Gandi Bar - Gandi

Simple Hosting is live!

Ryan — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:15:00 +0100

After 4 months of beta testing, the Gandi team is proud to present our new hosting offer, now available to the general public. Simple Hosting has been designed to offer you the maximum possible flexibility and simplicity at a price that will allow everyone to use it.

Since its founding, Gandi has challenged itself to combine two things which don't easily go together: We want to be at the forefront of technological innovation in our field, and also to offer our services to as broad an audience as possible.

In 2008, we were among the pioneers of Cloud hosting in Europe, developing a complete IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). This offer, which has been very successful since it was introduced, and which is still growing in users, was primarily aimed at system administrators and architects; people used to dealing with dedicated servers.

We have continued to expand our IaaS platform, which constitutes the foundation of all of our hosting solutions, and this time we wanted to make the technology available to the largest number of people possible. The idea is therefore to combine the flexibility of the Cloud with the simplicity of the traditional shared-hosting model, and to offer all of this at a price everyone can afford.

We therefore present you with a service offer based on a PaaS (Platform as a Service), which will give you all the flexibility you are used to getting from Gandi, but which will be very easy to use. This will be appreciated by webmasters who don't want to have to deal with server administration, but want to benefit from the advantages of Cloud Computing.

We are launching our Simple Hosting offer with a server that has PHP and MySQL already installed, and comes with dedicated disk, RAM, and CPU core resources. The flexibility of the offer allows you to increase or decrease the power of the server in a few clicks (and a few minutes), without the need for migration. We are also keeping the minimum commitment period to one day, so that you can easily create and use resources for only as long as you need them.

Our prices (and all prices below are listed excluding VAT), are designed to give you a very attractive offer that is economically feasible for you and for Gandi. Prices start at €4 euros per month (or an annual cost of €48), and we are both proud and happy to announce that we can guarantee this price.

The starting offer, that we call the "S", or small size, corresponds to a server with 256MB of RAM, one dedicated core, and a MySQL database whose size is limited only by the size of your disk!

We have devised 5 offers in total, for this first instance family, and have grouped them by size, in order to meet your needs. Here they are:

S Pack: $5, £3.50 or €4 per month
M Pack: $10, £7, or €8 per month
L Pack: $20, £14, or €16 per month
XL Pack: $30, £21, or €24 per month
XXL Pack: $40, £28, or €32 per month

Each size pack will give you twice as much power as the previous size, an exponential increase in power, though the price increase by pack size is basically linear. All the packs come with 10 GB of disk. However, the disk space can be increased just as it can with our IaaS offer, and at the same price: $0.25 (£0.16, or €0.18) per GB per month, up to a maximum of 1 TB (1000GB).

So, what can I run off of an "S" instance?

Many things, in fact. Our engineers have implemented a web cache system that allows us to run many simultaneous pages, as long as they are in the cache. The only real limit is the strict number of simultaneous processes. By strict, we mean simultaneous connections by X number of visitors.

In the case of "S" instances, this limiting number "X" is equal to 2. What this means is that only 2 visitors will be able to call PHP/MySQL at precisely the same instant (the others must wait until the end of the execution of the script before taking their turn, typically a few milliseconds).

Our offer is well suited to people who have created their website themselves, or done so with the help of popular tools such as Magento, Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress, punBB, etc. With predefined sFTP access and phpMyAdmin already in place, the management of such a website is surprisingly quick and easy to set up!

To help you with this, we have written up some installation guides of a few popular tools that will help you get your website published on a Gandi instance of any size.

During these 4 months of beta testing, we have been focused on the feedback we received from our testers, looking for the right balance between ease-of-use and security. We have arrived at something that we believe is really easy to use, and yet without sacrifice in the area of security, which is a constant problem, and one not dealt with adequately by some of the more "traditional" hosting offers.

We have already written several wiki pages that will answer the majority of your questions. And for those of you that are eager to get going, we have even written up a Quickstart Guide that will show you the basics in a quick and easy way. Of course, access to our customer service is included in our offer.

Currently we are only offering Simple Hosting out of the Paris datacenter, as we initially needed to validate the technology and infrastructure before ordering up the expansions needed to enable the American datacenter. This has now been done, and Simple Hosting will be available from at our American datacenter at around the beginning of April.

Of course this does not prohibit customers from around the world from benefiting from the current offer. If your visitors are mainly from the United States, however, you might want to consider waiting until our offer is available out of the Baltimore datacenter.

For our customers that have been seduced by our offer but don't yet have a hosting plan with us, we are offering a promo code to all domain name customers at Gandi.

This promo code will give you a 50% discount on the price of any instance you choose, in exchange for a one-year commitment(*). A "S" size at €2 per month, for example, will be a total of €24 for the entire year.
(*) Warning, this offer is limited to the first 3 million customers who request it

We recommend that you choose a S pack (with monthly renewal), and test your site on it, and then adjust the size of your instance as needed (since you are free to do this at any point). When you are sure, just renew your pack at the ideal size, using your promo code.

We have done everything we could to have our offer meet your needs, while staying true to our mission of helping the greatest number of people possible to profit from this wonderful platform for free speech: the Internet!

One more thing: as you know, we do not purchase any advertising, or ever pay anyone to say nice things about us. It's all honest word of mouth (ok, and twitter plays a part too). So, should you like to help us continue operating like this, we would be very grateful if you would purchase a pack of Simple Hosting, but even if you don't, you can still spread the word. Thanks for your support, and we wish you a happy 2012!
The Gandi Team

New Domain Name and Email API

Ryan — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0100

Those that have been following our blog closely are aware that we have been doing a complete overhaul of our domain name platform over the past year.
With this overhaul comes a new domain name and Email API, replacing that already available to resellers. As a special surprise, the new API will also be available for non-resellers too!.

A new API, but still in RPC XML

We have made the decision to make the same API available to you that we use for the gandi.net website. This means that you will benefit from all our improvements at almost the same time as we do (like new extensions, new products, etc.).
This also means that you will have access to all of the extensions that Gandi provides, and that the price catalog can be queried directly via the API (thanks to new methods that allow you to query for the price at your price rate).
You can also create lists of operations, domain names, and contacts that you can apply filters to.
Finally, you may manage your Gandi Mail out-of-office reply via the Email API.

