I've been moving all the domain names I look after away from a provider whose ethical standards didn't sit well with me. They were cheap - but price isn't everything.

Gandi have a great reputation and their strap line, 'no bullshit', sounds good to me!

We are different from other companies in this market in that we set respect for customer rights as our first priority. Why "No Bullshit"?

In addition to domain registration there are some nice benefits to being with Gandi for those interested in self-hosting their data.

Free email hosting permalink

I don't enjoy running email servers.

Any domain registered through Gandi gets free email hosting for up to five mailboxes. This includes effective anti-spam and anti-virus. The maximum mailbox size is 1GB which isn't very big compared to Gmail but is plenty for my needs and I'm happy to archive messages to another server once I get beyond that. (I've been using the excellent NoPriv.py script for this.)

The service will work best for those who primarily use a dedicated email application. If you need a web interface, they provide an instance of the impressive RoundCube, but I still wouldn't recommend this for full-time email use.

Free SSL for first year - only €12 after that permalink

Recently I've been investigating various open source web applications for self-hosting services that I currently use a range of web applications for - things like, bookmarking, personal todo lists, blogs, photo hosting and backups.

To keep my interaction with these things secure it's a big help to encrypt the connection to the server with SSL. I can of course create a self-signed certificate, but anyone else who wants to interact with the server will have to click through various warnings, so a verified certificate can be a useful thing to have.

Gandi give you a free certificate in your first year and after that it's a very affordable €12 per year.