Using gandi.net¶

We advise people to use gandi.net for your registrar. In order to get a domain, you must register it with a registrar. Unfortunately, most registrars charge a lot of money or have questionable legal agreements. Gandi.net is cheap and has the best legal agreement out there (it makes it clear that you own the domain name and you alone). However, there are many good registrars out there: gandi is not the only one!

One added benefit of using gandi.net is that they will also host your DNS (although, these days, most registrars will also host your DNS).

The one problem with gandi.net is that their interface is really difficult and confusing to use. So, here is a tutorial for configuring a domain registered with gandi.net to work with riseup.net web hosting. This tutorial assumes that you have already registered the domain.

NOTE: this tutorial is out of date. The best thing to do is just to specify pigeon.riseup.net as the primary name server and stork.riseup.net as the secondary name server. You do not need to mess with custom DNS hosted by gandi.

1. Go to gandi.net
2. click ‘Administration’
3. click ‘Customized DNS’
   
4. Login
   Specify the domain you want to modify, your gandi handle,
   and the password for your handle. click ‘Submit’
   
   In this sample image, we are modifying revolt.org using the riseup.net
   handle. Obviously, your values will be different!
5. Choose “Simplied Interface”
   
6. Specify the host computer
   First, click on the oddly named ‘Click here!’ button under the text “In order to specify the address of the computer which hosts your website”
   
7. Enter the host computer’s IP address
   Currently, there are two riseup.net servers which might be the host for your website:
   

   raven.riseup.net 69.90.134.160
   crow.riseup.net 216.162.197.233 (discontinued)
   

   
   If you don’t know which one to specify, contact us first before continuing.
   Enter the correct IP address in the fields like this:
   
   and then click “Submit”.

1. You’re done!
   That’s it. There is no way to logout, so you should not do this from a public computer. One important thing to remember is that from time to time we may need to switch the IP address of the web host. If this happens, you will have to go back through these steps and update the settings for the new IP address.