Documentation is already available at this address, and it contains examples in Python, Php, Nodejs, Perl, and Ruby.
You will find a step-by-step tutorial on how to use it, on this page or, if you prefer, you may download it as a PDF file.

The major differences

The idea from the beginning has been not to change everything, so your migrations will be smooth, using familiar terms and calls. Since we are mentioning migration, you should know that the current (old) API will not be updated, though it will be supported until June 30th, 2012 to give you time to start using the new version.
Concerning your migration, the two APIs are compatible and you can migrate between them method by method, giving you constant control over your transition to V2.
One point that may seem a bit trivial, but which will cause problems for some: there is no longer a method for logging in with a login and password in the new version. You must use an API key, which you can get here for your Gandi interface.
Finally, remember that this new API is open to everyone, whether or not you are a reseller. The only requirement is that you must have at least one domain name at Gandi and/or have a prepaid account that has enough funds for your operations.

What is an API used for?

Our API lets you do the same thing with domain names from your website as we do on ours. For example, you can use the scripts to program renewal reminders at the dates that you choose, provide your family, friends, or customers (if you are a reseller) with your own interface that will allow them to create email or web forwarding addresses, program out-of-office replies for their email, etc.

When will it be available?

The OT&E (Operational Test and Evaluation) test platform is already available at the address https://rpc.ote.gandi.net/xmlrpc.
The production platform will be available in 3 to 4 weeks.

Changes to come

What we will soon be integrating into the new domain name API (and not into the V1 API) will please many of you. The finishing touches are being added to DNS zone file management. Additionally, we expect DNSSEC to follow a couple weeks after that. Owner changes are in the works, however we still have one more migration to do in our system before it will be compatible with the API methods.

Gandi is moving!

Ryan — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:45:00 +0100

Gandi is moving it's French headquarters to a larger and more modern location in Paris this week.

This is something of a big change for us, since our headquarters at Place de la Nation in downtown Paris were getting a bit cramped. We have therefore chosen a more modern and spacious location in the southern part of the capital.

A view of our new offices:

We will be packing up our things on Thursday, December 15th and will be fully operational once again as of Monday, December 19th in the morning.

What does this mean for you? There will be a slowdown in the processing of support tickets during this period, and an interruption in telephone support for resellers from Thursday the 15th at 13:00 GMT to Monday the 19th at 8:00 GMT.

Our new address in Paris is:

Gandi SAS
63/65 boulevard Massena
75013 Paris

New website creation tool (HTML5)

Ryan — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 10:26:00 +0200

After having listened to the many pertinent remarks that our customers have made on this topic, we recognized the importance of finding a new website creation tool that we could provide you with. This tool would need to allow you to create a website in pure HTML5/CSS, import and export your website as easily as possible, and all the while being sure that it is easy to use and to create a professional looking website.

After more than a year of scouring the landscape of online website creation tools, and after looking at many different companies and projects, we are pleased to announce that we have chosen BaseKit! This London-based company is full of dedicated geeks that love what they do, continue to find new ways to improve their business, and are people-oriented. It should therefore come as no surprise that we are rather fond of them

We have a couple of projects in the works right now, and so you won't see their integration for a couple of months yet, however to let you in on what's going on behind the scenes:

BaseKit will use Gandi's VPS Cloud Hosting service,
BaseKit's domain names will also be provided by Gandi,
Gandi will integrate the BaseKit tool directly into our website by the end of the year,
You can visit their website at http://www.basekit.com to get an idea for yourself in the meantime (We are working with BaseKit to launch their site in French too, at the address http://fr.basekit.com ).

The tool will be updated shortly however; The new version is much more ergonomic and is really a joy to work with.

On a final note, I would like to stress that our strategic partnership is based on the product, and will assure that we always have the best and most up-to-date HTML tool on the market.

Happy website building!

Quicker inter-domain and server navigation

Ryan — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 17:43:00 +0200

The optimization of Gandi interfaces is something that we work hard at. We have many ideas as to how to improve things (display rapidity, ergonomics, etc.) and you, our customers, frequently submit very interesting ideas with regards to this.

We are pleased to present a new feature that will make your life easier

If you have a large number of domains and/or servers, and if you frequently make operations on them (DNS changes, website creation, checking statistics, etc.), you have probably already noticed that it is rather annoying to keep having to go back to the list of your domains.

This is why this little improvement will make those of you concerned really happy

As always, an image is worth a thousand words:

This navigation feature is therefore visible as soon as you are in the domain's or server's control panel, and if you have more than one and less than 200 (a temporary arbitrary limit).

GANDI is reinforcing its Corporate offer

Ryan — Wed, 11 May 2011 14:36:00 +0200

The idea in itself is simple: too many companies that want to have a real management of their online identity pay too much for their domain names just because they are companies, and because they are approached by providers either vaunting their service or through glossy marketing brochures. Being very aware of this, we introduced a new approach to this a while ago to try and bring about another way of handling this situation.

For many years now, we have been working with large groups, institutions, associations, SME, as well as consulting and law firms, to bring them a service that is even more customized and complete, all the while remaining ourselves, meaning, clear and honest.

A dedicated and experienced team has recently been hired to develop offers and services that are unique to this type of customer. Gandi is therefore developing its Corporate offer, with the goal of being able to provide you with an ethical alternative to your professional needs.

Thanks to their specific knowledge of this demanding market, developed over the past twelve years in dedicated companies, Michael and Stéphane bring their experience to the teams already in place and that have also (isn't it true Sophie and the others) proven their added value to our "Corporate" customers.

The creation, protection, and promotion of your brands on the internet require personal assistance, and a strong commitment. We make it a point of honor to offer you a service that is 100% customized to your specific needs. Our objective is to create a real lasting partnership with each customer.

