Goodbye Gandi
As a long-term, and satisfied customer, of Gandi’s services, I’m sad to have witnessed them being sold to a greedy company like Total Webhosting Solutions B.V., earlier this year.
I first heard about Gandi, the French cloud service provider, after getting my Ubuntu Membership back in 2009. It turned out that the Ubuntu Membership came with a few perks. One of the perks, happned to be a generous discount rate at Gandi.
I became a customer at Gandi, partly because of the discount, but also because I liked that they both funded and supported various non-profit organizations and open source projects, like Creative Commons, Gnome, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Students for Free Culture, World Wide Fund for Nature, International Federation for Human Rights, Ubuntu and Debian. They also used open source software themselves, at least for some of their services. And their services seemed to be good and reasonable priced as well.
The new pricing at Gandi
Before TWS bought Gandi, I paid about 11 EUR per year, for a .SE-domain. All domains also came with 3 free e-mail accounts, with 3 GB storage for each account. That all changed when TWS took over. My expenses for my domain and my e-mail, went from 11 EUR per year, to about 75 EUR per year. That’s a 681% (!) price increase.
The 3 free e-mail accounts that used to be included with each domain for free, now costs 4 EUR monthly, per account. Which is a bit pricey for a rather basic e-mail service if you ask me. And my 11 EUR domain, now costs 34 EUR. That’s just not okay.
And yes. I’m well aware that free e-mail was rather generous of them. I would have gladly paid about 1-2 EUR (monthly) for it. If, the domain was still at 11 EUR. TWS took it way too far.
GleSYS is my new home for my domain
First: GleSYS is a sponsor of Linuxkompis! They have sponsored my Swedish project Linuxkompis, with a VPS since the start of Linuxkompis. And that’s it. They have nothing to with me moving my domain to them. And I get nothing for moving my domain to them either. They’re most likely not even aware of the fact that I have moved my domain to them. The domain “linuxkompis.se”, is paid in full by me, with my own money.
GleSYS is a Swedish cloud service provider that uses green and sustainable energy. They also happen to charge a much more reasonable yearly fee at 192 SEK (≈16 EUR) for my domain. And as an added bonus, their user interface is way better than the one that Gandi ever had.
Mailbox.org is now taking care of my e-mail (again)
While GleSYS do provide an e-mail service, they don’t have two-factor-authentication for it, only for the regular cloud account. Which is a big no no for me. It doesn’t matter if they have the most sophisticated e-mail features of all providers out there. If I can’t secure my e-mail account with 2FA, I’m not even going to bother trying them out.
That’s why I went back with Mailbox.org. I used to be a customer at Mailbox.org in the past, before I moved over to Gandi a couple of years ago. I wrote about it here.
I did look around for other alternatives, before settling with Mailbox.org. They seem to be the best option out there today. It should also be noted that, since I wrote my last post about them, they have replaced the Google reCAPTCHA spyware with something called Friendly Captcha. Which is a privacy-first and fully GDPR-compliant service from Germany. They also don’t use cookies or store personal data from the users. A wise move by Mailbox.org.
I have only used Mailbox.org for about two months now. Some things are still the same, like their website, which is still, ehh.. confusing and quirky to use. We’ll have to see about the rest, but I have no complaints about the service in general though. They have always provided me with a reliable and high quality service. And to be fair, it’s not like I’m accessing my account via their website that much anyway.