> Now, Gandi will raise the prices of the Standard mailbox plan from €0.35/month to €3.99/month per mailbox, a 1040% increase.
24 Euros for .de, one of the cheapest ccTLDs, is almost daylight robbery, IMO.
That €0.35/month plan was a steal. Most places don't even offer backup store-and-forward SMTP for that let alone full email hosting. Of course, now that they are pricing themselves the same as their competitors they will be held to the same standard, and we'll see how that holds up.
Ordinary mail hosting is nothing special. Anybody can do it with very little investments. Of course if they can charge for it, good for them. But I don't think it's fair to compare those services. It's like comparing AWS and some random VPS hosting with cpanel just because both can launch debian VPS.
What viable alternatives exist that aren't cash-grabbing vultures and aren't beholden to US globalist interests?
This headline reads as if the company is just destroying customer wallets a La Reddit API customers until you get into the details. There are premium email clients that charge way more than EUR3.99 per month.
An appeal of Gandi is that they do not take the position that they own domains, and the registrant just rents them. Gandi used to be clearer on this. 2004 terms: "The Client owns the Domain Name registered. Gandi simply acts on the Client's behalf."[1]
That page disappeared some time prior to 2008.
Here are the terms from 2015. "You are the owner of the domain name, meaning that You are the person or the legal representative of a legal entity that has been declared as the owner of a domain name upon its registration, and visible in the public Whois database,...)."[2]
Wordier, but not too bad.
In the current version, that explicit ownership language has disappeared. There's a definition of terms that says: "Contact Owner: refers to the natural or legal person identified by the Registry as the owner of the domain name."[3] But no explicit statement of ownership. The termination clause allows Gandi to terminate only for breach of contract, not at will.
Compare Network Solutions, which is part of "Web.com":
"Registrant acknowledges and agrees that Web.com has the absolute right and power, in its sole discretion and without any liability to Registrant whatsoever, to suspend the Services, close Registrant's account, terminate provisioning of the Services, list Registrant's personal information in the WHOIS output or unmask or otherwise provide the Registrant's personal information to a claimant or other party to resolve any and all third party claims, whether threatened or made, arising out of Registrant's use of the Domain Name or the Services, or to take any other action which Web.com deems necessary, in the event that (i) the Domain Name is alleged to violate or infringe a third party's trademark, trade name, copyright interests or other legal rights of third parties; (ii) Registrant breaches any provision of this Agreement; (iii) Registrant breaches any provision of the Registrar Terms; (d) if necessary to protect the integrity and stability of the applicable Domain Name registry; (e) if necessary to comply with any applicable laws, government rules or requirements, subpoenas, court orders or requests of law enforcement; (f) if Web.com is named as a defendant in, or investigated in anticipation of, any legal or administrative proceeding arising out of Registrant's use of the Services or Domain Name; (g) if necessary to comply with ICANN's Dispute Resolution Policy or other policies promulgated by ICANN (including policies which may preclude using a service such as Private Domain Registration); (h) if necessary to avoid any financial loss or legal liability (civil or criminal) on the part of Web.com, its parent companies, subsidiaries, affiliates, shareholders, agents, officers, directors and employees; or (i) any violation of the Web.com Acceptable Use Policy."[4]
Um.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20041206084659/http://gandi.net/...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20141203012738/http://www.gandi....
[3] https://contract.gandi.net/v5/contracts/53904/DomainNameCond...
[4] https://assets.web.com/legal/English/DomainNameRegistrationS...
To me, 35c/mo doesn't exactly sound like a service I should be trusting with something like emails. $5/mo won't exactly break the bank either.
It made me migrate all of my emails to a self-hosted solution using Mail-in-a-box. I'm also looking for another registrar that handles .me and .ru domains without going through Cloudflare.
So far no luck. So my domains will cost me a little more to renew next time it comes time to renew them.
I ended up migrating to Zoho. It took about an hour getting accounts set up, DNS records changed, and data migrated. Importing data through IMAP went really smoothly. I probably could have gotten by on the free tier but a few family users didn't want to use the apps and preferred the Exchange ActiveSync functionality to have a more system-native experience on platforms like Android and Windows.
So far, so good.
Really happy with them, I'm paying 15 USD a year on a recurring black Friday deal. I think that has 50GB storage, which is fine for my usecase.
They have unlimited mail accounts, which is great, as some family members might only send or receive a handful of emails a month...
How many more years need to go by before we all acknowledge the truth? We are not guaranteed fixed pricing and we do not “own” anything in this environment. Legal terms and marketing “guarantees” are all as malleable as the code that backs the product. This is a fundamental reality of working on the web. Every time I see someone angrily copy and paste a company quote of some kind, I chuckle a little because that’s someone who still believes that companies all mean what they say all the time.
Companies mean what they say today to make money today, that’s it. As soon as today’s messaging no longer satisfies the profit motive, everything changes. The most successful companies are the ones that are able to raise prices without upsetting people’s expectations.
Having a backup plan isn't a horrible idea either... might give mail-in-a-box a try.
I like porkbun for personal stuff, dnsimple for work
1000% when the real story is an increase of 3 euro?
Bs, the company decided they can't discount and as long as they give enough notice I don't see a problem.
> Now, Gandi will raise the prices of the Standard mailbox plan from €0.35/month to €3.99/month per mailbox, a 1040% increase. The Premium plan will go from €1.75/month to €5.99/month, a 242% increase.
Should businesses, e.g. supermarkets, raise prices by 10x for items below a certain threshold? What should that threshold be? Or, what about AWS? They charge something like $0.10/GB for egress. Should they start charging $1/GB?
I'm being frivolous of course, but I'm sure among Gandi's customers there's gotta be someone who uses a lot of mailboxes and is therefore going to be significantly impacted from this.
> as long as they give enough notice I don't see a problem
They gave a month's notice. Whether that's enough, I suppose that depends on how many "products" (domains, mailboxes, hosted sites, etc.) you'd have to migrate.
Now, your bills are €288 per year, for the same service, basically overnight, without even beginning to consider other price raises by Gandi and general inflation. If you don’t have a ton of disposable income that’s kinda brutal and you don’t have a lot of time to work this out.
Was easier than expected to port my config — I was especially nervous about the nameserver config since I use one of those domains for my primary email address everywhere. But yeah totally smooth, there is almost zero friction to change domain registrars… I’m surprised that companies can mark up on pricing at all without their margins getting entirely competed away to nearly zero
You get what you pay for. I want my registrar to have a sustainable business model so they don’t screw me over. A domain name is a critical SPOF for any business.
Much easier to integrate with a reseller and have them do a lot of that for you. Then you can only worry about the big ones (e.g. Verisign for .com), and maybe slowly onboard to additional ones over time.
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/do...
I think it is dangerous to have as much of the web as there already is behind a single entity is all. I do not wish to contribute to the centralization of the web even further by pushing my own sites and projects through Cloudflare. So I make an active effort to avoid using them. The ever increasing centralization of the web should be considered harmful and Cloudflare and AWS already run an absurd portion of the internet and it only seems to be getting worse. To such an extent that US East 1 outages has become a meme.
I don’t love how they’re a single point of failure for much of the internet, or the amount of power that gives them. But from a user’s perspective their service has been fantastic, especially for how little I’ve paid them.
For business use I don't care so much about this. But for personal stuff I just can't accept unlimited liability. I would even be willing to pay a bit more for the safety.
So... I suppose my question is: what's a good option for folks who are worried about bill shock?
