Gandi vs Selectel: Which Is Better?
We track Gandi and Selectel 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 SelectelSelectel (est. 2008, St. Petersburg) is one of Russia's largest cloud and hosting providers, serving 36,000+ customers from 6 own Tier III data centers in Moscow and St. Petersburg plus a partner DC in Novosibirsk. The catalog spans an hourly-billed cloud platform, 100+ ready dedicated servers deployed in 2 minutes, GPU systems up to 8× NVIDIA B300 HGX, VPS/VDS packages from 200 ₽/mo, colocation, managed Kubernetes & databases, S3, CDN and DDoS protection — with ISO 27001, PCI DSS, SOC 2, GDPR and 152-FZ compliance.
Comparison Table
| Feature | Gandi | Selectel |
|---|---|---|
| Price / mo | $0.00 win | $2.37 |
| Renewal price | Standard rate after the promo term | — |
| Datacenters | 2 | 7 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 | 98.60% |
Price History
Gandi · SSL Certificate FreeCollecting price history — the trend fills in as we track this plan.
Selectel · VDS 1-1-10Collecting price history — the trend fills in as we track this plan.
Uptime & Performance
Gandi 100.00% Selectel 98.60%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
Selectel- 6 own Tier III DCs (Moscow, St. Petersburg) + Novosibirsk partner DC
- Dedicated servers from 8,540 ₽/mo, deployed in 2 minutes, 100+ ready configs
- GPU line: B300 HGX, H200 NVL/HGX, A100, L4, RTX 6000 Pro/4090 (cloud + bare metal)
- Hourly-billed cloud with preemptible VMs and freeze option (up to 75% savings)
- Free unlimited 1 Gbps traffic on dedicated; 3 TB free on cloud VMs
- VPS/VDS from 200 ₽/mo (~$2.2) — 7 fixed NVMe/KVM configs
- No shared web hosting plans (discontinued)
- No money-back guarantee — prepaid balance model
- Cloud GPU prices published hourly only (monthly estimated at 720 h)
- International footprint limited (KZ/UZ/KE pools are regional)
- English site & docs are a subset of the Russian portal
- Colocation pricing is quote-based (no public price list)
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 & Selectel alternatives
Cheaper than Gandi / Selectel
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.