Gandi SAS is the largest French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 domain name

Domain name

A domain name is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet. Domain names are formed by the rules and procedures of the Domain Name System ....

 provider in France, and web host. The company's head office is in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

.

Origins

Gandi is a domain name registrar that was founded in March 2000 by Valentin Lacambre, Laurent Chemla, Pierre Beyssac and David Nahmias, with the goal of opening up the domain name market. The project was met with a resounding success, and the company began its philanthropic tradition of sponsoring alternative organizations, "Gandi Supports".

2005 to present

In 2005, a 16-million dollar deal was signed, changing ownership and management to a team of internet experts led by Stephan Ramoin (formerly of MultiMania/Lycos

Lycos

Lycos, Inc. is a search engine and web portal established in 1994. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, webhosting, social networking, and entertainment websites.-Corporate history:...

), and three investors Joe White, Eirik Pettersen (co-founders of the online website creation application, moonfruit.com), and Warren Stephens. The purchase represented a positive changing force for the company and a decision was made to maintain the original philosophy of being an ethical alternative in the industry. Already, plans were made for steering Gandi.net towards cloud hosting

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....

 services and other domain name services.

Gandi.net is currently one of Europe's leading registrars, providing over a million domains to customers throughout 192 countries.

In 2008, Gandi launched its Xen

Xen

Xen is a virtual-machine monitor providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently....

-based VPS

Virtual private server

Virtual private server is a term used by internet hosting services to refer to a virtual machine. The term is used for emphasizing that the virtual machine, although running in software on the same physical computer as other customers' virtual machines, is functionally equivalent to a separate...

 cloud hosting service, based on a system of "shares" and scalable resources that can be adjusted in real time.

2010 marked the creation of its subsidiary company in the United States, Gandi US Inc., along with opening of a data center in downtown Baltimore, and business offices in Hunt Valley, Maryland

Hunt Valley, Maryland

Hunt Valley is an affluent unincorporated community in Baltimore County, Maryland, United States. It lies just north of the city of Baltimore, along Highway 145 off Interstate 83. Loch Raven Reservoir...

, bringing Gandi closer to its American customers, both in terms of the physical location of servers, though also for customer support, which until then had been exclusively operated out of Paris, France at Place de la Nation

Place de la Nation

The place de la Nation is a square in Paris, on the border of the 11th and 12th arrondissements...

.

Customer support

Gandi has chosen to base its development on the satisfaction of its customers, not on advertising to those that are not customers. Gandi does not have any marketing department or advertising team. Since all publicity is made by word-of-mouth, Gandi necessarily places strategic importance on the quality of support. Even in cases regarding complaints against domains, Gandi treats each case on an individual basis.

Customer support is currently provided in three languages (English, Spanish, and French).

Gandi supports

A strong supporter and advocate of open-source software and rights, since September 2010 Gandi supports Creative Commons

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...

, providing them with free domain registrations and renewals, as well as VPS services.

Other projects that Gandi supports:
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an international non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization based in the United States...

, Students for Free Culture, The Spamhaus Project

The Spamhaus Project

The Spamhaus Project is an international organisation to track e-mail spammers and spam-related activity. It is named for the anti-spam jargon term coined by Linford, spamhaus, a pseudo-German expression for an ISP or other firm which spams or willingly provides service to spammers.-Spamhaus...

, Debian

Debian

Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...

, Dotclear

Dotclear

Dotclear is an open source blog publishing application distributed under the GNU GPLv2. It is relatively popular in French speaking countries, where it is used by several major blogging platforms. Developed originally by Olivier Meunier from 2002, Dotclear has now attracted a solid team of developers...

, Paris Web, World Wide Fund for Nature

World Wide Fund for Nature

The World Wide Fund for Nature is an international non-governmental organization working on issues regarding the conservation, research and restoration of the environment, formerly named the World Wildlife Fund, which remains its official name in Canada and the United States...

, VideoLAN

VideoLAN

VideoLAN is a project that develops software for playing video and other media formats across a local area network . It originally developed two programs for media streaming, VideoLAN Client and VideoLAN Server , but most of the features of VLS have been incorporated into VLC, with the result...

, Adie, Canard PC

Canard PC

Canard PC is an independent magazine founded in France in 2003 devoted to PC gaming and published bi-monthly.Canard PC independence from the game companies is recognized in the French video gaming circles.-History:...

, International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Demotix

Demotix

Demotix is a citizen journalism website and photo agency. It enables freelance journalists and amateurs to share their user-generated content and photojournalism, and license them to clients including mainstream media organisations, charities, and stock image buyers.The website was launched in...

, GoodPlanet, Jamendo

Jamendo

Jamendo is a music website and a community of music authors. It bills itself as "the world's #1 platform for free and legal music downloads under Creative Commons licenses."...

, In Libro Veritas, and Arrêt sur Images le retour.