Our values are at the foundation of our company: following-up, flexibility, transparency, dedication, and listening to our customers. Yes, this resembles the usual marketing line a bit. However, we want to truly refresh the practices of this market, all the while not making any compromises on what makes us who we are.

Therefore, our ethics will not change; no broken promises, no misleading advertisements, no over-billing for domain names: simply forcing ourselves to do our job honestly and correctly, meaning that we provide you with the best product or service for the right price, and in a way that is transparent.

We offer you a real quality of service, one that is clearly measured and explained depending on your demands. This constitutes our best sales argument, and we commit ourselves to keeping our promises. For us, this is the best guarantee of a relationship based on confidence and one that must last.

We are in the process of working on a group of services that are dedicated to the needs of companies. These services will be progressively made available by the end of the year, though some corporate services are already available such as:

Management of dedicated accounts,
Transfer and rationalization of entire portfolios,
Registration and management of domain names in extensions that we are not or cannot be accredited for,
Payment by invoice,
Management of your domain name strategy,
Local contacts.

Please do not hesitate to contact us, to tell us how the Gandi Corporate model may be extremely advantageous for your company versus the existing.

Gandi switches to 3.0.11

Arti — Fri, 06 May 2011 11:35:00 +0200

The V3.0.11 is one of the last major updates (Gandi BackEnd) before the much awaited 3.1.0, which will introduce the new reseller API.

This version includes a lot of "invisible" changes, but a few "visible" ones too:

the Gandi Mail pack now goes through the streamlined purchase process. You can still pay with the usual means of payment. You can also view the price as well as cancel a mail pack before its expiration.
we have also updated some of the contact management processes, especially for domain name transfers. Some verification mesures are now performed to follow the Registries' requirements and, thus, reduce the number of failed transfers.
the orders in progress list for your domain names is a new feature that lets you quickly view your domain name operations. It can be accessed directly from your domains list. Just click on the "Operations" button at the top, just to the right of "Domains". For example, DNS updates and glue records management are now managed in quick asynchronous mode.
you can now do a "grouped" search for various domain names on the purchase page. Here is a preview:

4 new stylish country extensions have been added to our portfolio: .GD (Grenada), .TC (Turks and Caicos Islands), .VG (British Virgin Islands), and .WS (Samoan Islands). The first three extensions are €40.00 excluding VAT/year in the "A" price list, and the last one is €24 excl. VAT/year, also in A list.
our datacentre in France now uses the same storage technology as our US one. So we now have plenty of new disks using ZFS technology, ready to serve you even faster than ever! A more technically detailed article is available in the "Gandi Kitchen".
Disk snapshots, available only for disks created in the new system, are now for public test for 2 to 3 weeks by our group of testers. Feel free to contact us if you want to be a part of it!

The 3.0.12 will allow us to finalise the migration of our internal processes for domain names (renewal, contact management among others) and billing. Once the migration is over, we will work on V3.1 in order to give everyone an access to our new domain name API.

A t-shirt for .EU

Ryan — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:15:00 +0100

Yes, that's right! Since Tuesday, and until April 15th, customers that purchase a .EU domain name at Gandi.net will get a promo code by email that will let them get a free Gandi.net/Eurid T-shirt.

This operation will not cost you anything (shipping is free too, as it is included in the promo code), and will let you show our colors all over Europe while also promoting your European identity (as a reminder, only residents or companies located within the European Union can register a .eu domain (more).

Here is what the T-shirt looks like:

The only limitations of this operation are the delivery address (it must of course be in the European Union), and the expiry date of your promo code: it must be used by April 24th 2011 at the latest.
There is no maximum number of t-shirts that can be given to a handle or shipped to an address: if you purchase 50 .EU domains between March 15th and April 15th, you could probably open a T-shirt store while you are at it :p

Keep in mind that only one coupon is sent by email, however (within the hour of your order) to the person that paid for the domain name, and therefore, not necessarily the owner of the domain.
Just like for Gandi's 10-year domain giveaway, remember that using your promo code is done in the following manner:

Log into our website with your Gandi handle at http://www.gandi.net/
Go to the special T-shirt page: http://www.gandi.net/tshirts
The coupons can only be used for the Gandi.eu t-shirts of course
Choose the size and gender that you would like (you can choose between women's S-M-L and men's S-M-L-XL-XXL) and then submit your order
Even if you have many promo codes, you can only choose one Gandi.eu t-shirt at a time. Our system does not support the utilization of several coupons in the same session.
Next, choose the shipping address (which must be in the European Union), if it is different than the address of your Gandi handle (yes, you can give them away as presents ),
Enter your coupon's code in the "Promo Code" field just below it,
Accept the contracts of the product, and submit

Therefore, if you have several coupons, you will need to repeat this process once per coupon. Yes, it is a bit repetitive, sorry, and we'll get that fixed later. For now, we prefer to stay focused on the new and upcoming Gandi features

One more thing: if you lost your promo codes or your emails, remember that you can get your codes on at My account - Billing - My promos: https://www.gandi.net/admin/billing/promos (more info on using gandi's promo codes here)

Gandi has upgraded to 3.0.9

Ryan — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 16:42:00 +0100

Gandi has upgraded to version 3.0.9, this version was particularly oriented towards making improvements on the backend, and correcting some known bugs.

That's right, this version will not bring you very many new features, however it is worth noting nevertheless:

The automatic application of a 15% reduction for domain name creations that are for 3 years or more
the all-new .GR.COM extension which was officially launched today
the availability of the latest version of Debian 6, in 32 and 64 bits
the addition of a hosting price simulator (very practical since the arrival of additional resources)

the possibility of having Gandi t-shirts sent to addresses in the entire European Union
the correction of about 50 bugs that were on our to-do list over the past couple of months

With regards to Gandi hosting, our hardware supplier has finally delivered some new equipment, and so we will soon be able to provide you with "snapshots" of disks and will be able to create a load balancer very very soon.

The next version (3.0.10) will mainly concern the migration of our domain name and billing backend.

Happy New Year 2011

Stephan — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 12:21:00 +0100

The whole Gandi team would like to wish you all a happy and prosperous new year for 2011. We would like to take this opportunity to briefly recap on 2010, and also to take a look ahead at what 2011 has in store

In 2010?

