Editor's opinion
Sean Thompson
I am a full-time web developer & IT professional with more than 18 years experience. I have been working with numerous hosting companies over the years.
First impression
Gandi is a French-based company that was founded in the year 2000 by Alentin Lacambre, Laurent Chemla, Pierre Beyssac, and David Nahmias, with their primary focus being a Domain Registrar. They later added Shared Hosting and VPS Hosting to their line of offerings and in February 2023 they were acquired by Total Webhosting Solutions, forming a new brand – Your.Online, a European online services platform. This hosting provider is run by a team of over 150 employees, spread over three continents, and proudly boasts a solid, ever-growing customer base of over 350 000.
Trial Period
Gandi doesn't offer a free trial period or a refund policy. However, since both their Shared and VPS plans allow for monthly sign-ups, you can try them out without risking much if they don't meet your expectations.
Billing Cycle
Their Shared Hosting plans offer clients the option of signing up on either a monthly or annual basis, with up to 2 months free should users opt for the yearly commitment. On the other hand, their Cloud VPS plans are either billed monthly or by the hour, where you only pay for your usage.
Gandi currently accepts all major Credit Cards, PayPal, Wire Transfers, Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, or Ethereum), or Prepaid Accounts as valid payment methods.
Control Panel
Gandi provides its proprietary web-based control panel with all Shared Hosting plans, facilitating management of various hosting aspects such as databases, DNS, emails, and more. However, their VPS plan does not feature a control panel by default. Users can install their preferred control panel using SSH (Secure Shell Protocol) command lines. Nevertheless, it does offer a VPS interface allowing adjustments to RAM/CPU, storage size, and other settings.
Limits
Their Shared Hosting plans are available in 4 easy, scalable, and secure options, namely the Starter, Advanced, Pro, and Business. The Starter plan comes with 20GB storage space, 1x Core CPU, and 256MB RAM, although the amount of space provided is ample, this plan is suited for not much more than a very basic site or personal blog. The Advanced and Pro plan features 50GB disc space, 2x Core CPUs, and 512MB RAM, and 100GB space, 3x Core CPUs, and 1GB RAM respectively, whilst the Business plan boasts 200GB space 4x Core CPUs, and 4GB RAM (upgradeable to 1TB space, 8x Core CPUs, and 8GB RAM).
All four plans come standard with 2x POP/IMAP email accounts, with a combined space of 10GB, a free domain name, and free TLS/SSL certificates.
Gandi’s VPS plans also offer four plans that range from 1 Core CPU and 1GB RAM on the V-R1 plan, up to 8x Core CPUs and 16GB RAM on the V-R16 plan. The storage space on all plans is 25GB but it can be increased to 1TB at an additional fee, and includes 250 Mbit/s, 3TB transfer bandwidth, IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, as well as Snapshots, an instant image of your VPS server, taken at a given time, from where you can revert back to a previous state if you make a mistake, or experience an incident.
It is important to note that their VPS plans don’t include a free SSL certificate, but one can be purchased from them.
Website Builder
Gandi's hosting plans do not include website builders, but their Shared Hosting packages feature convenient one-click installations for WordPress, Nextcloud, Matomo, and GravCMS. In a nutshell, these content management systems (CMS) allow users to easily build and manage a website without any coding knowledge.
Security
The security Gandi includes in their hosting plans is the bare minimum. They only include a free SSL certificate for the first year, as well as DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack protection, but it is mainly to protect their own infrastructure and network, so you are pretty much responsible to install your own security. Even basic security, such as Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus aren’t included.
OS
Their Shared Hosting plans operate on the Debian 10 (Buster) operating system, renowned for its open-source nature and default inclusion of AppArmor. This Linux application security system actively safeguards the OS and applications from external or internal threats, including zero-day attacks, by enforcing proper behavior and thwarting the exploitation of known and unknown application vulnerabilities.
For VPS plans, users can select from Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 10, Arch Linux, and NixOS. Additionally, they plan to introduce Fedora, FreeBSD, or CentOS options in the near future.
Support
Technical support is available 24/7 in English, Spanish, Chinese, French, and Japanese, via Live Chat and an Email Ticketing system. The agents are friendly and knowledgeable, and in my case responded within an hour by email.
Conclusion
Pros |
Cons |
- Affordable Plans;
- Good Support.
|
- Very Basic Security;
- No Phone Support;
- No Money Back Guarantee.
|
Gandi offers no-nonsense, what you see is what you get the type of hosting. The plans are affordable and straightforward, uptime decent, and probably a good choice for someone just starting out, but the security they include is very basic and they also still make use of standard HHD. Personally, I would be reluctant to sign up.