As you know, last year was particularly gruelling. And while our teams are buckled down and working hard (and drinking lots of coffee!) in order to complete the interfaces that will be used by our resellers and Corporate customers, we are seeing a new increase in the number of support tickets opened each day, leading to a response time that is longer than usual.
To give you an idea, the backlog of tickets waiting for answers – which is usually around 900 tickets – exceeded a historic record of 1700 tickets this week!
This is mainly due to two factors:
First of all, the month of January is traditionally a month of high activity for Gandi. During the renewal of their domain names, many customers chose to migrate to #gandiv5 and discover our new interface and the new management of users, organizations, and teams. The result of all this is more customers needing help with the new site, and therefore more tickets, longer response times, and impatient customers.
At the same time, the migration of our hosting customers at FR-SD2 to FR-SD3, FR-SD5 and FR-SD6, announced last August, led to service interruptions and latencies for many customers. Our technical teams are working hard both at the datacenter and in maintaining the platform, but there too, we clearly had to handle a larger number of support tickets at the beginning of the year as usual.
We sincerely apologize for the frustration and the added waiting time caused by these subjects, but these changes are necessary to be even better and more efficient both in the management of your domain names and in our hosting services.
In addition, the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that we spoke about in the beginning of January added an additional workload to the already very busy schedule of our technical teams.
The good news is that the end is near:
With regards to the interface, our UI/UX team has already made (and continues to make) many modifications and improvements that allow our customers to better find their way around our website, as well as complete documentation being prepared. We will soon be sharing some of the changes to our platform’s UX with you.
On the hosting side, we have asked a lot of patience of our customers, however it had become necessary to shake up our platform and rebuild it from the ground up, both to be able to meet your usage needs as well as to maintain the stability of our hosting service, and therefore the quality of service that you are used to.
This has not been without difficulty, and many customers encountered, and still encounter, problems that our technical and support teams are working day and night to resolve. However, all of these efforts are worth it: at the conclusion of this period of instability, you will have much better performance and moreover we will be able to greatly expand our products.
We are also hiring for the Support, Development, and Operations teams, to help assure that we can go farther and faster in this deployment, which is so very important to us.
All of these are good reasons to hope to a return to normal very soon, with a reasonable volume of tickets, which will allow our support teams in Paris, Luxembourg, Taipei, and San Francisco to reply to you in short response times that you are used to from us…and to reduce their coffee intake 🙂
Thanks for the post, and for the honesty about your V5 interface.
I’m one of the customers who find v5 to be nowhere near as good as v4, and to be honest I’m concerned about how long I’ll be able to keep using v4, as the progress on v5 seems to be very slow.
I’ve just logged into v5 to see if there’s been any improvement, and sadly it doesn’t look much different. I manage 26 domains (had to look at v4 for that, v5 doesn’t provide a count) and while the default view in v4 shows all 26 at once, getting there in v5 means clicking ‘full list of domains’ which then just shows 20 (had to count them manually!), and then clicking ‘Show More’ to eventually show all 26. This wouldn’t be too bad, except that you have to do this every single time you go back to the front page.
Plus, even when you do show the full list, the information presented for each domain is very limited compared with v4.
Without needing to leave the front page on v4, I can see:-
1. Domain Name
2. Owner
3. Admin contact
4. Technical contact
5. Billing contact
6. Expiry date (sadly called expiration, but still there)
7. Auto-renew status
8. DNS Name Servers
9. SSL Certificates
10. Mail Service
11. Gandi Hosting Products.
v5 manages to show just two of these, numbers 1 and 6. It does show something under the domain name, which in some cases is a handle, and others is a company name. I’ve no idea what it’s supposed to be, there’s no help given when you hover. So, as far as I can see, v5 is about 2/11 of the way to catching up v4.
It wouldn’t be so bad if there was a domain overview page which showed all the missing information. But the existing domain overview page only adds item 7 above, all the others are missing. You can find them all, but you have to go through loads of different pages to find them.
It’s such a shame. Gandi was like a breath of fresh air when I moved all my domains across a few years ago, everything was easy to find, and they didn’t shy away from the technical stuff. So much better than my previous registrar. I’m really not sure if I’d think the same coming straight to v5 now.
The v5 interface does look pretty, but like many pretty interfaces it’s functionally limited. Maybe v5 could be kept as the beginners option, and v4 as the expert one. But at the moment I can’t do anything in v5 without migrating away from v4, and I daren’t do that.
Hello Matthew,
Thank you very much for writing us this feedback.
V4 won’t be decommissioned until we will be internally (and externally our clients) proud of it.
We addressed the simple needs first. The current UI clearly lacks efficiency, clarity, and synthesis. We don’t answer yet to technical or advanced usages.
Dashboard improvements will progressively come in weeks and month to come with the clear objective not to be just as good as V4 but better.
We are also reviewing the lists views so that you can view them all at once, without the pagination, and be able to filter on it. A table view is also in progress so that you can have your technical information back.
Other topics are also in progress, we will detail them in a blog post very soon.
We know it’s been months you read that things are moving without seeing any visible changes. A lot of things have been reviewed internally and we are changing a bit the way we work.
We are ready to move fast now (finally) and will share soon about this on our blog.
Thanks for the time you took to write this, such feedbacks mean a lot to us.
Sedert de verandering van alles heb ik al 2 maanden geen website meer
Alles is betaald
Maar ik vind niets meer terug
Wat kan ik doen
I have to tell that I’ve found the redesign of the web user interface to be nerve breaking and also a step backwards in usability.
It has totally meant that any interaction with Gandi to manage the products I have here is always slower, always uncertain about
where things are, and always a cold-sweating-experience trying to find out how many places I have to go to in order to fetch the data I need to properly manage my products, etc.
The “No bullshit”(TM) motto should be struck down. It no longer applies to Gandi.
I manage domain registration and SSL certificates through Gandi. These are critical products for our company to operate. Having my nerves broken by a barely functional web user interface when I have to manage such critical products, is what I would qualify as bullshit.
Hello Pepe,
As we explained to Matthew few comments earlier, we know that unfortunately, for many reasons, we released a new UI that we are not really proud of. For now, the new UI is less efficient and we clearly understand how you can feel disappointed and bored with it.
We are working hard to improve and fix all the things we missed, to get back efficient views with relevant information, shortcuts to access your products and data you are interested in. A lot of these improvements will be shipped in the next weeks.
The V4 version will stay available until the new version will exceed the old version efficiency and performance.
Meanwhile, we are still Gandi and nobullshit is and always be the reason why and how we do our job. It doesn’t prevent us to do some mistakes, but we are not hiding behind excuses about them, and we try hard to correct them, to offer you the services you are waiting for. The service we would wait for ourselves as customers.
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