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
- 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.
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
