Gandi SAS (''Gestion et Attribution des Noms de Domaine sur Internet'' – "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

Gandi was founded as a domain registrar in April 2000 by Valentin Lacambre, Laurent Chemla, Pierre Beyssac and David Nahmias. In 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. In 2008, Gandi launched a

Xen Xen (pronounced ) is a type-1 hypervisor, providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently. It was originally developed by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory an ...

-based

VPS VPS may refer to: Science and technology * Ventriculo-peritoneal shunt, a neurosurgical method used to treat hydrocephalus * Video programming system, a standard for video recorders in Germany * Virtual private server, a method of partitioning a ...

cloud hosting service, based on a system of "shares" and scalable resources that can be adjusted in real time. In 2010 the company created a subsidiary in the US, opening a data center in downtown

Baltimore Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic, and the 30th most populous city in the United States with a population of 585,708 in 2020. Baltimore was d ...

, 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. In late 2011, Gandi.net was the 25th largest registrar in terms of the number of domains registered. On 31 July 2014, Amazon Web Services partnered with Gandi and announced the ability to register domains directly through their Route 53 Service. On 28 February 2019, Gandi CEO Stephan Ramoin announced that private equity firm Montefiore Investment had acquired the company.

Service

Domain registrar

Gandi is mostly known as a

domain name registrar A domain name registrar is a company that manages the reservation of Internet domain names. A domain name registrar must be accredited by a generic top-level domain (gTLD) registry or a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registry. A registrar ...

Email services

Gandi is also known for its "Gandi mail" offering, which includes some productivity software and allows to use

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

software Roundcube as

webmail Webmail (or web-based email) is an email service that can be accessed using a standard web browser. It contrasts with email service accessible through a specialised email client software. Examples of webmail providers are 1&1 Ionos, AOL Mail, G ...

interface.

Business model

Gandi does not advertise, relying primarily on "word of mouth" recommendations from existing customers. Until 2019, the company didn't distribute profits nor take debts, but reinvested all its margins in the business. 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 Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

software, and since September 2010 has supported

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

, providing them with free domain registrations and renewals, as well as VPS services. Other projects that Gandi supports include (but not limited to) the

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet ci ...

, Students for Free Culture, The Spamhaus Project,

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, Let's Encrypt, Ubuntu,

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, Dotclear, Mageia, Paris Web, World Wide Fund for Nature, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, VideoLAN, Adie, Canard PC,

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(FIDH), Demotix,

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, Jamendo, In Libro Veritas, Arrêt sur Images le retour,

Software Freedom Conservancy Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. is an organization that provides a non-profit home and infrastructure support for free and open source software projects. The organization was established in 2006, and as of June 2022, had over 40 member pro ...

, Geeklist,

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, Wikiotics, and

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References

{{WebManTools Blog hosting services Companies established in 2000 Domain name registrars Information technology companies of France Web hosting