[jellicle]

I lost a domain because Gandi refused to do anything about it; although I was well within the renewal period and tried to contact them many times Gandi refused to process any sort of renewal until it expired and was deleted by their system.

Gandi ONLY accepts support requests through their web form (no email, no phone), and generally ignores those or provides nonsense answers several days later.

As long as you never ever need any sort of support, Gandi is fine.

[soulshake]

@jellicle, that doesn't sound like us. Can I look into your case further? If we messed up, we'll make it right.

[brongondwana]

@soulshake - check out legal #4827870. We were, as we would say in Australia, bloody lucky.

[soulshake]

This is me nodding in greeting and letting the legal team do their thing.

[jellicle]

This was several years ago; what's done is done. I moved all my domains to another provider shortly afterwards. I'm not giving you another chance to screw me.

[Shinkei]

You publicly complained about their customer service. They have offered to right the wrong. You have a poor sense of fairness if you are willing to make a public claim and then aren't willing to address the issue when the company calls you out on it.

[jellicle]

Oh, the stupidity, it burns. What sort of righting do you think they could do, several years past the fact? Gandi refused to respond to their web form for a period of about four weeks or more; they let my domain expire and be deleted (if I recall, the only problem was that my credit card expiration date needed to be updated in their system and the charge processed). Besides the immediate hassle and serious annoyance of having an uncontactable company ignore their support form, it ended up costing me a few hundred dollars to buy the domain back from a domain speculator who snatched it up.

What price should I put on that? What price is it worth to Gandi? Are they going to offer me a year's free domain registration with them? That offer has negative value to me; I wouldn't take it unless paid a lot of money to do so. Are they going to offer me a pile of money (no they aren't, it's not worth it to them). So what exactly are they going to offer here to right the wrong?

The point here - which the top of this thread made, but maybe it wasn't explicit enough for you - is that services such as domain registration can easily have effects disproportionate to the cost of providing them. If all of Google's domains were deleted tomorrow, the cost to Google would easily exceed ($10 x number_of_domains). So a poor service experience can easily do more damage than the sum total of all revenue ever received from a particular customer. Thus the commenter looking for companies which try hard to provide good service. Gandi.net is not such a company, in my experience. (Hint: companies which provide good service have email addresses and phone numbers to contact them.) That's my only comment.

[aalbertson]

just to drive a point home about "calling out stupidity". Your follow up statement is the equivalent of stating "I'll never ever ever use a Windows product because several years ago I use Windows M.E. and it was so bad and they wouldn't fix anything so they can't possibly have fixed any of the issues I may or may not have actually experienced".

It really irks me when people use this sort of logic. I can't say what their support was like several years ago, but I have heard nothing but fantastic things about their support and service offerings over the last 2-3 years, and not by the general web user, but by us "nerd elites". So dude, chill the Eff out and don't be such a hard ass against something that happened admittedly several years ago.

Oh, and you call out "what could they possibly provide me after so many years", well you have a direct response from a customer support person who has offered the ability to "make it right". You do not know what they would be willing/capable of doing until you ask. So get off your high horse and just ask. They might surprise you...

/rant

[foxylad]

Maybe I'm stupid, but I agree wit the parent - if a company fails me, I won't go back to them no matter how much they promise to have cleaned up their act.

It's not that I don't believe companies can fix their problems; it's that I believe in feedback and the one form of feedback companies cannot ignore is revenue. It's Darwinian - if a company screws too many customers, they die.

So I haven't used Windows since Microsoft's deeply unethical attacks on OpenDocument; I moved all my US domains from GoDaddy to NameCheap after the elephants broke that camel's back; and Domain Central have all my Aussie domains after NetRegistry de-registered a heavily used domain name in very dubious circumstances.

[bananas]

From experience it's generally not worth the risk. Perhaps they got it right but 90% don't. It's like playing the lottery.

[nitrogen]

Besides the immediate hassle and serious annoyance of having an uncontactable company ignore their support form, it ended up costing me a few hundred dollars to buy the domain back from a domain speculator who snatched it up.

I once let a domain expire by accident, but since it was obscure the squatter who snatched it let it lapse after the ~45 day ICANN "trial" period that used to be a boon to evil squatters (AIUI, IIRC). So I just registered it again myself.

[heypete]

While I doubt neither the veracity of your claim nor your reaction to Gandi's actions (if such a situation happened to me, I would certainly not want to give a company my business going forward), I have had a very different experience with them: all of my queries to Gandi support have received prompt, relevant replies that addressed my issue.

Also, ny domain registered with Gandi can be renewed by any Gandi handle. In the event that you're having trouble accessing the handle that owns a domain or otherwise cannot renew it normally, you can create a new handle and use that to renew the domain. See https://wiki.gandi.net/en/domains/renew and https://www.gandi.net/domain/renew?lang=en for details.

I'm not sure if their "any handle can renew any domain" policy/system existed at the time of your situation, but it should prevent similar issues from occurring today.