Gandi Bar

We have been alluding to this option since the beginning of our hosting service, and we are particularly proud of it quite simply because it is a tool that we would like to have seen at one of our competitors...

To make a metaphor (I like metaphors), imagine that you drive to work every day, say, 50 miles round-trip each day, from Monday to Friday. You have a small, fuel-efficient, 2-door car, with a small trunk that is just enough for your daily needs. The problem is that on the weekends with the wife and kids, it is just too small for a comfortable family trip... Your only real choice is therefore to purchase a bigger car : a 4-door gas-guzzler with a huge trunk and one that is therefore more expensive. Or even, in the worst-case scenario, you would need to purchase two new cars...

Well, at Gandi, we just invented modular back-seats and an optional additional trunk! Ah...no, wait. Actually, as we do not yet manufacture cars, we have applied this excellent idea to servers. And we must say that this is far easier than with cars

Therefore, concretely, this means that with GandiFlex, you may schedule in advance at what time during the day, the week, the month, or even the year, when you will need more power, more RAM, more of everything. Since our hosting system is based on server-shares, we provide you with the possibility of adding from 1 to 7 to your server depending on the program of your choice. You will notice that we have initially limited the Gandi Flex service to 8 shares. This is because we so not yet know how such as service will be used by you, though mainly because for now, the number of servers with more than 8 shares totals only 0.1% of our supply. Here are a few examples that do not allude to cars that will help you see how it works (note: all prices below are excl. VAT):

You manage a news website, and you have a daily newsletter that you send out at around 4 PM. Set up a repeating weekly GandiFlex program from 4 PM to 5 PM from Monday through Friday to increase your server's power during that period and forget about it. Your mails will be sent faster, without disrupting access to your website. How much will this cost you? 1 Flex-share costs €0.07 per hour ($0.1 or £0.6). In the case of this example, you will only pay an additional €1.40 per month

Another example, demanding more power: you created a guild of online gamers, and your team holds training matches every Friday and Saturday on your virtual dedicated server. You therefore need more resources to use your gaming server, in addition to your website, your forum, and TeamSpeak... You decide to program a schedule that will add 2 Flex-shares every Friday and Saturday from 9 PM to midnight: 2 Flex-shares (€0.14) X 3 hours X 2 days = €0.84 per week, or €3.36 per month!

Obviously, the addition or the removal of a share will not require a reboot of your server. In the two previous examples, in order to assure an optimal rendering, you would have needed to purchase more shares all the time, or in the case of a dedicated server, have a machine configured from the start for peak consumption. It would not be very environmentally friendly, like using a huge SUV to drive to work by yourself everyday.

Here is another illustration of use, depending on the peaks encountered in the load on your server. This one is running on 2 server-shares, though has a clearly identified need from 6 PM to 8 PM daily. This need may be estimated at 4 shares for two hours. Starting from the final price of a share at Gandi (10 euros) this user would need (without GandiFlex) to pay €60 per month to assure an optimal service for his or her server (6 shares X €10). With Gandi Flex, it is a simple matter to only use the strict minimum daily need, 2 server-shares (eg. €30 per month) for two hours - in other words €0.56 per day, or an additional €16.80 per month. This translated to a total of €36.80 per month! A monthly savings of €23.20 by just using what is needed is nothing to sniff at eh?

All of this is now available at Gandi! You just need to log into your account, and go to your server's control panel, and from there, by clicking on "Change" after "Flex operations active".

And tomorrow? Imagine that you are driving along the highway and come across 3 hitchhiking friends that you pick up. How are you going to pick up the 4 Norwegians sticking out their thumbs 2 miles further up the road? We have a solution to this, and will soon tell you all about it

A heads up on the work in progress !!!

The .ASIA TLD will be launched today at 1pm, French time. Gandi, who did not participate in the Sunrise phases for reasons explained in this post, has been .ASIA-accredited since the end of last year.

The .ASIA for all!
The TLD is normally reserved for individuals and corporate bodies who can justify a contact in the Asia geographic zone (from Turkey to the Pacific). This contact (CED) can be one of the 4 contacts linked to your domain (Owner, Admin, Billing or Technical), and you will then need to provide identification information for this person (passport number) or body (company number). Important point: if you cannot justify a CED contact yourself, Gandi, who possesses an Australian subsidiary, will be able to assume a technical contact position with the Registry for no extra charge.

