Gandi Bar - Gandi

Disk problems

Ryan — Fri, 16 May 2008 12:00:00 +0200

Despite extremely low odds considering the type of hardware used, we lost 2 disks on a filer in under 3 minutes yesterday. While we do our best to warn you of any anticipated problems, we again stress the importance (and your contractual obligation) of maintaining an up-to-date backup of your server at an external location in the unlikely event that just such an incident might arise.

At 7:50 PM (GMT) we lost a third disk and all of its data Our teams spent the night trying to recover the RAID 6 volume of filer 13, though this was eventually deemed not possible.

To be totally transparent, we are not going to hide behind the fact that we are still in the Beta testing phase, or that our hosting contract requires you to maintain a backup of your data on an external machine; The loss of your data is totally unacceptable. Even if what happened had nearly no change of occurring, it did, and those of you that were affected by this will be given a full refund.

Let us now go into detail about the changes we are making in the platform's disk architecture.

Right from the start, we have been having rather frequent disk problems with:
- sporadic disk loss (which went unnoticed because of RAID6 - until yesterday),
- temporary freezing that occurred during disk access,
- the fact that a filer failure might lead to the loss of data for our customers.

We therefore decided to extend the Beta testing phase until we have addressed all these issues. Our idea is to, even if it leads to additional costs, change the RAID structure so that your data is constantly replicated on 2 different filers. Work is advancing quite nicely towards this goal, and we hope to soon be able to provide you with good news about this.

In the meantime, what has occurred once can occur again, and we strongly advise you to keep constant backups of your data on a local disk at your own location. For those of you who are uncomfortable with Linux, we are in the process of writing a tutorial that will help do this.

Note: 3:00 PM (GMT) we were forced to reboot all of the servers to correct the snowball effect that was starting to dangerously increase the load on the machines.

Note 2: The filers in question are all from the same manufacturer. Others are currently being configured. A grand thank you to the teams that have been working non-stop since yesterday morning. Keep up the good work, I'm proud of you (Stephan)

Note 3 (Friday 7:35 PM GMT): the VMs that were directly impacted by the failure of filer 13 will not be brought back online probably until Sunday afternoon. In the meantime, please write here if there is an emergency.

700,000!

Ryan — Wed, 07 May 2008 07:28:00 +0200

As we have gotten into the habit of 'celebrating' the passing of each hundred thousand domain names, we're not going to make an exception to the rule!

Today, we give you the possibility of winning 100 Gandi T-shirts (1 per person) to the 100 orders around 700,000 (from 699,950 to 700,050)

Once the 700,000 benchmark as been passed, we will contact you to see what size you would like.

The offer is limited to residents in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Italy, and Spain.

GandiFlex will revolutionize web host purchasing

Ryan — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:15:00 +0200

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

What's up, week 16

Elliott — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:24:00 +0200

As we continue to hurtle towards Hosting's final release, here are Gandi's latest building blocks - courtesy of our dear developers.

To begin with, since I've already raised it, Hosting: servers can now have up to 16 shares as opposed to 8. This means more power at your disposal, and more flexible tools according to your needs.

We now also have a safety console, for the expert users among you who need to reboot a machine when SSH is broken: a simple request to Customer Care and they'll enable it for you. For others, Customer Care will be able to intervene directly thanks to this tool, reducing the time it takes to solve problems - good news for everyone in terms of quality of service.

Regarding Gandi AI: we're also coming close to V1.0, which is just as well: when I see the list of requested modules in the wishlist, I feel like crying ... and that doesn't even include the unmoderated list, which is about 3 times as big. Sure, the unmoderated list has lots of doubles and things we can't apply, but still. We have lots of work to do to meet your expectations, and we're grateful to you for this.

We've also put up a list of "refused" ideas to explain why a module won't be developed in the near future, or ever.

