Gandi Bar - General

The future of the Internet is Mobile: Is it also meshed?

Thomas — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 11:56:00 -0800

The ascendancy of mobile devices like smartphones is clearly a market trend. We always like to talk to innovators, so here's how one innovator sees a way to provide more reliable connectivity with a meshed approach.

More and more Internet-connected devices have been showing up, many running wifi-capable operating systems, leading analysts to start discussions on the "Internet of Things". Some insightful technologists are embracing these trends. They like getting ahead of the curve and challenging big established monopolistic companies with innovative approaches, that help us scale and extend the usefulness of these connected devices, often for purposes that are not directly related to making a profit, but still benefit our global society. Gandi does things like that all the time, so when we meet like-minded people, we want to hear what they think. Josh (m0nk) Thomas is one such innovator.

The self-described "breaker of things", Josh has created a kernel module for Android that implements a wifi mesh network with smartphones. I caught up to him at a mobile security conference recently, and we got to talking. Here's what he has to say about his work.

Gandi: The SPAN project links wifi capable smart phones in a mesh network. Why did you create it?

m0nk: Before the project, I always felt slightly skeptical about our societal reliance on the cellular infrastructure. The service providers do a wonderful job, but in the end they are for-profit corporations, focused on ROI and the like. I honestly commend them on the reliability they have attained, but it's far from 100%.
Then Fukushima happened. I was taking paternal leave from work as my son had just been born, and the Internet just exploded with news and heartbreak. The one story that really got me was a YouTube video of a family trying to call each other to say "Hey, I'm alive". The cell phones just said "no service". I remember thinking, why are we so reliant on a technology that doesn't support us when we need it most?
I started doing research. I learned that the worldwide cellular infrastructure is designed to handle only 80-90% capacity. In almost every major catastrophe, the network dies. I also learned that most emergency management personal rely on the cell infrastructure, so it isn't just families not being in communication, it's the people trying to help and manage the crisis as well. I decided it was time to fix this problem, or at least attempt to show the world it was fixable.

Gandi: So who does the SPAN project benefit?

m0nk: I'd like to think it has the potential to benefit everyone with a cell phone. It's my belief that meshed cellular communication should be ubiquitous across the globe, and anything I can do to promote that cause will get us one step closer to never losing communications again.

Gandi: What’s the biggest barrier to adoption of the SPAN project?

m0nk: In America, we like to think positively. We don't really ever consider disaster striking so we never really think about being prepared. Those that do think about it are sometimes labeled as "crazy". Though some are, the entire mentality is usually dismissed from the public consciousness. That's a barrier.
In the end, all people need to do to adopt SPAN is download and install an application on their phones that they will hopefully never use. To be realistic, I just don't see that happening en masse.
Therefore, I am hoping to one day catch the eyes of Google and Apple, and let them adopt the technology into the backbones of the actual production phones. I can show them it's simple software running on their phones (so the cost is low), but I cannot provide them with an impetus beyond "it's for the greater good".

Gandi: Does the proliferation of Internet-connected devices make mesh networks more or less important?

m0nk: Probably more. The more reliant we as a global society are on the Internet, the more important it becomes for daily life. If connectivity is removed, the effect increases with the number of devices that rely on it.

Gandi: What do the carriers (ATT, Sprint, etc) think of your project?

m0nk: I've heard the full gamut from "Hey, that's really cool" to "It does VoIP and free internet tethering, we DO NOT approve". They might fight the project, since it shows there is a potential problem, and the technology allows for bypassing the network for VoIP calls. As someone who pays the bills, I wouldn't really fault them for protecting their public image and revenue stream. I just think it's short sighted.

Gandi: Do you have any allies in the Internet industry?

m0nk: Not really, I'm just a guy with a loud mouth who got a little bit of FFRDC funding to explore this concept. I spend most of my mesh time these days evangelizing the technology and trying to raise awareness.

Gandi: Is security of mesh networks a problem?

m0nk: It depends on the deployment. For situations like the Arab spring, very much so. If the government shuts the Internet down to keep people from organizing, you have to expect they will also monitor and track the mesh network if they can. Oddly enough, emergency response personnel also need security, to avoid terrorist snooping, for example. For a general deployment across the landscape, I'd expect security would actually come second to bandwidth.
In the end, we have spent a ton of time working the security angle of the project. We have some code and a lot of ideas. What we lack is time and sponsors to solve it.
I am trying to prove a point with the SPAN project, namely "Mesh networking is a viable alternative / backup plan for emergencies and we as a global culture should adopt it." I'm not trying to say that SPAN itself is the answer, it is solely my implementation. Maybe someone will be as riled up as me, and solve the security problem before we do. That would be awesome. If not, we will solve it in due time.

We at Gandi love to hear what the leading edge people like Josh are up to, and to help out when we can. As the technology evolves to make innovations like mesh networks possible, Gandi will do it's part to promote them for the common good.

Here is some more information on Josh's work:
Presentations by Josh
SPAN Project Code
Amphion Forum Powerpoint

How Gandi does marketing without advertising

Thomas — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 09:03:00 -0800

The fact that we don't advertise or every pay for positive mentions makes for an unconventional marketing approach here at Gandi. We thought some of you might appreciate knowing how we go about meeting these challenges, while you are bombarded with ads from other less strictly ethical companies.

Most marketing efforts are a combination of inbound and outbound approaches. Print, media, and Internet Pay-Per-Click (PPC) are combined with SEO, social media and publicity to make a well-rounded campaign, with hooks to build a community of common interest.

What happens when some of these tools are simply removed from the toolbox?

I work for a company who has actually publically stated that we will never pay someone to say nice things about us. That is, we will not pay professional bloggers, buy advertising in print or media, or do any PPC.
That’s actually a challenge for an Internet company, especially one selling in an incredibly competitive market like web hosting and domain name registration. How do people even know you exist? How do you generate awareness if you can’t even buy a banner ad with your name and logo? Is it even possible to build awareness in this context?

The answer is that yes, it is possible. But that does not mean it is easy. There are specific approaches that work, some that don’t, and you definitely need to be patient. The good news is that your marketing budget, while not zero, won’t be broken if you do it right.

At Gandi we have focused historically less on publicity and SEO than on building a community, and around making our products appealing in a context of minimal or even zero promotion. A lot of people know us for our tag line: “No Bullshit”. As a pledge of honesty it means, in effect, that we don’t pester our customers with upsell opportunities, sell their data to marketing partners, or otherwise try to leverage the commercial relationship in any way other than providing service in exchange for a fee.

We really believe in the No BS philosophy, and we think many more people would take to it if they only knew we existed. How then to get the word out?

To make more people aware we exist, in the last year we have focused on generating that awareness. This meant that when we released new products or features, we made press releases. We actually had not done that for a couple of years. We re-vamped the front-end of our web site to be more eye-catching, with subtly improved workflow, without actually changing the overall organization. This both gave the customer a better user experience, and generated a feedback loop with our user community. We re-organized the online product documentation to be more easily searchable and SEO-friendly.

We have had some social media presence, mostly on twitter, for a while. While it was a good, solid base of followers, and an excellent feedback channel, we decided to push the envelope a bit. This past spring we offered to reward followers with free t-shirts. While it’s almost like paying someone to say nice things (are follows nice?), we decided it was actually a kind of giveaway to build the community, and still far enough from actual advertising that we were comfortable with it. That choice did generate some critical questions from users, but a lot of people liked the t-shirts, too, and our follower base increased significantly. The community is now richer for it.
We combined this with a company facebook and Google+ page, opening more channels for user engagement and feedback.

One of the more pleasing consequences of the no BS policy is simply that we need to rely more on actually delivering value. We found that when we actually deliver useful, high-performance products with innovative technological approaches, it helps us generate awareness.
People like talking about things that are cool, that take some intellectual effort to understand and explain, and above all work well and efficiently. Intellectually engaging subjects make for good blog posts, and if the products also work well, and solve a problem, then people enjoy using them more, knowing that they have an advantage driven by innovative technology. That makes for satisfied customers, and that is who spreads the word.

I’m leaving out a lot here. Gandi also builds communities through sponsoring non-profits, for example. And of course you can’t have a good reputation without having great support, making your site search-engine friendly, and adding the features people need in your field, and that your competitors have or will soon have. All that comes with the territory. We are doing all of that as well.

