Gandi

Gandi SAS

Type	Société par actions simplifiée
Founded	1999
Founder(s)	Pierre Beyssac Laurent Chemla Valentin Lacambre
Headquarters	Paris, France
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Stephan Ramoin(President) Nicolas Lhuillery (Head of Product, Gandi SAS) Leland Vandervort (Director, Technical Operations, Gandi SAS) Pascal Bouchareine (Director, R&D, Gandi SAS) Thomas Stocking (VP US Operations)
Services	Domain name registration Web hosting Blog hosting service
Website	en.gandi.net

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.^[1]

History

Gandi was founded as a domain registrar in March 2000 by Valentin Lacambre, Laurent Chemla, Pierre Beyssac and David Nahmias.

In 2005, ownership and management was changed to a team led by Stephan Ramoin (formerly of MultiMania/Lycos), and investors Joe White, Eirik Pettersen (co-founders of the online website creation application moonfruit.com), and Warren Stephens.

In 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.^[2]

In 2010 the company created a subsidiary in the US, opening a data center in downtown Baltimore 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.

As of late 2011, Gandi.net was the 25th largest registrar in terms of the number of domains registered.^[3]

Business model

Gandi does not advertise,^[4] 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".^[5] It uses and advocates for open-source software,^[6] and since September 2010 has supported Creative Commons, providing them with free domain registrations and renewals, as well as VPS services.^[7] Other projects that Gandi supports include Electronic Frontier Foundation, Students for Free Culture, The Spamhaus Project, Debian, Dotclear, Paris Web, World Wide Fund for Nature, VideoLAN, Adie, Canard PC, SiteMaker which it supplies as an option to customers (Moonfruit), International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Demotix, GoodPlanet, Jamendo, In Libro Veritas, Arrêt sur Images le retour, and Software Freedom Conservancy.^[8]

References