Ask HN: Is gandi.net really this bad?

by general_failure on 10/16/2014, 4:28 AM with 1 comments

So I have heard a lot of very good reviews of gandi.net here at HN. I tried it today for registering a domain. The experience has been outright horrendous.

- The UI is clunky and I would ignore this if it was atleast functional.

- Any updates to the DNS records take atleast 30 minutes. Note that I checked my TLD's name server directly. It just look that long for gandi.net to even get to inform the TLD registry.

- The free SSL cert provided for every domain first asks you to accept that you pay 16 USD! This amount will apparently will become 0 at checkout. WTF?

- I chose the DNS method for SSL cert validation. You just have to keep pressing refresh and sit there. It says nothing other than 'verification pending'. AFAICT, the domain records that it wants and that one my name server match completely and it has propagated as well. Even after a hour, I am just sitting there and nothing happens.

- So, I decide to setup email. It doens't go past the account screen. It keeps saying 'The password that you chose is too short and/or too easy to guess. Please add special characters for more security.'. Out of frustration, I generated a password out of https://strongpasswordgenerator.com/ and used 'e*B8[3~3^~e9'2b' as the password. Nope, that is still not strong enough!

So... Long story short, gandi.net is terrible. I would avoid at all costs. I am somewhat amazed that route53 uses it.

  • by hashtag on 10/16/2014, 7:44 AM

    I tried it in the past due to people raving about it to. It was a garbage experience. After the one domain I had with them expired (never used it for much), I stopped using them.