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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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