Customer Service? What’s that then? (gandi.net)

Member Name: dunos

Product:	gandi.net
Date:	16/02/01 (723 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: cheepish, european

Disadvantages: customer service, administration system

No clutter domain registration but appalling session management.

Gandi offer a streamlined way to register and administer domains in a world that is getting more and more commercial. Their no frills website offers all the tools you need to get your domain up and running for only 12 euros per year. You can either go with the traditional route of pointing a domain at some DNS servers or you can get Gandi to forward web page requests and email to an existing account on a free web space provider.

Because they bill you in euros and not American dollars it can often work out cheaper to register a domain with Gandi than with one of the American companies offering the same services. It very much depends on the exchange rate at the time and if you are in Europe it can often work in your favour. It is certainly better than paying Network Solutions (who up until a few years ago had the sole monopoly on domain registration) up to $35 per year for fewer features.

Gandi, like the majority of real registrars, let you point your domain name at some DNS servers so that you can administer how your domain is run and what services you want to use with it. If, like the vast majority of people who are now buying domain names, you don’t want to properly host your domain you can use their web forwarding service. I used their web forwarding on one of the domains I registered with them for about 3 months. During this time the service was fast and had no noticeable down time or lag between requesting the page and the page appearing. However they do not offer URL cloaking on their web forwarding. URL cloaking is where the site might be located at http://www.yourisp.com/username/blah/ but the user actually sees www.yourdomain.com. They also only offer email redirection on one email address. Most other forwarding services offer multiple email address forwarding and various forms of URL cloaking.

At any time during your registration period you can swap be
tween proper DNS hosting and Gandi’s own web forwarding. Remember that this is an ICANN approved registrar who operates more or less like Network Solutions and not like one of these “free domain name” companies. The domain is to all intensive purposes yours during your registration period and you can do what you like with it, even move it to another registrar.

I have two major criticisms of Gandi. Firstly their domain modification system tracks your authenticated session by using your IP address. This is fine for most people because most people don’t go via any form of proxy to request web pages, or if they do it is a transparent one. For those of us who do you will have big problems with Gandi’s admin pages if your proxy uses load balancing to spread the requests over a number of separate servers each with their own IP address. When this happens your IP address changes each time you request a web page. Because Gandi tracks by IP address and your IP address changes they don’t know who you are and therefore you will keep getting “bad password” messages even if your password was authenticated when you first logged into their system. This really sucks if you are trying to change your DNS servers in a hurry.

My second criticism is of the Gandi support staff. I have now been waiting over a week for a reply to several emails. When someone is playing at being a domain registrar it does them no favours to ignore customers. When I am spending money on the Internet I expect good customer support. This is something that Gandi lacks and I am now reluctant to use them again.

If I were a business and had to trust my domain records to a domain registrar I would not use Gandi.

Summary: