Gandi SAS (Gestion et Attribution des Noms de Domaine sur Internet â€" Management and Allocation of Domain Names on the Internet) is a French company providing domain name registration, web hosting, and related services. The company's main office is in Paris.
History
Gandhi Biography - Gandhi 1869 - 1948 Gandhi was the most prominent Indian political and spiritual leader who led India to independence. See a related article at Britannica.com: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/...
- 2000: Gandi was founded as a domain registrar in March by Valentin Lacambre, Laurent Chemla, Pierre Beyssac and David Nahmias;
- 2005: following internal struggles in management, ownership and management of Gandi was sold to a team led by Stephan Ramoin (formerly of MultiMania/Lycos), and investors Joe White, Eirik Pettersen (co-founders of the online website building service Moonfruit), and Warren Stephens;
- 2008: Gandi launched a Xen-based VPS cloud hosting service, based on a system of "shares" and scalable resources that can be adjusted in real time;
- 2010: the company created a subsidiary in the US, opening a data center in downtown Baltimore, Phoenix, Arizona and business offices in San Francisco, California, as well as creating a customer support center in the US, which until then had been exclusively operated out of Paris, France at Place de la Nation;
- 2011: at the late of the year, Gandi.net was the 25th largest registrar in terms of the number of domains registered;
- 2014: at 31 July, Amazon Web Services partnered with Gandi and announced the ability to register domains directly through their Route 53 Service.
In 2017 and 2018, including in mid-March 2018, Gandi's services had many substantive technological breakdowns, including email outages arguably unprecedented amongst companies that provide email access or service. This caused, and continues to cause as of March 22, 2018, many to lose full functionality of basic email functions, in some cases for weeks. Gandi's support also was effectively non-available. Gandi posted on its website an apology for the lack of support and promised to improve at some future date. Much of this problematic history also can be gleaned from online reviews of Gandi and from Gandi's own website, which publishes a timeline of past technological breakdowns in its system, although this publishing of past technological breakdowns does not encompass the totality of effect or capture every substantive breakdown.
Business model
Gandi does not advertise, relying primarily on "word of mouth" recommendations from existing customers.
The company has a program to provide funds and/or promotion to projects and organizations that meet its criteria of "concrete", "open", and "alternative". It uses and advocates for open-source software, and since September 2010 has supported Creative Commons, providing them with free domain registrations and renewals, as well as VPS services.
Other projects that Gandi supports include (but not limited to) Electronic Frontier Foundation, Students for Free Culture, The Spamhaus Project, Debian, Let's Encrypt, Ubuntu, GNOME, FreeBSD, Dotclear, Mageia, Paris Web, World Wide Fund for Nature, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, VideoLAN, Adie, Canard PC, International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Demotix, GoodPlanet, Jamendo, In Libro Veritas, Arrêt sur Images le retour, Software Freedom Conservancy, Geeklist, FlISoL, Wikiotics, FluxBB.
References
