Gandi vs Hivelocity: Which Is Better?
We track Gandi and Hivelocity prices, uptime and specs 24/7. Here's the live head-to-head for September 2026 — no paid rankings, just the data.
About GandiGandi is one of the oldest independent domain registrars in Europe, founded in Paris in 1999 by French internet pioneers and ICANN-accredited since its early years. It now runs a catalogue of 996 domain extensions alongside LXC-based Simple Hosting (with preconfigured WordPress, PrestaShop and Nextcloud variants), GandiCloud VPS on OpenStack with block storage and snapshots, mailboxes, TLS/SSL certificates, Premium DNS built on Cloudflare and a public API for automation. Its infrastructure sits in private rooms at Equinix PA3 in Paris and LuxConnect in Luxembourg, and the company is certified against ISO 27001 and ISO 22301. Gandi is best known for price transparency — every zone's creation, transfer, renewal, owner-change and restore price is published — and for free WHOIS privacy and free Anycast DNS on every domain.
About HivelocityHivelocity is a Tampa, Florida-based infrastructure provider (est. 2002) running 40+ data centers across 6 continents on a 2+ Tbps multi-carrier network. Instant-deploy bare metal, VPS/VDS, GPU servers, colocation and managed services — with 24/7/365 human support (NPS 79), a 99.99% uptime SLA and SOC 2 / PCI DSS certifications.
Comparison Table
| Feature | Gandi | Hivelocity |
|---|---|---|
| Price / mo | $0.00 win | $10.00 |
| Renewal price | Standard rate after the promo term | Promo pricing (up to 50% off) |
| Datacenters | 2 | 42 win |
| NVMe storage | ✗ No | ✓ Yes win |
| Free domain | ✓ Yes win | ✗ No |
| Backups | Snapshots included | — |
| CDN | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| Support | 24/6 email & chat | — |
| Uptime · 30d | 100.00% win | 99.07% |
Price History
Gandi · SSL Certificate FreeCollecting price history — the trend fills in as we track this plan.
Hivelocity · pro.sm.amd (Virtual Shared)Collecting price history — the trend fills in as we track this plan.
Uptime & Performance
Gandi 100.00% Hivelocity 99.07%Pros & Cons
Gandi- French internet pioneer and ICANN-accredited registrar since 1999 — 135 employees, HQ in Paris, ISO 27001 & ISO 22301 certified
- One of the most transparent domain price lists in the industry: 996 extensions with creation, transfer, renewal, owner-change and restore prices published
- Free Anycast DNS with LiveDNS (sub-250 ms propagation), DNSSEC, 2 free mailboxes and a free SSL certificate with every domain
- Simple Hosting runs every site in its own LXC container with dedicated CPU/RAM — not the usual shared-resource plan
- Five languages on the same plan (PHP, Python, Node) with MySQL or PostgreSQL, plus free snapshots and a Varnish cache
- GandiCloud VPS on OpenStack with block storage, volume snapshots and a public API/Terraform/Ansible automation
- Renewal prices are steep on the popular zones — .com renews at $38.38/year and .net at $39.98, well above the market
- Promo pricing covers the first term only; standard rates are 3-4x higher (Starter $3.99 → $15.00 per month)
- No dedicated servers, GPU or colocation — the top of the line is an 8 vCPU / 16 GB VPS
- No money-back guarantee or free trial is published, unlike most US and EU hosts
- Support is 24/6 (not 24/7) by email and chat; phone help is a paid advisory service
- Only two data centers, both in Europe — latency is poor for Asia-Pacific and most of the Americas
Hivelocity- 40+ data centers across 6 continents (US-heavy: Tampa, Miami, NYC, LA, Dallas, Atlanta…)
- Instant deployment — servers online in minutes, hourly billing available
- 99.99% uptime SLA on a 2+ Tbps multi-carrier network
- 24/7/365 human support by phone, live chat and tickets (NPS 79)
- No setup fee on instant-deploy servers; up to /29 IPv4 included
- SOC 2 and PCI DSS certified data centers
- US-centric pricing and footprint — EU/Asia edge stock is limited
- Most instant-deploy configs are limited stock; custom builds take days
- No shared web hosting or domain services
- Colocation and private cloud pricing only on request (quote-based)
- Managed services and backups are paid add-ons
The Verdict
On the data we track, Gandi wins more rows in the comparison table above (3 vs 2). That said, the right pick depends on which rows matter most for your use case — price, uptime, datacenters or backups.
Gandi & Hivelocity alternatives
Cheaper than Gandi / Hivelocity
FAQ
Right now Gandi has the lower entry price across the plans we track. Prices update every few hours — the live snapshot above always shows the current starting price for both.
Over the last 30 days of our monitoring, Gandi had the higher measured uptime. We ping both providers every few minutes from multiple locations — see the uptime graph above.
Yes. Both run standard KVM virtualization, so you can snapshot your server, export the image, and import it on the other provider. For most stacks a fresh deploy plus a data copy is simpler.
It depends on your priority: pick the one that wins on the rows that matter most to you in the table above (price, uptime, datacenters, backups). For latency-sensitive apps favour uptime and network; for value favour price and specs.