On the domains side of things, the keen among you will have noticed the newly arrived .DE and .AT TLDs, as well as the special rebate on the .AT which will still be valid for the next few domains. The transfer procedure for these two extensions requires a confirmation fax which we are in the process of finalising: transfers should therefore be possible within the next couple of days.

Since the 31/03 major update, the Webmail has been evolving some more, thanks to some requests from Bar users and Twidi's responsiveness, who spent a lot of time and energy applying the requested changes. In sum, this means corrections in the way that accents, group replies and some file attachments are now managed, as well as improved management of multiple identities.

Still thanks to our customers' good ideas, please note that the commentary system for resellers is now available in different colours, allowing for improved visual identification.

Finally, to those who misunderestimated (Bush Dictionary, 2003) our commitment to transparency, we have set up a rating system on our customer support pages so we can have your impressions on your exchanges with our agents. This allows us to have a better reading of your satisfaction and, since we don't have anything to hide, this rating will be available to everyone.

The risk with this kind of interface is people trying to spam it (go figure ^^), thus making it unreliable. In any case, we're going to try it out and have taken some precautions. Above all, we trust that our support will give you the service you deserve, since this is what will define our rating in the end.

What's up, week 14

Elliott — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:43:00 +0200

A heads up on the work in progress !!!

Our efforts to stabilize the hosting platform are going well. We think we've targeted the major bugs, and these are being resolved .

We've also put loads of effort into shortening the length of operations and they have been 42% quicker on average as a result! It's a nice stat, but it sounds even better in practice: a server update operation now takes 1 minute and 30 seconds, when it used to take 6 minutes. A Gandi AI server with all the modules will take 27 minutes to install, and a Gandi MI about 16 minutes.

With this in mind, we'd like to recommend our brand new distributions for starters: Open Suse and Fedora Core 8. Still for starters, please note that Gandi Flex has gone to Alpha test phase (internal + a few customers). Gandi Flex, let me remind you, allows you to plan the amount of shares you'll need at a specific time (date and hour), and for a given length of time. This service is designed to cater to your chronological hosting needs with extreme precision, giving you the flexibility you only ever dreamed of. We plan to release this key service as a Beta in upcoming days.

Let's move to the main course, shall we? The menu's pretty copious this week.

The dish of the week is, without a doubt, our Webmail update, thanks to Twidi's relentless work to make sure the latest version of Atmail be compatible with our greatly modified version of the original code. No more bugs linked to character encoding. What is more, you can also change your password in the Webmail interface directly, as well as use a de-branded (logo-less) version of the interface. All related info is in this post. Incidentally, this post's comments (in its French version) has been discussing the recent slowness of the e-mail platform... Yes, our e-mail infrastructure is overloaded at the moment, but be reassured: we ordered two new big Filers a couple weeks ago and they arrived yesterday, so we're setting them up. The e-mail infrastructure should be able to breathe a little. You as well, for that matter.

As we're discussing big things, please note also that the Gandi Team have been working hard to conceive and redesign the Gandi AI engine. Some important changes have been made, namely in the way the user groups are managed, which was a blocking point for developing several plug-ins. Had you noticed we hadn't added new plug-ins since January? Boooo! It's just that we were all taking windsurfing lessons courtesy of ~~*Censored*~~ Ltd. OK, that was a lie. Though the weather has been lovely in Paris recently. Anyway, Gandi AI's update will open many new possibilities which didn't previously exist. When we saw the kind of things that were being asked in the Wishlist, we quickly realized things had to be done all over again. This has been dealt with, and so Gandi AI should soon be seeing new add-ons such as SVN, which was the most requested, as well as a guest star module you will be discovering shortly.

Cheese, salad? We have just been accredited for the .IN (India) TLD, and we are currently performing connexion tests with the .DE (Germany) and .AT (Austria) Registries, with whom we are already accredited. On the .IT side of things, some of our customers suffered from an interfacing bug with the Italian Registry. We're very sorry about that and are currently fixing the problem. We'll ask you to relaunch your orders at the beginning of next week (you will be contacted).

