Gandi vs SSD Nodes: Which Is Better?
We track Gandi and SSD Nodes 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 SSD NodesSSD Nodes is a budget-focused VPS provider founded in 2011 and headquartered in Tustin, California. It rents capacity from the Hivelocity data center network and runs its own Vippy virtualization stack, which lets it offer KVM plans with 8 GB RAM and up from just $5.50/mo on 3-year terms. The company is deliberately VPS-only and covers 14 locations across the US, Canada, Europe and Asia-Pacific.
Comparison Table
| Feature | Gandi | SSD Nodes |
|---|---|---|
| Price / mo | $0.00 win | $3.25 |
| Renewal price | Standard rate after the promo term | — |
| Datacenters | 2 | 14 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 | 99.20% |
Price History
Gandi · SSL Certificate FreeCollecting price history — the trend fills in as we track this plan.
SSD Nodes · SSL CertificateCollecting price history — the trend fills in as we track this plan.
Uptime & Performance
Gandi 100.00% SSD Nodes 99.20%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
SSD Nodes- Rock-bottom VPS pricing — KVM / SMALL from $5.50/mo on a 3-year term
- NVMe storage on 4X-LARGE and up (720 GB – 1.92 TB) at prices far below the market
- 14 locations across the US, Canada, Europe and Asia-Pacific (Hivelocity network)
- Free IPv6, 10 Gbps ports and full root access on every plan
- No bandwidth overage fees — soft caps with upgrade recommendations
- 14-day money-back guarantee with 24/7 support
- Best prices require 3-year prepayment — monthly billing costs ~25% more
- VPS only — no dedicated servers, cloud, or managed hosting
- Entry tiers still run SATA SSDs — NVMe starts at the 4X-LARGE tier
- Aging Intel Silver CPUs — no AMD EPYC/Ryzen or newer Xeon options
- Bandwidth capped at 4–48 TB/mo — no unmetered plans
- No phone or live-chat support — tickets and email only
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 & SSD Nodes alternatives
Cheaper than Gandi / SSD Nodes
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.