2010, for Gandi, was of course our 10th anniversary, during which we rewarded are most loyal customers with 55,000 free domain names, either for their own use, or for their friends or acquaintances. Given that our success rests solely in your hands and based on your recommendations, we opted to use this means to hand out these gifts, and it proved to be immensely successful … as well as a nice demonstration of our hosting platform

It was also the year in which we passed the one millionth domain name managed through Gandi (and sent one of our customers on a week's vacation in the Maldives ;))…

We started off the year with the release of Gandi V3 : new colours, and a new interface. We also had our fair share of outages and hiccups of course, but our hosting platform was continually upgraded and improved throughout the year, and we have to date seen more than 42,000 servers created.

We additionally opened our new offices and data centre in the United States, partly to take advantage of the market on the other side of the pond, but also and above all to better serve our customers on the American continent as well as extending the available hours to support our customers!

During the course of 2010 we have added 25 new domain extensions to our portfolio, welcomed 9 new members of staff, and (perhaps equally as important) managed to snarf through several hundred kilos of coffee beans !

So, What's in Store for 2011?

Yup, of course we have a very detailed roadmap, along with a precise idea of what we need to accomplish, clearly defined and time-bound objectives, and so forth. But we know full well from experience that very often the cumulative effect of little things, emergencies, new opportunities, may sometimes have a consequence on this roadmap and that in order to maintain the timelines some things have to be re-prioritised… nothing new in the world of tech companies, but equally the case for any dynamic business.

Nevertheless, we can give you a sneak peek at some of what is in store on this precious roadmap, not really to dangle the proverbial carrot, but simply to let you see what is being and will be developed over the course of the next year.

Be advised that even though our development team has its "specialist" domain name section, as well as its alter-ego for hosting, in 2011 Gandi Domain Names will be back with a vengeance! Expect a new backend (the nuts and bolts of the system), the construction of which actually began last June. Although the bulk of the work is for now still invisible from outside, certain of the processes already show signs of increased speed, simplicity and efficiency.

The first process to have recently come up to bat on the new backend is the domain transfer system, and "on deck" is domain renewal. We estimate that this work will be completed by the end of the first half or 2011.

Of course throughout the year, we will continue to introduce new domain extensions for which we are already accredited (mx, dk, so, nf, ki, no, af, pe, ag, lc, fi, and coop), and will become accredited for still others (ca, co.nz, ie, gr, si, ee, au…).

Another important revamp underway concerns the billing process. Our current billing platform is starting to show signs of age, dating back to Gandi V2, and after several patches along the way it has become less flexible and less adapted to our dynamic evolution. This renovation project will be spread over the course of the year.

We are also working on the "Corporate Services" activities, with dedicated customer managers and new associated products being implemented.

For hosting, the projects that we have already announced (load balancing, snapshot, optional bandwidth, etc.) will obviously be continued by the team, and even though this is a bit of a tease, the second half of the year will not be without a few nice surprises!

In any case we remain, as always, attentive to your feedback and comments, which continue to make up significant portions of our development plan. Even if we simply do not have the time to validate and sort your numerous suggestions on the Domain Name and Hosting wishlists, we do of course read them attentively and gain inspiration from them!!

Once again, the entire Gandi team wishes you a happy and prosperous new year for 2011, and may it be as exciting and fulfilling for you as it seems to be for us!

Gandi 3.0.8 or the disappearing share...

Leland Vandervort — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 11:07:00 +0100

This melodramatic title is actually good news : we have obtained greater flexibility and competitiveness. More resources for less cost? Yes indeed, but how?

Until now, the way in which our Hosting services was marketed was based on the allocation of a bundle or resources defining a "share".

One Gandi Hosting share historically consisted of:

a fraction of a CPU core
128 MB of RAM
5 GB of disk space
5 Mbps of bandwidth

Numerous customers had quickly asked for the ability to add something other than just disk space as an option...

Therefore, we have modified several of the parameters of the "share" definition and we gave you the ability to purchase optional additional RAM, IP addresses, and more disk space. We also set the minimum fractional CPU core to 1 ! This means that from the first share, you have access to a dedicated CPU core.

Up to this point, the idea of a "share" was practical in order to present an offer that was easily identifiable and quantifiable. A server with 4 shares is larger than a server with 2 shares, etc... but not necessarily twice as powerful. So let's cut to the core of the matter...

Until now, in order to have multiple cores on the same server, you had to attribute several shares to it:

With one share, you had by default one core, but this didn't change until the 5th share.
Between 5 and 8 shares, you had 2 cores available.
Between 9 and 12 shares, you had 3 cores.
(...),
Between 21 and 24 shares, you had 6 cores.

We had promised the ability to buy additional optional cores, given that they determine the computing power of a server. Except, we had problem to make this possible : how to determine how many cores were available as a quota among the rest of your resources... hmmm...

As a result, if you had 48 shares, you had the ability to create 48 servers of one share each, and therefore a total of 48 cores, but if you created two servers of 24 shares then you only had a total of 12 cores (2x 6). To define a quota of 1 full core for every share is of course unrealistic, but it is equally out of the question to eliminate the first core with the smallest server...

Therefore, we have created a new type of quota in the resource bundle : let's call it the server-quota , which permits the creation of a server.

What does this mean to me?

From now on, here is what a bundle provides (let's refrain from using the term "share" in order to make it more understandable, shall we?) :

0.25 CPU core
256 MB of RAM
8 GB of disk space
5 Mbps of bandwidth
1 server-quota

Okay, here's the trick: The server-quota is required to create a new server, but it also, in and of itself, contains two things:

One IPv4 address
0.75 CPU core

Let's break this down succinctly : if you create a server with a bundle, you will use your server-quota which gives you 0.75 of a core, to which you naturally add 0.25 core from the bundle, making one full core!

I can hear you ask now : "What if I create a server with 2 bundles?" Following this logic, you would have one server with one full core, as well as an unused server-quota. So what happens to the remaining 0.25 CPU quota from the second bundle? It will be available in your resource pool and usable when you add or obtain the other 0.75 required.