Some sweets to finish this copious post. We have set up a comments system for our resellers, allowing them to write notes regarding a domain, a contact or a server. This will be very useful if you work with a lot of domains/contacts/servers. This add-on will profit all our customers as well: thanks to this system, our support team will be able to leave you nice messages when they solve your problems pro-actively (detecting and fixing a problem before the customer does), or tell you what you need to do if the solution needs to come from your side.

Finally, the icing on the cake: all our server shares have been upgraded to 3mbps bandwidth instead of the 1.5 you had so far, in order to test our network performances as we prepare for the final version. To answer your next question on this point: yes, this means that if you had a server with 8 shares, your bandwidth is now 24 mbps instead of 12.

Bon appétit.

Gandi Webmail improvements

Elliott — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:09:00 +0200

At around 9pm tonight, Gandi's webmail will be unavailable for one hour maximum - for a good cause: As you know, Gandi's webmail is @Mail-based. Though we've already improved on it in many ways, this update constitutes a big step forward, with the integration of several edits published by @Mail, but also and mostly thanks to a significant amount of internal work:

Sorting rules (based on topic or e-mail)

E-mails sent in html also come in text version

Contact group management

Corrected problems with draft editing

Corrected editing problems during html <=> text shifts

Display number of unread e-mails in the list of folders

Page management in the Xul interface

Name + e-mail displayed (instead of e-mail only) when an e-mail is sent from the address book

Corrected problems when an action is performed on a selection of several e-mails

Corrections on the search page when it gives no result

"Enter" key can be used in the search form

Translated HTML editor

Added 'mark as Spam' entry in the Ajax interface's contextual menu

Multiple identities also available in the simple interface

We have also made a large amount of small graphic corrections and the like, which would take too long to list here but will have significant impact on Webmail use.

For resellers, we have also produced a "de-branded" version of the Webmail, that is to say without the Gandi logo.
To display this version, nothing simpler: you just need to access the Webmail WITHOUT going through the mail.gandi.net url, but rather using the one you defined in your zone, or webmail.yourdomain.tld if your zone is Gandi's default zone.
Following the same idea, you can now change your password in the webmail directly, without having to go through the Gandi interface.

We continue to work to improve Gandi Mail in general (including modifications to the technical architecture), and namely on our antispam/antivirus solution, so as to lighten the current load on our servers.

.ASIA Launch

Elliott — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 11:05:00 +0100

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/

Website maintenance

Ryan — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:28:00 +0100

We are performing maintenance on Gandi's website in order to definitively fix the database problem that has been making all of our lives difficult since yesterday. This disruption should not be long.

Please accept our apologies for this temporary inconvenience, and know that we are doing everything possible to assure that you can resume your operations as soon as possible.

Time lags on Gandi Mail yesterday, explanations

Ryan — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:07:00 +0100

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.

Friendly reminder on how to renew your hosting account

Ryan — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:28:00 +0100

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

Our service is without a minimum contractual period. You can cancel your service whenever you want. We will refund your prepaid account for the amount of time that you did not use your service. The renewal only consists of extending your account's expiration date by one month.

There are two ways to renew your account:

"manually", via our website by clicking on the renew button.
"automatically", by activating the auto-renewal system (also available for domain names).

In both events, it is necessary for your prepaid account to have sufficient funds for the operation. But there is nothing to worry about: you will be sent reminders alerting you that your account is approaching its renewal date. You can also see the renewal date of your account in your Server Overview page.

If you would like to cancel your account, simply delete all your servers and disks, and remove the shares associated with your account.

If ever, despite our renewal reminders, you forget to renew the account that you use for your servers, it will be put on "redemption" period for 7 days. Your servers will no longer be accessible, though you will have 7 days in which you can still renew your account if you wish.
After this period, the servers and disks will be permanently and definitively deleted.

