I’ve been using Gandi for over 20 years, almost since it was founded. Since being acquired in 2019 by Montefiore Investment and this year by Total Webhosting Solutions their service have become more and more expensive and have finally priced me out.
For context, I administer a bunch of domains, mailboxes and HTML websites for my family and extended family, and I prefer services hosted in the EU because of GDPR and local availability.
This post is meant as a list of practical decisions in 2023 for the small time selfhoster. If anybody wants to comment on what Gandi (or rather TWS) is doing feel free to do so in the comments, I’m curious myself.
Prices I’ve mentioned use my country’s VAT so will vary slightly for you.
Domain names
Domain names have always been a bit on the expensive side with Gandi but they used to include a lot of features for free with them (SSL, DNSSEC, mailboxes, a small static website, WHOIS privacy, local contact for TLDs that need it etc.) and what they added extra was proportional to the base TLD cost.
For the next renewal all my domains were slated to jump to €28 across the board. If you have domains with Gandi try adding some renewals to the cart and check in advance.
I had to look for an European registrar because I have lots of European ccTLDs that the usual suspects like Cloudflare and Porkbun don’t support.
I’m moving to INWX.de and will be saving 25-60% per domain. This takes into account WHOIS privacy where needed for an extra 5€/domain (EU ccTLDs are private due to GDPR but we own a couple of TLDs too) as well as local contact services where required (price varies by country).
I manage multiple mailboxes but they have low traffic and low storage requirements. Gandi will be offering them at €55/mailbox/year. I’m not questioning their pricing, 3-4€/month for email is common, but typically charged by email-focused services.
Anyway, this per-mailbox model would price us into hundreds of euros for resources that go 99% unused. I’m switching to Migadu.com, who allows unlimited domains and mailboxes (within common sense) under a single account and charges for the conflated storage space and emails sent/received across all mailboxes.
Migadu tiers start at 20€/year for 5GB and 200/20/day (soft limits).
Webhosting
We were using Gandi’s smallest hosting package for about 100€/year, which was slated to jump to €135. Not an outlandish price for your typical PHP + MySQL hosting, especially since it had some VPS-like features. Then again the typical webhosting service would include a couple of mailboxes and some other goodies.
This was a good opportunity for us to reevaluate out hosting needs and realize we can ditch PHP+MySQL (if we really have to revisit it we’ll consider VPS offers in the future). It’s mostly static sites, image galleries and a bit of blogging. We’ve cached all our stuff as plain HTML/CSS/images and moved it to BunnyCDN.
Bunny lets you define a file bundle, gives you FTP access with a unique username+password, lets you pick the extent of replication, puts a CDN on top of it, and lets you point a domain name to it. Also throws a bunch of web server-ish features on top like rules/rewrites and Let’s Encrypt SSL.
They actually offer more features than that but I’ve just mentioned the minimum you need for serving a bunch of static websites.
Bunny pricing starts at $0.01/GB (with a minimum of $1/month) and you pay as you go.
Nameservers
Since we’re doing this I’ve taken the opportunity to dab into DNS. Turns out it’s not that hard. There’s only like half a dozen of commonly used DNS record types and everybody’s helping you with them – email services like Migadu generate the email-related ones for you, registrars and managed DNS services generate the SOA for you, they have forms that tell you what fields are needed etc.
There are lots of managed DNS options. Registrars usually include nameservers and let you mess with the records so INWX was one choice. Bunny offers DNS service that integrates with their CDN. deSEC is a completely free service I’ll be using as backup.
All of the above also offer APIs so a bash script will be taking care of dynamic DNS.
I’m also on Migadu for email, and I can say the experience has been pretty excellent. They have good instructions for setup stuff, and their pricing model is great. The pricing model has things in common with rsync.net, where they impose a soft limit on storage and reach out if you start exceeding it to talk about upgrading.
I do wonder if other mail providers will at some stage support jmap, it seems like it could take away some frustrations.
JMAP would help providers and clients but I’m not sure how it would improve upon user experience. The problems that JMAP solves are typically hidden from the user.
There are speed and developer experience improvements, and a whole bunch of it is there to optimise for mobile. They have some info in the FAQ on jmap.io. It’s something I won’t 100% take without any consideration - it is written by the fastmail Devs - but a modern stateless protocol is no bad thing.