The idea is the ability to purchase only the resources that are really needed, and not more, after all that is one of the benefits of Cloud Computing! But the other benefit is that in the end you pay less for the same resources.

Let's make a small comparison : Let's take a basic server according to commonly required specifications:

1 Dual Core server, 2 GB of Memory and 80 GB of SAS disk space in RAID 60

At the beginning of the Gandi cloud offer, this configuration could be achieved with :

16 shares at 12.00 Euros (excl. VAT) per month.

Which represents a monthly cost of 192.00 Euros (excl. VAT).

Afterwards, we upscaled the definition of the initial share by attributing a whole core and making additional RAM available as an option:

5 shares at 12.00 Euro (excl. VAT) per month
40 GB of additional disk quota at 0.20 Euro (excl. VAT) per GB per month
768 MB of additional RAM at 4.00 Euro (excl. VAT) per 256MB per month

This came to a total of 80.00 Euros (excl. VAT) per month.

Now with the new definition, we have the following:

1 bundle at 12.00 Euros (excl. VAT) per month
72 GB of additional disk quota at 0.18 Euros (excl. VAT) per GB per month
1792 MB of additional RAM at 4.00 Euros (excl. VAT) per 256MB per month
1 additional core at 9 Euros (excl VAT) per month

Which represents a total of 61.96 Euros (excl. VAT) per month (or 56.80 Euros on an annual commitment).

You will have surely noticed that not only the price of the same configuration has decreased, but also there are more add-on elements. Some may see this as an added complexity, and while partly true, it's also the ability to have a server configuration that you need at the best price! Those who want a high-performance server for calculations, those who perhaps need a lot of RAM, or those who need maybe oodles of disk space...

Well.. there we have it for the "product" presentation of these new changes to the hosting resources. For the more technically minded, we will shortly have a more detail explanation on the Gandi Kitchen ... watch this space!.

Gandi has upgraded to V3.0.7

Ryan — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 11:57:00 +0100

This version enables the opening of our US branch in Baltimore, Maryland, in a couple of days. It will also bring you a complete reworking of our domain name transfer process.

The domain transfer system is an aging part of Gandi's platform, and we clearly needed to update it in order to improve the quality of transfers to Gandi.

Changes you will see with regard to transfers:

We will no longer create a temporary handle during the transfer process. This is the old process that forced you to make an owner change after the transfer was complete.
We now handle more transfers directly online (ex.: .name, .aero, .pt, .hk ...), which means less paperwork for everyone.
The complete transfer process can now be monitored, step-by-step. You will be able to clearly see the actions that you need to perform in order to successfully complete your transfer.
You now have the ability to change your DNS during the transfer process.
For bulk transfers, the limit has been bumped up from 20 to 50 domains. Additionally, you now have an interface where you can quickly and easily add auth codes for each domain in a list.

Other changes you will see in version 3.0.7:

Integration of IPv6 glue records for all compatible extensions: (.com, .net, .name, .org, .info, .us, .me, .in, .es, .fm).
The visualization of clear error messages on your Orders in Progress page.
A better view of our domain name promotions on our home page, so that you don't miss any important deals.
As announced in the previous article (here), we have increased the RAM limit to 12 GB instead of 8, which if you want, you can use with Debian's new 64-bit distribution (5.0 - all the more so as the price of additional RAM has been reduced by 33%!
The addition of a sitemap for those who are curious or lost
We have corrected a number of little things that have been brought to our attention following the release of 3.0.6. Thank you once again, to all of our customers that have taken the time to report the bugs that they have seen on our site, in order to improve the overall quality of Gandi

I would like to add that you will soon be able to create your servers in our American datacenter in Baltimore.

Finally, I would like to end with just a quick note to say that our teams are already working on version 3.0.8, which revolves around Gandi's Hosting service, with new features such as load-balancing and optional cores for your servers...

Gandi is now on version 3.0.6

Ryan — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 22:42:00 +0200

The changes discussed here primarily concern improvements made to the backend and the hosting API XML.

It is frequently the case that there is more than meets the eye, and in the case of this update of Gandi, the vast majority of improvements go unseen. This is because we have improved all the inner workings of our backend which is responsible for handling the information that you need and configuring your servers for you,

In order for it to work correctly and in a way that is coherent with the rest of the website, we have chosen to run it off of a common language: our API.

In short, our Hosting API XML is now directly patched into our new backend, and it is now responsible for carrying out all of the hosting operations requested via Gandi's website.

Of course, not all of the work is invisible: you will surely notice some changes to some of the resource management pages. The changes make the pages compatible with upcoming features. Here's a quick overview of the changes you can expect to see with our Hosting service.

Server creation: new process

- All of the steps involved in creating a server are now displayed on a single page:
- You may choose some additional resources to add to your server, by drawing from your pool of resources. This will soon be made even more prominent (notably with the ability of adding more cores or bandwidth),
- It will be possible to clone a server directly from this interface,
- You will soon be able to choose a 64-bit distribution and add up to 12 GB of RAM per server,
- The ability to select an IPv6 interface from your server will be available very soon,

Resource management: new interface

- The order process is now standardized, which allows us to add new types of resources (such as CPU cores or bandwidth),
- The "share" will gradually be transformed into a bundle of resources: each component of which will be able to be ordered separately (this is already possible with RAM, disk quota, and IP addresses),
- likewise, resources will be used globally: with 10 shares, you can create one server with a lot of RAM while another may have very little, but with more bandwidth for example (already somewhat possible),

Choice of Datacenter

- Though the website currently presents information relating to the existence of various datacenter locations, only Paris is currently available. Starting in December, however, you will be able choose your server's location in either Baltimore (USA) or Paris. (http://en.gandi.net/hosting/vps/network).

Disk management: new methods

- You may now choose the boot disk for your VPS and manage the system,
- The attach/detach interface for disks has also been changed in order to make it more clear, especially with regards to attaching disks,
- The possibility of creating a server from a system disk,
- Our R&D team is currently hard at work, in order to bring you a new storage infrastructure that will let you take snapshots of your servers and clone them.