Renewal during the Beta period comes to 6 euros excl. VAT per share. We will alert you to the end of this period when the date has been fixed, thus allowing you to renew your account at the Beta rate one last time. Finally, for those that have missed the announcement, the price for the final release version has been set at 10 euros excl. VAT per share, and we have increased the dedicated bandwidth from 1.5 to 5 Mbits per share.

What's up - Week 6

Nicolas — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 13:50:00 +0100

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.

The first point is hard to miss. Gandi's website has gone widescreen! We were beginning to feel a bit squeezed in our website optimized for 800 x 600. There is therefore no longer the problem of the too-long domain name which is cut-off, the lack of information on certain tables due to lack of space...for those that don't know what I'm referring to, press Control+F5 to empty your web browser's cache.
The news system at Gandi has been transferred to the Gandi iwi blog, so we recommend that you update your RSS news reader with the new address. This is where we will be posting maintenance updates, upgrade information, improvements, and other news addressed to our customers.
On Gandi Hosting: the management of reverse DNS is finally available! You can activate it in your server administration area by clicking on the 'activate' link located to the right of your IP address.
If you are not a DNS zone expert, we now provide you with a new page on our website where you can simply attach your domain name to your Gandi server. This is in the lower-right hand part of the domain name control panel.
We are in the final phase of the test for the .IT ccTLD, which will be available for all residents of the European Union next week.
We are in final internal test phases for servers running on BSD and Solaris. We will be making them available to those of you that might be interested in testing the servers and providing us with feedback.

WARNING! "Domain Registry of America" (DROA) - "Domain Registry Services"

Nicolas — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 13:49:00 +0100

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.

Blog Maintenance from 4pm to 5pm

Arti — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:47:00 +0100

Sorry for the late notice but, after this maintenance, you're going to love us. We finally have all the necessary elements (equipment and people) to change the Gandi Blog database server. Migrating the data should take a little less than an hour and will greatly improve your beloved blogs' loading time.

EDIT : maintenance finished

Here's what we're up to at Gandi

Ryan — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:22:00 +0100

It's nice to release new products (ah! hosting!), it is even better to know how to take care of the maintenance and evolution of what already exists...
It is time for us to tell you all where we are in our development concerning all our products and services that are currently at your disposal.

Gandi Hosting

The installation of machines is complete and we can now manage the sustained growth in the number of servers created per day (which explains why sometimes operations may have seemed slow),
We are continuing to stabilize the platform, and our technical teams are fixing all the bugs that you have shown us on the wiki and in the Gandi forums. The main problem remains in attaching disks to the servers. This will be resolved by the end of the week.
The stabilization of Gandi AI is also going well. The 'wishlist' is filling up (too quickly) and we are going to begin working on new packages soon.
The new version of our forums is ready to be installed, the migration will occur before the end of the month.
Following various discussions, both here in the bar and in the forums, the specifications of the final product and the rates have been refined. The price for one share will be 10 euros per month and the bandwidth allocated per machine will be increased to supply up to 5Mbits per share instead of the current 1.56Mbits

All of these points mean that the end of the Beta phase and the beginning of the final version will occur next month. Of course, we will alert our Beta testers well in advance, as soon as the date will be set, and in order to allow them to renew their hosting account at the lower rate (and to thank them for their confidence and help).

Gandi Domain Names

The rate of new accreditations has increased, and we will soon be able to provide a large number of new TLDs in the first trimester of 2008.
The .IT (Italy) ccTLD will be open to all residents of the European Union and will be the next one that we will be offering in the coming weeks.
We are already accredited for .ASIA domains, and will be participating in the 'Landrush' phase beginning on February 20th. We will be discussing the registration conditions for those domains in an upcoming blog entry, though we believe that this ccTLD will be in demand.
A brand new service for managing your domain names will be launched at Gandi this year.

Gandi Mail

The Webmail will be updated in the coming weeks. This will include the correction of the bugs and problems that you have brought to our attention, as well as the addition of new services.
The load on the platform has been greater than anticipated and we are soon going to strengthen our infrastructure to increase performance.

