Gandi Bar

Friday 21 October 2011

Since the launch of our Simple Hosting service in beta testing, many of you have asked us when we will implement the improvements that we have been promising to make on our IaaS servers.

Thursday 22 September 2011

Do you want hosting that is simple, inexpensive, flexible, and that provides real service quality? In short, hosting Gandi-style?

Tuesday 17 May 2011

Don't see the relationship between Gandi's VPS cloud hosting and photography? How about if I give you a hint by referring to snapshots? ...now do you get it?

Wednesday 16 February 2011

From now until March 15th 2011, we are giving you 256MB of RAM for free for one year with every annual hosting share that you purchase.

This offer is only valid once per customer, but is addressed to a larger number of customers. It is available to all existing customers that would like to switch from monthly billing to annual billing, and for new customers that choose the annual subscription from the beginning. Just to be clear on one point, though, if you subscribe to 2 shares, the extra 256 MB of ram will only be added for the first share.

Monday 14 February 2011

UPDATE: The Beta testing period has ended, and Gandi AI 1.2 is live both at Paris and Baltimore.

We have just released the new version of Gandi AI (our automatically-installed VPS cloud servers) in beta testing at our Baltimore datacenter. After a brief testing period we will activate the image at the datacenter in Paris.

Tuesday 16 November 2010

Some of the "coming soon" are now "released", and so here's a little entry to tell you what, and how.

Monday 18 October 2010

I'll start by reminding everyone that our hosting platform has not experienced any major technical problem for a long time now; in fact, since the beta testing phase. And you know what? This is still true.

Let me explain: what do you do when everything is going well and you are progressing slowly but surely towards a wonderful success?

Well, here at Gandi, we evidently felt the urge to shoot ourselves in the foot. This is all the more ironic since we are our own cause of problems! What better way is there to keep things interesting here?

Gandi is a human company, and we take the definition of the word "human" to its extreme; We are imperfect by definition, and one of us has clearly demonstrated a perfect example of this today.

Yes, the rebooting of servers was a regrettably caused by human error, but there is nothing, not even through the various control and validation procedures in place, that I can to to fix this. We surely don't have a Kerviel in our team, and the consequences are not the same, however for me, for us, and for you, it's unacceptable.

As I write these lines, I do not yet know exactly who is directly responsible for causing the incident. There are more important things to be done, such as getting everything back in order, and to keep everyone informed of the status of the situation in the most transparent way possible.

I am not sure it is important to know who who did it, nor what our reaction will be with regards to it. We will see once all the details emerge;

It goes without saying that we will be offering you today's hosting for free, and we will see on a case-by-case basis if a particular situation requires going beyond that. And to think that we were about to make a big announcement for our hosting service...we will wait a bit for that now I think;(

Thursday 8 April 2010

We have now released version 3.0.3 of Gandi.net (version 3.0.2 wasn't very exciting and mainly to do with our 10-year anniversary). The exciting part of this new release is a change in the way that we handle VPS shares, and the ability to add RAM on demand to your server.

Wednesday 25 November 2009

This operation ended on August 24th, 2010 and is no longer in effect.

Friday 13 November 2009

Hello,

Today we have launched the functions allowing you to manage your own interfaces. You may configure up to 4 interfaces per server.

To add an additional interface, you will need to add additional IP address quota via the resource management interface.

Each additional IP address costs €1 excl. VAT per month (if paid monthly), or €10 (ex VAT) per year if paid annually, e.g. 2 months free!

This new function lays the foundations for us to provide you with some really cool features in the future such as an IP failover system, the utilization of IPv6 addresses or even creating a private networks between your servers.

As this has been at the top of your Wishlist for several months, we sincerely hope that this new feature will make you smile!

You can find documentation on this in our wiki here.

Monday 9 November 2009

Today we are opening the beta-test phase for the implementation of IPv6 on our hosting platform.

As a reminder, IPv6 is the successor to the current IPv4 upon which the internet is based, and given the generous attribution of the early IP addresses, the IPv4 address space is rapidly running out of available adresses.

Its replacement is gently making its appearance across the internet. An IPv6 address is made up of 128bits as opposed to 32bits for an IPv4 address. We are moving from 2^32 available addresses to 2^128 (excluding reserved allocations, of course) which gives us a few decades.. erm.. centuries to breathe!

If you wish to participate in the beta test phase, you must:

- Have some basic knowledge of IPv6
- Have a Gandi server in expert mode (i.e. with root access)
- Send us a request to participate to ipv6beta@gandi.net and include your gandi handle/user-id. (You will receive an email by return with the procedure to follow).

