I’m posting this in selfhosted because Gandi increasing prices actually helped me a lot with being more serious about selfhosting, made me look into things like DNS and reverse proxies and VPN and docker and also ended up saving me money by re-evaluating my service needs.
For background, Gandi.net is a large and old (25 years) domain registrar and hosting provider in the EU, who after two successive rounds of being acquired by investment funds have hiked up prices across the board for all their services.
In July 2023 when they announced the changes for November I was using their services for pretty much everything because I manage domains for friends and family. That means a wide selection of domains registered with them (both TLDs and European ccTLDs), LAMP hosting, and was taking advantage of their free email hosting for multiple domains.
For the record I don’t hold the price hike against them, it was just unsustainable for us. Their email prices (~5€/mailbox/mo) are in line with market prices and so are hosting prices. Their domain prices are however exaggerated (€25-30/yr is their lower price now). I also think they could’ve been smarter about email, they could’ve offered lower prices if you keep domains registered with them. [These prices include the VAT for my country btw. They will appear lower in USD.]
What I did:
Domains: looked into alternative registrars with decent prices, support for all the ccTLDs I needed, DNSSEC, enforced whois privacy, and representative services (some ccTLDs require a local contact). Went with INWX.com (Germany) and Netim.com (France). Saved about €70/yr. Could have saved more for .org/.net/.com domains with an American registrar but didn’t want to spread too thin.
DNS: learned to use a dedicated DNS service, especially now that I was using multiple registrars since I didn’t want to manage DNS in multiple places. Wanted something with support for DNSSEC and API. Went with deSEC.io (Germany) as main service and Bunny.net (Slovenia) as backup. deSEC is free, more on Bunny pricing below. Learned a lot about DNS in the process.
Email: having multiple low-volume mailboxes forced me to look into volume-based providers who charge for storage and emails sent/received not mailboxes. I’ve found Migadu (Swiss with servers in France at OVH), MXRoute (self-hosted in Texas) and PurelyMail (don’t know). Fair warning, they’re all 1-2 man operations. But their prices are amazing because you pay a flat fee per year and can have any number of domains and mailboxes instead of monthly fees for one mailbox at one domain. Saved €130/yr. Learned a lot about MX records and SPF/DKIM/DMARC.
Hosting: had a revelation that none of the webpages I was hosting actually needed live dynamic services (like PHP and MySQL). Those that were using a CMS like WordPress or PHP photo galleries could be self-hosted in docker containers because only one person was using each, and the static output hosted on a CDN. Enter Bunny.net, who also offer CDN and static storage services. For Europe and North America it costs 1 cent per GB with a $1 minimum/mo, so basically $12/yr since all websites are low traffic personal websites. Saved another €130/yr. Learned a lot about Docker, reverse proxies and self-hosting in general.
Keep in mind that I already had a decent PC for self-hosting, but at €330 saved per year I could’ve afforded buying a decent machine and some storage either way.
I think separating registrars, DNS, email and hosting was a good decision because it allows a lot of flexibility should any of them have any issues, price hikes etc.
It does complicate things if I should kick the bucket – compared to having everything in one place – which is something I’ll have to consider. I’ve put together written details for now.
Any comments or questions are welcome. If there are others that have gone through similar migrations I’d be curious what you chose.
US based, here. I moved my domains and basic DNS over to Porkbun.
I was already self hosting email and web for myself, and wanted to exit those “lines of business,” as it were. Tied of managing the risks of maintaining a mail stop and keeping up with the Googles and O365s of the world to keep my reputation up in the spam rankings for what amounts to a couple of vanity and spamdrop mail addresses.
I mostly host what DNS i need at the registrar, using their API to update my more dynamic records as needed. I may look into diversifying assets into some DNS secondaries later this year, and make the registrar a hidden master or host the hidden master on a VPS somewhere.
For email l decided to set up a lifetime plan with MXroute. At the time, it was US$99 for a no-bullshit lifetime subscription, 10GB for unlimited domains and mailboxes. My personal use is 200MB or so, so its a steal at twice the price. Plus, now I don’t need to deal with upgrades, TLS or any of the other nonsense aside from keeping my DMARC and DKIM records valid.
I’m still self-hosting my websites on a free-to-me VPS, but am planning to migrate that all out to a real VPS soon. The US providers seem spendy to me, but I haven’t quite gotten comfortable with the idea of offshoring my web presence. At least I can ignore GDPR when hosting it In the US. (No offense, Euro-buds!)
Unless its for personal use or it needs to be on-prem, I try not to self-host at home. Better, IMO, to make the operational problems someone else’s and make sure I have good backups.