Gandi Reseller

An interface for managing your contacts is being developed. It will allow you to more efficiently manage your customers.
The API for managing hosting are also being prepared. We hope to be able to make them available in a few weeks.

Gandi Iwi

The Gandi Groups forums will be updated to version 2.0 next week, with an improved interface.
The guides and Screencasts on all sorts of things and tricks for managing and using your server is progressing nicely. Elliott, who has recently joined us, dedicates 100% of his time to these. If you would like a guide on a particular topic, please feel free to request it here.

GandiBlog

The priority for the upcoming weeks is to improve the performance of the platform. This will happen, among others, by a change in the database server and a better handling of spam.
New themes created by Steven.
A new theme that you can easily customize (without having to know CSS).
Once in place, we will surely see about a more significant update of the blog as it currently exists, in order to provide you with a simpler and more flexible tool.

Gandi Hosting in public beta is open!

Ryan — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:20:00 +0100

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.

The fact of calling this launching "beta testing" does not refer to the intellectual capacity of your servants (at least, we hope not!). No. Simply, it is because we are careful people, and we want to underline the fact that we want to gradually increase the load of the truly new product that has been the result of the hard work and talents of all involved.

As with every project of this type, which does not involve reselling solutions that already exist and have been tested (or 90% of the market), we are going to go through difficult periods. We will come out for the better because we will be - as we have always been - reactive and passionate about what we do. We will also need your patience and indulgence: We would like to thank you and your teams in advance, who will help make this possible.

As you have been able to see in the previous blog entries on our hosting service, we have tried to create the product that we would like to have as a customer, with the principal criteria being flexibility (at all levels) and quality. The product that you have under your eyes today is only the first version of an even larger project, and we will everything possible to assure that we can write the rest of the adventure with you.

Adventure? In my eyes, yes. To dare to create a product, in France, that is for customers around the world, at the cutting-edge of technology in the field, while nobody has been expecting this from us, all the while restructuring a company in difficulty and solidifying its core metier, was not without periods of concern during the past three years. But here we are, many of our customers have been asking us to move in this direction, and it was something of a wild dream; Or perhaps simply we had confidence in our vision, persisting until we have transformed it to something tangible.

It is therefore with immense pride that I would like to thank everyone at Gandi who has made this possible, I know - because I have shared this with you - all the effort that you have put into this project, for your company, and am confident in our ability to fulfil our promises.

I would also like to thank all of those in advance, and those - you, who are reading this - that will allow us to continue our journey in this new direction by buying hosting server shares, and in spreading the word to your friends and colleagues the same way to have a presence on the internet :D. One that will last!

I will let you discover this new service for yourself, and even if it is not the objective of this entry to explain how it works in detail, let me share with you a few useful links to:

The Wiki of the new Gandi community (Gandi Wi) http://wiki.gandi.net/ which will allow you to post all the problems that you might happen to come across, or even to start to contribute your own knowledge to enrich this community. You may connect to the Wiki via your usual Gandi handle and password.
The blog of the same community, which is a sort of copy of the Bar, but devoted entirely to hosting, and which is located at the following URL: http://hosting.gandibar.net/.
The IRC chat channel, where we will be happy to welcome you and try to be available to answer your questions. This may be found on the freenode network (irc.freenode.net) and in the channel #gandi-hosting.
The Gandi newsgroup/forum via your newsgroup reader on the server groups.gandi.net or on the web at http://groups.gandi.net. For information, a new version of the Gandi groups is being prepared and will be released next week at the latest.

The team at Gandi joins me in wishing you a happy new year 2008!!!

(6/6) Our hosting will be of high quality

Ryan — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 19:14:00 +0100

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...

At any rate (^^), before letting it all out, let me speak to you about the quality of our hosting. And yes, I must profit from the title of this entry :D

First, the quality of our equipment. The most common hosting solutions rely on profiting as much as possible from each server. The best way to do this is to go as cheap as possible - both in rates, and in equipment - by buying large quantities.

