lucky that we had two options to sell: (A) to an investor who wanted to pervert our mission, vision, and values for profit; or, (B) to a nonprofit who didn't have the money to give us more than a single paycheck or two worth of payoff for our equity.

If we had sold to Option A, a dozen of us would be wealthy right now. But the company we built would have been perverted into something unrecognizable.

In our case, to our founder's credit, we sold to Option B to keep the dream alive, but none of us became wealthy... and the nonprofit just shut down the company we founded only 2 years after the purchase (partly because the nonprofit didn't have the business savvy to make it sustainable). _Everyone_ was just laid off.

That means, our noble sacrifice only extended the lifetime of our noble vision by 2 years, and we're certainly feeling less good about it.

Because the alternative would have meant that a bunch of us bleeding hearts would have the economic freedom right now to do all sorts of good for untold decades to come.

So I'm just saying, sometimes you don't get to have good options and everything sucks, no matter how well-intentioned you are.

[TedDoesntTalk]

Gandi’s VPS offerings have always been a nightmare

[hairofadog]

Ah, I knew about the price increases but not the sale of the company.

One thing I really liked about Gandi was that they had a concept of Organizations, and users within those orgs, so we didn’t have to share a login within the org.

I’ve been moving my personal domains to Porkbun and Cloudflare, just to see which I like better. For domains at the company where I work I’d rather move them to Cloudflare, but they require that you use their DNS, and I haven’t yet felt like untangling how that will work with our AWS setup — we’re currently using Route53 and features there, including their certificate management and routing to specific ARNs.

Anyway, It’s a shame, because I was a big advocate for Gandi for a decade, and any time I could I always transferred domains there, for myself and the companies I worked for. In my digital life so far, Apple is the only one I’ve been able to stick with long-term. If they ever get broken up or if I get inexplicably banned, that one’s gonna hurt.

[florbo]

> Cloudflare, but they require that you use their DNS

This has been my only issue with them so far. Realistically it's not likely to cause any problems for either my personal or professional situations since I prefer to use CF DNS. It's simply a missing feature.

If something happens that makes me reconsider their DNS product I'd likely transfer the domains, even if I could change nameservers.

[sylware]

Oh god.

I am a gandi domain user.

I could up my account balance with a check and use their simple noscript http API to perform my domain operations (with curl).

Does it mean I will have to go raw IP email server? Aka, myname@[x.x.x.x] and myname@[IPv6:...], at least SPF is free here :)

Why I cannot find who did buy gandi??? what is happening???

[franckl]

https://www.nextinpact.com/article/71103/gandi-fusionne-avec... Google translate it from french. Basically the new owners are known for not caring about customer service. Gandhi email service will probably go or increase a lot in price

[hairofadog]

It’s on their Wikipedia page:

> In February 2023, Gandi was acquired by Total Webhosting Solutions, forming a new brand, Your.Online. In June, the company announced drastic price increases, including a new monthly fee for mailboxes previously included for free.

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

[beowa]

I can vouch for Cloudflare — definitely the cleanest registrar I’ve ever used

[Nereuxofficial]

Also the price after 1 year is really cheap

[Karunamon]

I have had very good luck with Cloudflare, but their domain registration comes with an annoying limitation: you are not allowed to modify the glue records, you are stuck with their DNS

[malfist]

That's because it's a loss leader to get you into their system

[moonchrome]

But their DNS is free ?

[hairofadog]

(Not the person you’re replying to)

It’s free, but there are times when it’s more convenient to point to someone else’s nameservers, and some people like to keep their DNS separate from their registrations as a “separation of powers” thing, but I’ve never seen the utility in that.

[nytesky]

I hear this complaint often. Why do people want particular DNS? I thought it was synced around the world?

[buro9]

Try using Cloudflare and having a wildcard subdomain and then letting others CNAME to it.

You cannot do this on Cloudflare without purchasing an Enterprise offering with SaaS features.

It's a very basic thing, allow CNAME to your subdomains... but nope.

