Gandi, a domain name registrar, uses its news blog for service changes, price increases, security incidents, and ownership news.
Commenters cite its 2017 domain hijacking reports, but complain that the blog has gone quiet since 2022 and link the private equity buyout to rising prices.
Re myself, it looks like they're using FreeBSD-based ZFS filers with iSCSI/NFS exports using a user-spce NFS server:
* https://news.gandi.net/en/2019/09/exporters-detect-micro-incidents-and-improve-storage-performance/
> Gandi’s storage infrastructure consists of two environments: one for IaaS and one for PaaS. Both are based on FreeBSD-based storage units (filers), that stock each volume (disk) as though it were a ZFS volume.
* https://news.gandi.net/en/2019/03/tracking-a-storage-issue-led-to-software-change/
* https://www.bsdcan.org/2016/schedule/attachments/351_FreeBSD%20based%20high%20density%20filers-bsdcan2016.pdf
No mention of what they're doing for backups / "replication systems", unsurprisingly/unfortunately. I'm anxious to know what the failure mode for `zfs send | zfs receive` replication is here?
https://news.gandi.net/en/2022/03/for-all-the-people-and-one-internet-against-escalation-and-war/
> Cutting off Russians and Belarusians would only encourage the creation of different closed worlds and digital networks. We have chosen to hold out our hand to these people. We are not at war with them. Only their leaders, and their madness, need to be stopped. We will of course react quickly against war propaganda of any kind.
Few points that made me choose them (though I would probably take Cloudflare if they supported the TLD of my domains):
https://www.gandi.net/en/no-bullshit
https://www.gandi.net/en/gandi-supports
The founders decided "it had been a wild ride but all journeys come to an end" so the prices and upselling now keep increasing so that the private equity that bought them can see fast short-term gains (the only thing they care about).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35080777
https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/montefiore-investment-acquires-gandi-net--6d5453d1
https://news.gandi.net/en/2019/02/futureofgandi-the-adventure-continues/
Gandi still offers services in Russia and Belarus [1] while Namecheap discontinued its services to them [2].
No affiliation with Namecheap, just a happy customer of a company that is not supporting a dictatorial regime.
[1] https://news.gandi.net/en/2022/03/for-all-the-people-and-one-internet-against-escalation-and-war/
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/1/22956581/russia-ukraine-namecheap-ends-service-war-crimes
We were also affected by this on a major e-commerce site. It was a .se domain.
Their post mortem isn't really convincing ( https://news.gandi.net/en/2017/07/report-on-july-7-2017-incident/ ) since they do not state what really happened and how it can be prevented again.
I issued a support ticket to aws today to see what measures can be taken, otherwise we might need to change registrar.
To summarize:
Donuts (one of the biggest TLD registries) is increasing their TLD wholesale prices for 204 TLDs by USD 2-6 on Oct 4.
- https://icannwiki.org/Donuts
- https://news.gandi.net/en/2022/09/augmentation-de-prix-sur-les-extensions-de-noms-de-domaine-donuts-a-compter-doctobre-2022/
- https://ntldstats.com/registry/group/Donuts-Inc
- https://www.identity.digital/registry