You've guessed it, I'm talking about discount hosts. Gandi does not want to go in that direction because that is not a position that is based on the long term, and the durability of our solutions is an integral part of our reputation. We have therefore purchased our hardware from a major global supplier, with whom we have worked for years, and have established as-hoc guarantees that meet our criteria in terms of quality: pay a bit more, but with the knowledge that this give us a bit more guarantees "just in case".

The quality of our platform and our infrastructure is also part of this chain of operation. It has now been 18 (long) months that we have spent working at several sites in order to bring every bit of quality possible to our network and to our hardware. Yes, several mirror sites are in the process of being completed that allow us to protect you against as many incidents as possible, since our technology allows it. We are already in a closed loop on 4 sites, and 2 are done being equipped with servers. Our objective is to have at least 4 access points completed before June 2008.

Finally, the principle quality in our eyes, the service, must be stressed. Even if it has been long-established with regards to domain names, from the word-of-mouth of our clients alone, we have yet to prove ourselves to you with regards to hosting.

You can be assured that our work ethic will remain the same, our spirit identical, and our investment policy will continue to spurn all advertisements and marketing. Our viral force is YOU. It is therefore up to us to exceed your expectations.

This choice is not insignificant: to engaging in advertisements allows us to keep our mojo (sorry, I meant "attention") focused during the period directly AFTER the purchase, and not just BEFORE, which consists of trying to convince you that we are the best choice. A company can rarely do everything: recruit new customers and provide them with an irreproachable level of service. We have made a clear choice, against the current trend of the sectors of activity, and which comes at a cost, notably in terms of rapidity of development. But we believe that we are making the right decision for the long term, which is clearly our objective.

And here we are: Gandi hosting will be released in version BETA, and as a nice surprise, the opening rates will be lower than the final version.

This is because:

- not all the services will be available,

- some processing latencies are still present,

- some servers are still being installed at the various sites.

In addition, we remind you that our hosting service is without engagement of any time, you are free to test and stop your account if you want - the minimum billing period (for the moment) is one day. We have also put in a system to avoid abuse and avoid problems before they occur.

There are only a few days to wait now, we'll let new year's pass, and I promise, we will open the great gates of our new hosting service.

Happy new year!

(4/6) Our hosting will be innovative

Ryan — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:00:00 +0100

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')"?...

Each person has a different conception of the word "hosting", as well as different needs. This makes it easy for us to make a list of key points and possible innovations that would be able to drive this service in the right direction: yours.

To put all this down on paper, we use what we call "user cases"; these cases are just as diverse as the needs of all our customers.

Here is an exclusive look for you, our blog readers, of some examples, and we hope that you will be the ones to describe your own here shortly

Gandi AutoInstall

Automatic installation that is rapid and functional, and that lets you choose the level of customization you would like:

"I always wanted to have my own server, but my knowledge in system administration is not good enough...I'm always asking my friends how to install and configure this or that service. With Gandi AutoInstall, I can choose my applications, and specify the settings that I want. I then submit my request and the server is created and installed all by itself in a few seconds- and it works perfectly!"

Rapid and diverse installations to manage your wide range of needs:

"I am a reseller of complete internet solutions, with the number of customers that I have and their wide range of needs, I have found in Gandi AutoInstall a quick and reliable way to create multiple pre-configured servers in just a few clicks."

Gandi Hosting: Modularity of resources

The very principle of our service is based on the idea of providing a modular use of resources that can be changed in real-time, via the addition, removal, increase, and decrease of server shares and disk space.