Network interface management: new methods

- You now have the possibility of allocating bandwidth quota depending on what you have available in your quota,
- You will soon be able to add multiple IP addresses to the same network interface,
- Your interfaces will soon have native IPv6 capability without the use of tunnel-brokers,
- Finally, you will be able to load balance your services and build a respectable web architecture !

As you can see, this upgrade is a major improvement in the hidden part of our platform: a modification of the management interfaces, and the ability to rapidly integrate features that we are currently working on.

These changes represent significant improvements that will give us the ability to add exciting new features to our hosting service!

All of these features will be available via our public API XML which will be available for beta testing in a few days. They are being developed simultaneously, and our "dev" team is dedicated to releasing them as soon as possible, when they meet Gandi's standards of quality. Our objective is to release them before the end of the year.

Stay tuned !

Scheduled Maintenance: Gandi upgrade to version 3.0.6

Leland Vandervort — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 08:03:00 +0200

We are undergoing scheduled maintenance this morning from 04:00 UTC to 07:00 UTC (06:00-09:00 CET) to upgrade Gandi to version 3.0.6. This new version will have its own dedicated blog entry available in the course of the morning.

05:48 UTC: The upgrade is progressing smoothly, and we will be able to reopen the reseller API momentarily.
06:05 UTC: The reseller APIs are now reopened.
07:33 UTC: The services is now restored. Thank you for your patience.

We have noticed some bugs that are currently being addressed:

problem in the creation of email addresses
problem in the domain name transfer process
connection problems with some customers

Customer Support at Gandi: Evolution and Future

Ryan — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:15:00 +0200

As you surely know, we do not have any marketing team, and we do not engage in publicity. The (very good) growth that we have experienced in recent years is exclusively due to word-of-mouth, or in other words: you!

One of our highest priorities is to provide you with an irreproachable level of customer service.

This is something that we strive for every day, and which is a real challenge, since each customer has their own specific questions, needs, and demands. It is also one of the reasons why we have been investing in our staff for many years now.

A professional and experienced support team

Our support team is in-house, and it will never be outsourced to a country where we pay a lower salary to people in order to make more money.
Our staff is highly experienced, and some members have even been here for over 10 years now. We take our time during the recruitment process for new team members in order to assure the best possible fit.
We only hire those that are highly motivated and that are close to the product: they participate in both the product design phase and pre-production tests, and get constant training.
It is also these same people that handle all of our translations (English and Spanish), documentation, and that centralize your problems and suggestions.

New products, growing needs

We are constantly looking for ways to improve the quality of service that we offer to our customers. The first one is of course the quality of our products: the better they are means that you have fewer problems and reasons to contact our support. But helping our customers use our products is currently a large part of what our support does. Also, note that we closely monitor the replies that you get from our staff, and Gandi's management follows the customer satisfaction index closely here.

We are also trying to expand our team in such a way as to assure that our agents are not overloaded. Doing this assures that they can have enough time to correctly answer your questions. Finally, we have developed software to help our precious agents in their troubleshooting, and provided them with the necessary hardware to do so efficiently...

Our VPS cloud hosting service was changed, so that we have a specific support team that is able to respond to server issues in the event of an emergency. Whereas domain name questions can often wait 6 hours for a solution, the situation is often more critical when a server stops responding. By using our contact form to indicate that a server is blocked, your support ticket will be sent to our specialized hosting team for a quick reply.

Our ultimate goal is to have top-notch support 24/7.

We are already progressively working to expand support hours by working 6 days a week (Monday to Saturday), and once we have our offices up and running in the US this will help things enormously - particularly for our customers in America, who will no longer have to contend with waiting for Europe to wake up before we get your ticket Our objective is clearly to be able to answer our customers as good as possible, and at any time...in that order
This objective is ambitious, because it is very long in terms of training, as well as being expensive, and we are of course aware that it will not be reached this year. But rest assured - we are getting there!

What about a phone hotline?

This is something that our customers frequently ask us. We already provide telephone assistance to our resellers. Since these customers are internet professionals, it is often faster to help them by phone. Even with this limitation in place, it amounts to about fifty calls a day. It is rather clear at this time that we do not have the means in place to open the telephone support to all of our customers, while maintaining our objective of keeping a high level of quality. This being said, we have an answering machine available at +33.(0)1.70.37.76.61 for those of you that absolutely need to leave a voice message. Know, however, that the response time is slower than by email, and we only call our customers back (as opposed to writing to them) in the event that we feel the case would indeed be better handled by telephone.

Gandi's Wiki: Our Official Documentation

As I mentioned earlier, we are investing a lot of time in the training of our team members, and they in turn spend a lot of time training our customers
In case you have missed it, the Gandi Wiki is our official FAQ and documentation, which is written and maintained by members of our support and development teams. The module that we added to let customers ask questions is intended for customers to discuss the contents of the page among themselves (as opposed to for support), even if we do frequently look at them...

Gandi Groups: peer-to-peer assistance

The Gandi Groups were originally created for members of our community to discuss various matters between themselves. As it turned out, many people tend to actually ask specific support questions there. Remember that if you are looking for a quick reply from our support team, don't use the Groups, but rather, the support contact form, because our support team members look through the groups only after the email support questions have been handled.

IRC channels: a direct line to our developers

An IRC channel, what is that? It's a bit of an old-school chat system for geeks

We have several channels (on freenode: #gandi-mail #gandi-hosting), but we don't advertise them too much. It's not an official means for contacting the support team, though you will often find gandi developers there, as well as a few frequent customers. You might even get some help there in certain cases, though keep in mind that Gandi's developers are rarely available

And the conclusion of this entry?

Our support is constantly evolving and we are doing everything we can to offer you the best service possible. We are a customer-oriented company that trains professionals in order to stand out from our competition, though mainly to assure that, in the end, you get Gandi support !

What you can expect this fall

Ryan — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:02:00 +0200

Rush hour traffic on our street is starting to pick up again, and so I sense this is the beginning of the end of summer vacation for many of you and the return of the usual 9-to-5. What better time then for us to share with you how we are coming along with some of our latest projects!