So if you want to do this, you cannot use their DNS or Registrar.

[hairofadog]

Because sometimes it’s more convenient to point to someone else’s nameservers (I commented elsewhere in this thread about our AWS setup), and some people don’t want to give a single company control over their entire domain-to-web-server pipeline, though like I said I’ve never seen how that matters in practice.

[numpad0]

Could be particular registrar && DNS not run by that registrar

[moron4hire]

I had tried NameCheap for a little while, but I've been using NameSilo for everything for the past 5 years. For the most part it stays out of my way.

I've never found a registrar that really felt like it was overall a good experience. It's definitely a "least bad" kind of market. The thing that bothers me the most about registrars is that they all have their own interfaces for stuff and it takes time to learn how to navigate to everything. So it makes it hard to try new ones.

[temp0826]

I really wanted to move everything to Porkbun from Gandi after their announcements, but they don't support .st names and I'm not interested in having multiple providers. So I'll be sticking with them until further notice. The price changes seemed to only(/mostly?) affect their email hosting offerings that I don't use...but the change of hands in general makes me nervous.

[k8sToGo]

I transferred all my domains to cloudflare. The downside is that you must use Cloudflare DNS servers.

[robtaylor]

Just a shout for Porkbun.

Not directly domain related but they replied to me direct on something and great - humans there.

[sodality2]

+1. I’ll never forget when I had an account with them, set up FIDO 2FA, and lost my password + email access for the account. I emailed customer support asking if there was something that could be done, and if not, I was fine making a new account (I had no domains at the time, and if I had, payment method confirmation would’ve probably let me get it back). Within days, their engineers added that feature, tested it, and rolled it out…

[radicality]

I’ve been using internet.bs for a few domains for many years and haven’t had any issues, anyone else use it? I remember the control panel looks kinda old and sketchy, but it’s been working fine for me for probably at least a decade now.

[chias]

I saw the writing on the wall with Google Domains a couple years ago, and moved to Moniker. Their platform is a little bit slow, but other than that, it's excellent.

[numbasys]

Out of interest, how did you see that coming? The discussions I remember here on HN were full of people wondering why, and being generally blindsided by the news...

[chias]

I didn't see the writing on the wall for them shutting it down, rather that I could not rely on it.

I have (or rather had) two Google Domains accounts, one for my own projects, and one with my work email address for work purposes. My work Google Domains account got banned for some imagined rules infraction. I sent an appeal with evidence, which was immediately denied. In case you are curious, the effect of being banned from Google Domains is: you are no longer able to use Google Domains at all, which means you are both unable to change your DNS settings, and unable to transfer your domains out. For all of the domains, I had to wait until they expired, wait for the grace period to expire, and re-register them on a new registrar, hoping nobody else got to them first.

After this experience, I decided it was not worth the risk to keep my personal domains on my personal Google account, so I transferred them out a few days later. I assume this was a bug, but as soon as I initiated the domain transfers, Google deleted all DNS records, which meant I had some non-trivial downtime on all of my websites while I got it all sorted out on a new registrar.

After both of these experiences, there is no way I would ever trust another domain to Google Domains.

[iRomain]

I have 200 domains at Dynadot and keep my personal/most valuable ones at Cloudflare. Dynadot has improved a lot in the past few years.

[shmde]

I love porkbun. Bought 2 cheap domains and the UI is super duper friendly. Love it. Had used Gandi previously and liked it too.

[nextaccountic]

Why Namecheap rather than Porkbun?

[unmole]

Porkbun has trouble process my credit card for some reason.

[nytesky]

Anyone know if Hover is any good, a friend recommended them?

[tildef]

I used Hover for personal domains and email for a while. It was fairly priced and reliable, and I also got decent chat support when I was migrating off it (to AWS for domains and purelymail for email--just for convenience reasons since I'd already started using those services for other stuff). They have some cute novelty TLDs too, which is nice.

[rendall]

Would you mind saying more about your experience with Gandi?