The possibility of adapting to any situation in just a few seconds, without performing any changes:

"I launched my new social networking website one Thursday evening, and the buzz occurred faster than anticipated - hundreds of visitors tried to connect to the website at the same time on Saturday night! The website was not able to handle the load, and it was a catastrophe for the launching! I immediately went to the hosting management interface page and saw that I could increase the capacity of my website in just a few seconds: I tripled my capacity, without even having to restart the server, and I was able to absorb the demand"

Quick power adjustment for a very short time:

"I ordered a small server at Gandi to setup a TeamSpeak and an Americas Army server to play with my friends online. With Gandi's tutorial, I saw that it was easy to install, however, given the size of the installation file (2GB), it would have taken all day to install, all the more so, since we wanted to install several huge maps to customize the game. I therefore multiplied the power of the server by 4 and was able to download 4x faster! I was then able to go back to my original configuration, just 2 hours after having increased its power!"

Increased data security

Guaranteed reliability that is not found in similar offers:

"At Gandi, the disks run with RAID6, which strongly reassures me, even though this does not prevent me from performing regular backups of my database. Knowing that 5 disks are running at the same time to save my data, this is a real guarantee of security that is normally only found in a distinct service at an extra cost."

Gandi Wi

An active and reactive community, based on the Gandi spirit: peer-to-peer help for all:

"I am not a geek at all, but I would like to control my own server and choose the services to install on it. In addition to using AutoInstall that did all the basic installing tasks that I was happy to pass on, I found some great guides written by people in the Gandi community, who were also ready to help me with my questions. This really gave me the desire to participate myself."

Your right to be heard and to choose what technology Gandi offers:

"Many of us in the Gandi community wanted to see the addition of the Linux Gentoo operating system. Thanks to the Gandi wishlist, we suggested the idea, and rallied others who wanted it as wel. The project was accepted by Gandi's developers and will be added within two weeks! It is nice to be heard and granted one's wish!"

Gandi Flex (AutoFlex) * under development, available in early 2008

The idea was to offer you a scheduled and/or automated update of the number of shares of your Gandi hosting.

An advanced scheduling system to meed my needs and assure that I have a high-quality service at the best price:

"My website sees a lot of traffic on the weekend. Consequently, I was either under-sized for the times when the website was the most visited, or forced to have a hosting service that was over-sized for 5 out of 7 days, with the additional costs that go with it. With GandiFlex, I schedule the desired capacity on a day-to-day basis, and the server adapts itself to the volume of traffic. I therefore improve the quality of service, and avoid spending money needlessly."

A flexibility that allows changing one's needs depending on real and immediate use:

"Our team holds regular training matches of Quake Wars. We are 8 and the server runs well with 4 shares. But hey, our matches are rather random, and we give them the password to our server, and so we can sometimes have 16 players, with the necessity of having a perfect level of quality at that time. With Gandi AutoFlex, there is not even any need to touch the interface, the server will automatically change from 6 to 7 shares during our matches and the game stays super fluid."

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It would be difficult at this time to describe the technology that will be used (server shares) in order to reach our goals: know simply that we consider our service to be a huge pool of machine resources, and that our role is to empower you to profit from it depending you needs, and this, in real-time.

We must also offer you services that will simplify your life, and we must remain at the leading edge of trends in terms of distributions and languages, thus freeing you from all the usual restraints... in short, invent - with your input - a new type of use, a new way of thinking about hosting, to consume more intelligently, and if if possible ... less!

(3/6) Our hosting will be for everyone

Ryan — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 16:23:00 +0100

You only need to glance at our list of customers' domain names to see that Gandi's community is made up of far more than just a group of enlightened technicians.

There are some real neophytes among you and we are proud of it - as much as we are of having the more experienced people as well! :D
Remember that our mission is to share the internet with the largest number of people possible, and to make it accessible to all. Not just in terms of quantity, but with an emphasis on quality, a quality that is designed to be felt by all of you who want your presence to be felt on the internet, no matter what your level of experience with the web may be.

We wanted the same thing to hold true for our web hosting service: to allow everyone to step foot on our boat and to take control of it in a way that best suits them.