For the past 4 months now, we have been making progress on major improvements to our domain name and hosting services.

With regards to domains, we are re-writing our (old) backend, which was written prior to 2006 for the most part, and then only written to handle gTLDs (.com, .net., .org, etc.), though has since been used to manage the 80 new extensions added since then

Our new system will be more comprehensive and will be able to handle operations that we currently process manually (some transfers, IPv6 glue records, etc.). Due to its flexibility, it will be easier to add new extensions as well as make it easier for us to let you know why operations may have failed at the registry (you will be able to see the registry's error message directly).

Domain creations are just about ready to be handled by the new system, after which we will be adding transfers, renewals, owner changes etc. We have taken advantage of this overhaul to improve each process as well (allowing renewals as late as possible, being able to restore domains from your account, no longer add a new handle during transfers, managing DNS zones more efficiently, etc.)

One this has been completed, we will start to implement DNSSEC.

Hosting-wise, we have reworked our API to make it public. The beta version is almost done, and we will be posting more on this soon in the Gandi Kitchen.

We are simultaneously working on new features, mainly centered on:

disk management, with, for example: duplication, real-time snapshots, the ability to attach/remove or boot from the disk of your choosing, better management of SWAP and resizing,
network management with, for example, a better handling of network interfaces and the possibility of creating a load balancer.

Finally, our American datacenter and teams will soon be operational, though ssssshhh.. this is still somewhat of a secret

The new version of Gandi, called version 3.0.6, which, among other things will open our Hosting API, will be released mid-September. It will be a busy fall!

Gandi has moved to v3.0.5

Ryan — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 23:02:00 +0200

5 new versions since January's 3.0.0, with a many improvements and corrections between each one - onwards and upwards

We would like to use this entry to discuss a rather large upgrade of our system. This one is a bit unusual in that you will not see the majority of the work that we did as cool new interfaces or features. Rather, this version was mainly dedicated to the backend, which was improved and enhanced so that we can do many new things later on, but which will also have an immediate impact on the quality of our service.

Why discuss it then? Well, to be honest, because the changes that we performed were quite significant, and so despite the many hours of testing that we have performed over the past few days, it is not impossible that some bugs exist under special circumstances. We would therefore like to mention this, and ask that you let us know of the slightest problem that you encounter.

Otherwise, you will notice that we have redone the Orders in Progress page, which now lists your orders by product category. This interface will soon be improved and will provide an even greater level of detail, enabling you to watch the state of your order and the actions that are being performed in real time. Note however that the T-shirt orders have been left out of this page for the time being. This is intentional, but don't worry, we are watching them

And since we are talking about T-shirts, you may have noticed the presence of the new T-shirt model (the former were nearly all exhausted) which is currently available.

Finally, we have added a new page to our website: promo codes. You can now go to this interface (which is automatically updated depending on your eligibility with regards to active promos) to get promo cods that you can use at Gandi.net. For example, there is currently a .ORG promo underway: if you have a .COM or .ORG for which the .ORG is available for creation, you will therefore see a promo code that you can use to purchase the .ORG for 66% off the regular price!

And don't worry, other promos will follow this summer

Please let us know any bugs that you encounter by writing to gandiv3 _at_ gandi.net

Gandi will apply Verisign's 3rd price increase on July 1st 2010

Ryan — Mon, 31 May 2010 15:04:00 +0200

Verisign, the registry for the extremely popular extensions (.com, .net), unilaterally decided to raise domain registration AND renewal prices for the third time in four years. Gandi was informed about this decision on December 17th 2009.

A quick flashback: Verisign and ICANN (basically the Trustee Authority) for the technical management of the internet) signed an agreement towards the end of November 2006 stipulating that the former has the right to increase rates by 7% for .com and 10% for .net every year until the end of 2012.

Gandi absorbed nearly all the cost of the first two increases (2007 and 2008) for historic, commercial, and economic reasons. Since December 17th of last year, we have been looking for a solution to avoid having to pass on this unfortunate price increase to our customers.

We should mention right away that we were unable to do so. We have nonetheless tried to provide you with an offer that is attractive and realistic, that takes into consideration your expectations, our values, and market forces.

Beginning July 1st, only .com renewals (in euros only) will be affected by this increase. .Com renewal prices (in euros, excluding VAT) will therefore be:

12.50 euros excluding VAT under A rates, (14.95 euros incl. VAT)

11.40 euros excluding VAT under B rates,

9.50 euros excluding VAT under C rates,

7.90 euros excluding VAT under D rates,

6.30 euros excluding VAT under E rates

We will not increase the price of .com and .net creations, nor the price of renewing .net domains.

Our idea is simple, all customers, whether new or loyal customers that have been with us for the past 10 years, may continue to benefit from the same creation prices. You are our greatest advocates and understand the quality of our service, we appreciate the trust you have put in us. We understand you may choose to accept this 7% price increase when renewing your domain name. Or not.

For 6 months we tried to protect our customers from the price increases, however we can no longer sit back and do nothing, as this would put us in a very delicate position (especially as on top of this there is the current unfavourable euro/dollar exchange rate). We do not want to sell domains under cost or lie to you about the real price of our services unlike some providers. As you know that is just not our style.

The majority of registrars throughout the world have already raised these rates (creation and renewals) for both extensions, or will soon be doing so. At Gandi, we will have a look at the end of the year to see if we can continue to absorb the price increase for creations and the .net.

If you are going to renew your domain name, it may be a good idea to do so before July 1st, in order to avoid the additional cost.

The googlesharing.net saga – what actually happened

Joe — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 20:16:00 +0100

For those following this story, it’s been a pretty confusing and unsettling ordeal. And we’re certainly sorry for the part we played and adding to the confusion. But this was a play with many players, so let us set out below what happened and why. The major players in this drama were: Gandi.net (us), Moxie (the customer) and Comodo (the SSL technology provider). I could add the the Easter weekend, but I won't. And everyone played a part in this going wrong and shares some of the responsibility. We’ll set out why below.

