Gandi vs Timeweb: Which Is Better?
We track Gandi and Timeweb 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 TimewebTimeweb Cloud (est. 2006, St. Petersburg) is one of Russia's largest hosting providers, with 14 data centers across Russia, Europe, Central Asia and the US. The catalog spans shared hosting from 180 ₽/mo, a premium 1C-Bitrix line with isolated resources, 160+ ready dedicated server configs, NVMe VDS with daily billing, 352 domain zones, SSL certificates, business email and a website builder — plus a 10-day free trial, free site migration and daily backups on every hosting plan.
Comparison Table
| Feature | Gandi | Timeweb |
|---|---|---|
| Price / mo | $0.00 win | $1.12 |
| Renewal price | Standard rate after the promo term | 3-year promos vs monthly |
| Datacenters | 2 | 14 win |
| NVMe storage | ✗ No | ✓ Yes win |
| Free domain | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Backups | Snapshots included | — |
| CDN | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| Support | 24/6 email & chat | 24/7 Chat & Phone (RU) |
| Uptime · 30d | 100.00% win | 99.39% |
Price History
Gandi · SSL Certificate FreeCollecting price history — the trend fills in as we track this plan.
Timeweb · Timeweb MailCollecting price history — the trend fills in as we track this plan.
Uptime & Performance
Gandi 100.00% Timeweb 99.39%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
Timeweb- Shared hosting from 180 ₽/mo with unlimited traffic and daily backups
- 10-day free trial + free site migration + free .RU/.РФ domain on yearly plans
- Premium line with isolated resources for 1C-Bitrix (1Сайт / Eterno / Premium)
- 160+ ready dedicated configs from 7,270 ₽/mo across 10 data centers
- NVMe VDS from 711 ₽/mo with daily billing and a 1 Gbps port
- Free Let's Encrypt SSL, free DNS hosting and email on every plan
- Best promos require a 3-year commitment (monthly rates are 2-3× higher)
- Support and documentation are Russian-first; English site is limited
- No money-back guarantee — a 10-day trial instead
- Only 2 dedicated GPU configs (Tesla T4 / A2)
- International data centers cover a small slice of the catalog
- Hourly cloud billing lives on a separate Timeweb Cloud platform
The Verdict
Gandi and Timeweb are evenly matched on the data we track. Choose based on the rows that matter most to you in the table above.
Gandi & Timeweb alternatives
Cheaper than Gandi / Timeweb
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.