You are an expert: climb up the main mast, raise the sails, and choose your heading: you are the only master aboard.
You are an amateur: choose your heading - we will help you stay on course, and give you your Captain bars.
You are a total beginner: take your place on the bridge - we will clear off for you and steer the boat to where you want it to go.
You are a major merchant and dream of having your own fleet: thanks to our web hosting API, you can wear your Admiral hat.

Whether you would like to learn how to sail your ship solo, or whether you prefer being allowed to drift along with the currents, it makes no difference - we will be there beside you to help if needed.

Whether you are a professional of the high seas, renting large merchant ships, or a hobbyist that only needs a small pleasure boat and a megaphone, it is all the same - you will have tools that are perfectly adapted to your journey.

Let me recapitulate without the metaphors. Gandi will provide hosting solutions for:

web hosts that want to focus on their level of service,
experts that want to get their hands dirty in order to meet all their needs,
professionals that want a highly stable solution,
amateurs and beginners, so that we can help them,
those that don't have any experience at all, but want to learn more.

In short: our hosting will be for everyone.

(2/6) Our hosting will be flexible

Ryan — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 11:28:00 +0100

Flexibility, this is the capacity to adapt to a given situation. And this is how we have designed our hosting service.
There are so many of you, and you all have radically different needs from each other. Would that mean that we would need to have just as many different hosting plans? We are definitely not going to provide a simple shared hosting plan: it is our job to adapt to your needs, and not to force you to you to choose a plan from a category that only more or less fits your needs. Our service will be flexible!

We also re-examined the question of obligation. We, the consumer, are now accustomed to the tradition of signing a contract for a set time period, that to use a given product, you must sign a contact for X months. This tradition applies to nearly all the hosting services we have seen. It is also against the very nature of the very flexibility that we want to give to you.

As a user, for example, one might like to rent a server for 3 months (to launch a website, a brand, etc.), or even, why not... a day, in order to work by remote connection with a team located in Ireland. And even, hey! let's be crazy: 3 hours, tonight, to play a round of Quake with some friends who live far away!

Also, why we are being flexible on duration, we might also be flexible on the capacity: Would you like to assure the good performance of your machine during the launching of a product, and then reduce its power once the initial surge has dropped off? Why should this not be possible? This works in the other way as well of course, and to an extent that you might not even have dreamed of

All of this, and without a set contractual period, holy cow!

I'll sum up all this up for you: You choose what you want, how long you want it for, you pay, and you get it

(1/6) Launching of Gandi Hosting

Ryan — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 12:24:00 +0100

From Santa Claus's sack we are getting ready to pull out a revolutionary from of web hosting. In other words, we are doing everything that we can to assure that a public Beta version of a product that we have been working on for some time now will be ready by Christmas. :D

Why in Beta?? Honestly, we have been behind schedule in recent months on the development of this service. This is simply because the existing products take precedence over a totally new one, however enthusiastic we may be about it. We have been in an internal testing phase for several weeks now, and reset the majority of variables to zero each morning to test different possible configurations, and there are many!

By the end of the year, we should be able to open a Beta version that is clean and ready to go (with a price that is worthy of the Christmas spirit), which will only require being tested on the new network.

Why revolutionary?? The word is a perhaps a bit pompous, put it is nonetheless one that fits the best. This hosting offer will not be like any other one that is on the market. We wanted to create an offer that stays true to our core values, one that we would be proud to have among our services - with a Gandi spirit inside. We have done this by putting You, as usual, at the center of the project. Doing this has assured that Gandi Hosting will be perfectly adapted to real every-day use, both immediately and in the future.

I will soon go in more detail here on how our offer of hosting in "shares" works. A bit like an Advent calendar, we will be opening more and more of our new offer as we approach the launching, in order to prepare you for what you have been waiting so long to see.

In the meantime, if any of you feel like being a tester, please let us know at the address alpha.hosting @ gandi.net. There will certainly not be enough place for all of the willing volunteers, but we will be pleased to have some of you on our test machines.