Initially, we will limit the beta test to approximately 50 servers, so don't wait to send in your request!

Tuesday 6 October 2009

Since our hosting service has been released, you have been requesting it, and here it is!

Thursday 24 September 2009

A new version of Gandi AI, labeled 1.2, is currently available via the server module management page of your account. This version corrects many bugs and imperfections that were present in version 1.1. It also significantly improves the performance of Apache due to the replacement of the mpm-itk module by a per-user module.

We are also going to take advantage of this upgrade to implement two additional modules:

PunBB, an efficient open-source forum that is solid, light, and written in PHP
Magento, a (the?) open-source platform that allows you to create an online store. Many add-ons are available on the MagentoConnect platform, such as the possibility of customizing the design of your store, changing the language of your interface, or to activate the payment platform of your preference. Also note that Magento needs 2 to 3 shares to run correctly.

Set up your server at http://www.gandi.net/hosting

Thursday 16 July 2009

Tuesday 7 July 2009

The success of the "Your server for free this summer!" operation is such that we have decided to have another promotion, which will be an extension of the previous one.

The first 1,000 free servers were given out in less than one week! Given the number of requests that we have received, we have even opened 102 accounts in addition to what was planned. Only here is the problem: there are many of you on the waiting list and at Gandi, and we want to be able to please as many as possible

The new promotion will therefore begin today. We are once more offering 1,000 free servers though this time, for only one month. The promotion remains, of course, without any purchase necessary, and you are free to keep your server by adding hosting resources to your account, or to let them expire.

The promotion that allows you to benefit from 2 free months by exchanging your monthly shares with fixed annual shares remains valid until August 31st 2009. For this, as a reminder, you just need to go to your "resource management" page, choose the number of annual shares that you want, and pay for your order. Once the shares have been added to your account, you can then remove the monthly shares that you no longer need. You will then be refunded for the time that remaining in the billing cycle for those shares.

Thursday 2 July 2009

Dear Customers,

As some of you may have noticed, we experienced a power outage from 11:30 AM to 3:30 PM (CET) today. We apologise for the inconvenience caused.

The company which manages the datacenter, that houses one of our server rooms performed maintenance this morning on some of their electrical equipment. Unfortunately, a human error by the provider undertaking the maintenance led to a total blackout of the datacenter for several minutes. The outage impacted many major companies on the internet (Dailymotion, Skyblog, Pixmania, etc.), as well as a portion of our customers.

Our system automatically transfers data to another server room in the event of a problem and it was working normally until the threshold was reached too quickly. There are several reasons for this: a massive outage on a scale seldom seen, combined with our choice to build-up the other server locations gradually rather than all at once, a server rebooting process that still requires perfecting and the success of our free server operation...in short, a chain of events caused this outage for some of you.

It goes without saying that we will examine what we could have been done at our end to prevent this, for example, a quicker building up of the other server locations (the hosting operation helps this enormously), and the continued optimization of the rebooting script (in the event that the electricity gods or the datacenter's subcontractor are still out to get us).

Additionally, we will ensure we refund you for today, and are at your disposal for any additional requests you may have. We will be adding one day to the expiration date for all of the affected hosting resources throughout the day.

Please accept our sincere apologies for this inconvenience. We are working to ensure that our infrastructure is built-up in a way which assures good performance and excellent management, so that ALL of you can benefit from our technology.

Technical note: In the event of a Gandi AI server, if your server responds but one of your services (web, ftp, etc.) is not working correctly, you can fix this by simply stopping and starting your server from Gandi's website. In the event that you have an expert server, we recommend that you activate your account's emergency console and execute a fsck command on your disks.

Thursday 25 June 2009

Summer has come and this has put us in the mood to make you happy...

Tuesday 2 June 2009

As you probably already know, our platform protects you from hardware failures that might occur on your server.

In the event of a problem on the machine, or if we suspect that a problem might occur (abnormal temperature, corrupted memory, etc.), your “server” will automatically be migrated to another machine. However, if you have an internal problem on your "server" that is not to due to the physical machine, and if it no longer responds, then you will need to take action.

Thursday 7 May 2009

Many websites start with a single server solution, a box acting as a web server and database server all in one. Simply, easy, cheap. The problem comes when traffic gets too high (a victim of their own success!). Many customers want a bigger box, but the answer is actually changing your architecture from "web server" to "web infrastructure". You can duplicate web servers, use the DNS to load balance them and ramp up your capacity very fast and very far.