So here’s what happened: Moxie the customer, bought an SSL certificate for his website googlesharing.net from Gandi.net which uses the technology platform of Comodo (rather than reinvent the wheel for SSL). This was a standard certificate for which Gandi.net acts as the Certification Authority. (see https://www.gandi.net/ssl for details).

What Comodo did

Comodo reviewed the SSL cert issued by Gandi and decided to question the information provided by the applicant (Moxie) relating to the certificate. They did this because Moxie had attempted to get a cert for the same (and other) URLs in the past and had done so with falsified information. When they asked Moxie to prove the existence of the company name and address (which were non existent by searches) he was unable to do so. On this basis they revoked the certificate. Comodo told us:

“Moxie gave false and misleading information in the request which is a clear violation of our subscriber agreement so we revoked the cert. We ask for the address and organization details so we capture who we are doing business with. If they give a misleading answer then they violate the terms of the subscriber agreement so we can revoke. “Subscriber shall: … ensure that all information provided to Comodo is complete and accurate”.

Where Comodo went wrong was that they took action against a Gandi customer without telling us OR asking us to check the details and validate. They had no right to revoke without us agreeing to this decision as we are the Certification Authority in this case. The first we heard about it was when we were contacted by Moxie.

What Gandi did

When Moxie contacted us, we asked Comodo what had happened and why. They told us that it had been revoked because of falsifised whois information and fraudulent activity. The fraudulent activity did not relate to the activity of googlesharing (as Moxie claims) but the attempt to secure a certificate using falsified information, which amounts to fraud. Either of these would have been sufficient to revoke the cert.

We then relayed this information to Moxie, but added the ‘goolge trademark violation’ reason which was a mistake and pure speculation from our customer support team. This was a serious error on our part for which we sincerely apologise. Google has not contacted us, and had nothing to do with this. This was our error and ours alone. Sorry about that.

This information was then passed onto TheRegister.co.uk, who published the article without us having had a chance to comment. In fairness to them, they did email the management team, but at 2am CET and the article was published before we could respond.

We then published a blog article underlining the main reason for the revoked cert, which was the false whois data. This was not an attempt to cover things up, but the real reason for the revocation and it has taken us a while to unpick all the storylines (both real and imaginary) to get to the facts.

What Moxie did

Well, Moxie registered his domains and certificates using made up names of people and companies, and fabricated addresses. The addresses do not exist and the people’s names used changed several times but usually can be found in urban dictionary, e.g. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Amory%20Blaine.

As we’ve said before, a certificate is a stamp of approval that a person or organisation is who they say they are. They cannot be based on fraudulent information. So revoking the cert in this case was the right thing to do, just managed badly.

We understand that Moxie is a guy who values privacy (as his googlesharing service suggests), but the ICANN whois regulations are as they are, and the T&Cs of certificate providers require real people/companies too. We value our customers and trust them, but they must trust us too. And providing fake information to us is not the way to do this.

We would welcome Moxie’s comments on this and we’d be happy to issue him a new certificate but only if he provides real information as we expect from anyone.

So for our other customers, there is nothing to worry about. This matter was picked up because of repeated attempts to get certificates with falsified information, and this was the reason it was revoked. We are not going to randomly cancel other customer certificates, and neither is Comodo.

But activity seeking to fabricate information in the whois directory, or to get hold of certificates for nonexistent companies is a risky business. But that’s why most people don’t do this. If you behave like a bad guy you run a serious risk of being perceived as one. Additionally, registering a domain name with other people's brands in it often raises warning flags.

Anyway, that’s the whole story. Everyone had something to contribute to this mess. We have had many discussions with Comodo about this and will continue to do so to improve our processes and prevent this happening again. We would also welcome discussions with Moxie of course. We’d like to apologise to all our customers who have felt confused, unsure or upset during the last couple of days. This was never our intension and we whole heartedly apologise for errors we made in this, and have learnt from the process.

I hope that helps make things clear.

And just to complete the story, TheRegister updated their article with the following addition:

"Update In a sign that the "no bullshit" promise isn't a mere gimmick, Gandi COO Joe White sent us the following reply to a query we sent yesterday:

We certainly acknowledge that we could have handled this better, particularly in not contacting the customer prior to the revocation of the certificate. The reason for the certificate being revoked was because of the inaccurate whois data. Certificates really are a seal of trust, but that cannot be based on falsified whois data. It was right to revoke the certificate for this reason, but not without being in contact with the customer. We have reviewed and changed our processes to rectify this..."

Gandi Mail - Enhanced Security Measures

Leland Vandervort — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:27:00 +0100

As a result of increasing levels of misuse of our Gandi Mail service, we are obliged to take immediate measures to protect not only our infrastructure, but also the integrity and quality of the Gandi Mail service for all of our customers.

The Gandi Mail product is provided as a complementary service provided with domain names registered at Gandi. It is not, and never was, intended to be a "public" email (SMTP) relay service, despite it only being accessible after authentication. Of course, we also provide bolt-on functionality, at a modest cost, for our customers who require additional features such as additional storage space, more than five mailboxes, and auto-responders, etc. Nevertheless, the Gandi Mail service is only to be used for the sending and receiving of mails for our customers' domains registered with us.

Unfortunately, over the past several months a large number of users have been using the service to send emails "from" other domains, either not registered at Gandi, or in many cases domains which are entirely bogus. The vast majority of such emails have been revealed to be spam and/or "phishing" attempts.

As a result, effective immediately, and as part of the implementation of the new Gandi Mail platform, the Gandi Mail servers will only allow sending of emails from the customer's domain registered at Gandi. If the "from" address of the email does not meet this criteria, it will be rejected.

Again, we apologise for having to take such drastic action without notice, but these measures had to be put in place to protect not only the mail infrastructure itself, but also the quality of service for you, our customers, the vast majority of whom do indeed use the mail service responsibly and in the manner in which it was intended.

As usual, should you encounter any problems with your Gandi Mail service, please do not hesitate to contact our support team who will be happy to assist.