[liberationtech] Secure Your Domain - Where Is Safe to Register a Domain Name? - Gun.io

Tue May 8 06:26:43 PDT 2012

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Hi,

(Apologies, I replied from an incorrect e-mail address)

Someone asked me off list why I would not recommend Gandi for hosting, so I thought I'd reply to list.

Firstly, I do have some hosting with Gandi, more for historical reasons than anything else. I had some sites hosted in various places which had to be moved very quickly for a number of reasons. At the time reliable, secure reasonably priced hosting was difficult to find.  I chose Gandi as I had domains registered with them, I never had issues with their domain reg business. At the time their only hosting product was Gandi VPS (Virtual Private Server). Over the past 4-5 years, this hosting platform has been shown (to me) to be very rigid and inflexible. 

Recently I needed to upgrade a database server and the only way (they offered) was to reinstall from scratch. Clearly not acceptable. I plan on migrating from their hosting.

Their support is not very prompt (granted if I paid more, no doubt I'd have more clout), but the affect of this slow service impacts the rigid and inflexible platform. Also they are very reluctant for supplying SSL and secure access to certain services (reasons may be the following).

Tom is right regarding their actions against Moxie Marlinspike. He had (and still has) a service called GoogleSharing, which acts as an enduser proxy for interfacing with Google Search services - route your searches thru GoogleSharing and it will return the results to you and Google gets no information about you - IP, reading cookies, etc.

GoogleSharing had an SSL cert which was provided by Gandi.net. It was revoked due to "due to multiple and deliberate serious breaches” of the registrar’s terms of service". 

The violations were "incorrect information provided to Gandi.net’s Whois database, a trademark violation for the unauthorized use of “google” in the domain name and the use of the certificate for unspecified “fraudulent activities.” [1] Pretty bogus reasons TBH.

This essentially killed the service at the time, but it seems to have made a come back. [2]

I always wondered why Gandi killed the SSL cert, I presumed they were "squeezed" by Google, or someone large. None of the services I was involved in (or am involved in) are near the success of GoogleSharing so we have not had issues.

I hope that helps,

Bernard

[1] http://cyberinsecure.com/french-registrar-gandinet-takes-down-anti-google-privacy-proxy/
[2] http://www.googlesharing.net/

On 8 May 2012, at 14:01, Tom Ritter wrote:

> Can't find a reference on my phone, but I personally ruled out Ghadi after they shut down one of Moxie Marlinspike's domains over some bullshit.
> 
> -tom
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=====
Bernard / bluboxthief / ei8fdb
IO91XM / www.ei8fdb.org

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