Gandi.net review

First impression

Gandi is a French company founded in 2000 by Alentin Lacambre, Laurent Chemla, Pierre Beyssac, and David Nahmias, and their first core business was a Domain Registrar. They later diversified their product portfolio with Shared Hosting and VPS Hosting and in February 2023 were taken over by Total Webhosting Solutions and together they created a new brand – Your.Online, an online services platform in Europe. The hosting company is run by a group of over 150 employees, spread over three continents, and has a strong, continuously growing customer base of over 350 000.

Trial Period

No money-back guarantee or free trial is provided by Gandi. However, since their Shared and VPS plans can be subscribed to on a month-to-month basis, you may experiment with them without losing too much if they do not satisfy you.

Billing Cycle

Their Shared Hosting plans offer clients the option to join for a month or a year with as much as 2 months free sign-up if clients opt to join for a year. With their Cloud VPS plans, however, there is the monthly or hour-to-hour pay-per-use where you pay only as much as you consume.

Gandi now only accepts all major Credit Cards, PayPal, Wire Transfers, Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, or Ethereum), or Prepaid Accounts.

Control Panel

Gandi provides its own control panel with all Shared Hosting packages, which grants access to host a number of things like databases, DNS, emails, etc. No control panel is, however, provided with the VPS package. One can, however, install one's favorite control panel by running SSH (Secure Shell Protocol) command lines. It does offer, however, a VPS control panel for changing things like in RAM/CPU, the size of storage, etc.

Limits

Their Shared Hosting packages are available in 4 easy, scalable, and secure options, i.e., the Starter, Advanced, Pro, and Business. The Starter package has 20GB space, 1x Core CPU, and 256MB RAM, while although the space provided is adequate, this package is good for no more than a very simple site or personal blog. The Advanced and Pro package has 50GB disc space, 2x Core CPUs, and 512MB RAM, and 100GB space, 3x Core CPUs, and 1GB RAM respectively, while the Business package has 200GB space 4x Core CPUs, and 4GB RAM (expandable to 1TB space, 8x Core CPUs, and 8GB RAM).

All four plans feature 2x POP/IMAP email accounts by default, a total of 10GB of storage, free domain name, and free TLS/SSL certificates.

Gandi's VPS packages also come in four options from 1 Core CPU and 1GB RAM in the V-R1 package to 8x Core CPUs and 16GB RAM in the V-R16 package. Each of the packages has a 25GB disk space but can be upgraded to 1TB for an additional charge, and 250 Mbit/s, 3TB bandwidth, IPv4 and IPv6, and Snapshots, a snapshot of your VPS server at a certain time, from which you can restore to an earlier configuration if you make a mistake, or if something goes wrong.

It must be noted that their VPS packages do not provide a free SSL certificate, although it is available for purchase through them.

Website Builder

Gandi's web hosting does not include site builders, but their Shared Hosting plans include simple one-click WordPress, Nextcloud, Matomo, and GravCMS installations. In short, these content management systems (CMS) allow people to build and manage a website without any programming experience.

Security

The protection Gandi offers in their hosting plans is the bare minimum. They do offer a free first-year SSL certificate, in addition to DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack protection, but it’s really more for the protection of their infrastructure and network, so you are pretty much on your own to offer your own protection. Not even minimal protection, such as Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus are offered.

OS

Their Shared Hosting services utilize the Debian 10 (Buster) operating system, renowned for being open-source with AppArmor turned on by default. This Linux app security system actively guards the OS and apps from both internal and external threats, such as zero-day attacks, by maintaining good behavior and not allowing known and unknown application vulnerabilities to be exploited.

For VPS packages, the customers receive the option to select from Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 10, Arch Linux, and NixOS. They also plan to add Fedora, FreeBSD, or CentOS as an option in the future.

Support

24/7 English, Spanish, Chinese, French, and Japanese technical support is available through Live Chat and an Email Ticketing system. The support staff is friendly and competent, and in my case responded within an hour by email.

Conclusion

Gandi provides bare-bones, what you see is what you get kind of hosting. It is inexpensive and simple, uptime is fine, and likely a good option for a beginner, but security provided is weak and they continue to use standard HHD. I myself would hesitate to sign up.