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.

After a brief product stabilization period, and to celebrate our new Gandi news system, we are restarting our "What's up" blog entry series to give you a view of the new services available at Gandi as we roll them out.

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

Here we are: the moment that many of you have been waiting for, for days, weeks, or even months. Personally, I have been looking for to this for several years now, but then again I'm an incurable dreamer :D

You will discover a new navigation tab on our website that has been discretely highlighted (don't laugh...it's our version of publicity) so that you will not overlook it: Gandi hosting has been launched in public beta testing, we trust, to provide you with an even higher level of service.

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')"?...

Flexibility, this is the capacity to adapt to a given situation. And this is how we have designed our hosting service.

Following a beta test phase, we are very proud to announce the official release of Gandi Mail. More than 6,000 persons have assisted us in the testing of this new product.

Several improvements accompany this launch :

• Included in the purchase of your domain name, you now have 5 email addresses with 1GB of disk space divided as you wish amongst your different accounts.
• You can also now subscribe to Gandi Mail Pack which allows you to create up to 1,000 email accounts in connection with your domain. Pack rates start at €1 (VAT excluded). Payment is based upon the amount of disk space desired. No minimum engagement is required - you can cancel at any time, and be refunded for the time not used!
• new functions that will be available with the pack:
  • the auto reply function: you have the possibility of having an automatic reply when you are gone
  • the 'like' alias: a system that is unique to Gandi. This allows you to create dynamic aliases for your e-mail mailbox (for example, an alias 'begin with jo' will allow you to receive e-mails at jo@domain, jojo@domain, jonathan@domain, johnny.boy@domain, etc.)
• The installation of a sieve on the platform will allow us, in the coming weeks, to add the following functions:
  • the possibility of changing one's password by webmail
  • the possibility of managing the level of antispam of your e-mail
  • the possibility of managing a blacklist/whitelist of e-mail addresses
  • the possibility of managing a blacklist/whitelist of words in e-mails
  • the possibility of excluding certain codes, in order to reduce spam

If you have other ideas/requests concerning the Gandi Mail service, please remember that we are listening to you

Following the release of .re domains in July, we are pleased to announce the possibility of buying and managing .mobi domains. Gandi has been an accredited mTLD registrar since April 2007.

The .mobi tld is a generic extension for mobile platforms. There are no registration restrictions.

The details of this extension are available at :
http://www.gandi.net/domain/mobi/info
The rate list can be found at :
https://www.gandi.net/domain/price/detail/mobi/

There are many more extensions in preparation that will be released by the end of the year.

Finally!

Many of our American customers have been anxiously waiting for the day when they could see how much they are actually spending at Gandi.net (sure, multiplying by 1.3-something-or-other could get you there, but how annoying is that...)

Well...those days are over! In line with our perpetual drive to provide you with new services, as of this afternoon you can now pay for your operations at Gandi in US Dollars!

Not only that, but in recognition of the wonderful support that we have been receiving from our American customers (they make up the second-largest country in terms of sales, and the American media such as CNET.com, miconian.com, or inta.org like to comment on our integrity, customer-friendliness, and technical know-how...), we are now selling .US domains!

We really can't say it enough, so we'll say it again...thank you, all of you! It really warms our hearts to feel your support from across the Atlantic Ocean!