Now accepting orders
As always, we do not like pre-booking systems by which companies promise that you will definitely get the domain you want by paying more money, and therefore we did not participate in the auctioning system or in any anticipated booking.
You can start placing your orders right away, bearing in mind you will need to manually check whether the domain was reserved during the Sunrise period. If your order fails, we will of course reimburse you fully.

The TLDs specificities are available here:
http://www.gandi.net/domaine/asia/info

The TLD is sold for $25.00 excl VAT as an A rate. The full grid is available here:
http://www.gandi.net/domaine/prix/detail/asia/

We wish to express our sincerest apologies for the quality of our Gandi Mail service yesterday, Monday 3 March 2008. Some of you unfortunately received mail with more than 3 hours' delay, which is simply unacceptable.

The problem is mainly due to an abnormally significant load on our mail servers. On 'normal' days, we already manage more than 10 million e-mails (80% or 90% being spam). Delivering top-quality service is an every day struggle which should be made transparent to you. Yesterday was clearly a failure. We could have silenced it and looked the other way, but that doesn't correspond to our aims and to who we are. As always, we prefer to be totally transparent, to confirm that the problem has been identified and that we are working on it fully.

Our platform will therefore be modified in upcoming weeks to give you more comfort in your mail management. Until then - and starting from now - we are going to add machines and change some settings so as to ensure less delays when we experience spamming of several hundreds of thousands of e-mails.

Finally, just a word of advice for those of you who are still on the old mail platform and the old DNS (full1.gandi.net or ns7.gandi.net): I strongly recommend that you migrate to the new DNS and to Gandi Mail, which globally works better. To do so, all you need to do is click the 'Manage' link in the mail section of your domain management interface and follow the procedure.

As explained, maintaining an excellent quality of products and services is a priority, and this is adequately reflected in our timetable.

We are now in the 8th week of Beta testing for Gandi hosting. We are confidently heading into the 3rd month now, with far fewer bugs throughout all the various services and a level of stability in the platform that is approaching our goal of achieving a flawless level of quality in our service.

You may have noticed your GandiBlog running faster this afternoon.

No, we haven't added 50 new machines, we've just updated GandiBlog. In fact, we've doubly updated it.

Precisely one month after the launching of our Beta trial version, some of you may be wondering just how the renewal process works...

We have already spoken of this, though it is still happenning with DROA, and others are joining in as well. Just like "Domain Registry Services", which is in no way affiliated with Gandi.net.

If you receive a mail claiming to be a renewal form from Domain Registry of America do not act on it!. We are not in any way affiliated with these companies. Your domain cannot be registered with them as they are not a ICANN-accredited registrars, nor Gandi resellers.

If you have not transferred it already, your domain name is safely at Gandi. You may verify this by looking it up in our whois search engine. Look at the "Registrar" and "Expires" lines.

All that concerns renewal and/or contact information updates will be conducted exclusively by Gandi.

If you have received such a letter, and would like for us to archive it, and so that we can add it to a possible future action against the practices of these companies, please feel free to fax us a copy of it at +33.1.43.73.18.51.

Please note that permanent security of your general top level domain is available by locking it against transfers, and that our customer service department is available to help you if you have the slightest question.

Sorry for the late notice but, after this maintenance, you're going to love us.

Have you ever gone to register a domain name, only to discover that that between the time you made your whois search (perhaps you looked it up during your lunch break at work), and the time that you purchased it (say, when you came home in the evening), that the domain name was suddenly no longer available? That the domain name you once thought could be yours for 12 euros at Gandi was now being sold on a restricted basis for a higher price and at a different registrar?

Here we are ... almost at the beginning of the year 2008 and the start of a new adventure for us!

We have come to the end of this long series of teasers that, we hope, kept you waiting in expectation :D

Anyway, at the same time it was important that we hunted down all the bugs on our hosting platform, and so it was not a waste of your time...

When setting out to create a hosting service in the Gandi spirit, we made a point of doing something innovative.

Having come from our previous experience in the area (we just popularized shared hosting via Multimania roughly 7 years ago), we wanted to build a product that would bring something truly new to the market. To do this, our way of proceeding was to ask ourselves, "what would I like to be able to do with this solution (and adding, 'that I cannot do elsewhere')"?...