The point here is that not harassing your customer base to buy more, not making claims or slogans in advertising that your real customers know to be misleading, and basically just providing good value for the money without claiming to do more, are all marketing advantages if you can find honest ways to talk about them. You don’t really need outbound advertising in this context, but you do need to use the tools of publicity, SEO, and social media to spread the word.

Why does Gandi offer Corporate Services?

Thomas — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 11:31:00 -0700

Gandi's Corporate services is showing up a lot in the press, and you will see that some extensions are only available through Corporate Services subscriptions. What are these services, and why are some extensions reserved in this way? Find out here! For years, Gandi has been getting asked to help manage our customers large domain portfolios. We can do it well, because we have the experience, and so we decided to offer Gandi Corporate Services.

Gandi is in the business of registering domain names for our customers. We have been doing it for a long time, and we can now register a lot of different extensions for you. While we still can't register every single one possible, we are getting close!
There are some extensions that, while we can register them, are unbelievably difficult. Others are really easy, and the price we charge reflects this (along with whatever the registry involved charges us).

Some extensions are just... weird. Take .ET (not that I have anything against Ethiopia, but the registry rules are arcane in the extreme). While it would be great to be able to automate .ET registrations and offer them to everyone, it remains impractical, especially for a organization as lean and efficient as Gandi is. We need time to work with the registry, help them refine the process, and adjust our systems to deal with their requirements. The best way to do that is to have some managed registrations go through the system. That's why we decided to put all these types of extensions under Corporate Services, where we have staff that can work on this for us, and for our larger clients. It's a compromise between not offering the extension at all, and offering it publicly at a huge price, neither of which we feel right about.

As we work out the automation for these extensions, we will roll them out to everyone without the need for a subscription to cover the overhead. Think of it as an intermediate stage in the life cycle of a TLD, like the chrysalis of a butterfly.

Some of you really want these extensions as vanity domains, or for specialized business purposes. The corporate subscription we offer is an extra step and an extra fee, yes, and so it seems odd to you that we ask for it. Actually, if you take full advantage of it it's a much better deal than paying the fees we would have to charge for individual registrations! Given that its really just a few arcane extensions that are affected, and that the subscription lets you register any of them, and also gets you access to some very useful services, we think that this is the best way to offer these extensions.

So why all the other service offerings?

First of all, if you don't have about 50 or so domains to manage, it's probably not in your interest to order the extra services. The people who need these services are the really busy professionals who know the value of their time, and would rather let trusted experts deal with transferring, renewing, and maintaining the ownership of their domains. If you run an IT shop for a big company, or if you work for a legal entity charged with brand management on the Internet, these services are for you!

The services we offer are intended to offload your critical IT and brand management staff from the specialized, bureaucratic, and risky tasks of managing, reporting and monitoring your brand, as represented by your domains. That's why we offer them. That's what Gandi does: gives the customer the services they ask for. We want to offer our customers all the choices we possibly can, and this is just another example.

For more information, ask us here!

Gandi Support for Code the Change

Thomas — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:08:00 -0700

Are you a computer software professional who wishes their work had more meaning? Do you see all kinds of problems in society you wish you could use your skills to help correct? Well, check out Code the Change. Mahatma Gandhi said "Be the change that you wish to see in the world". That's often a challenge for computer science professionals. We tend to get recruited for hot projects like social media, virtualization, or cloud computing, and it sometimes is difficult to see the social good of all our hard work. At the same time, it's frustrating to see so much going wrong in the world that we could help fix, if we knew who needed our help, and how to give it to them efficiently.

How many more gifted and creative people would enter the computer science field if they knew that their work would be uplifting, socially relevant, and valued by society? How do we motivate ourselves and our peers to come up with the creative solutions we know we need to fix the world's problems?

Well, there are organizations out there that are making a difference. So besides sending your favorite non-profit a little extra cash, how can you contribute?

That's where Code the Change comes in. With their "Code Jams", they give you the chance to spend a short time creating solutions for the technical and software challenges faced by non-profits. You can do good with code!

They are also actively creating a network of schools, and connecting computer scientists to the non-profits that need their help. By offering students career counseling and guidance, Code the Change is inspiring those who might otherwise choose another subject, just because they do not see the social value in becoming a computer professional.

Some of the projects Code the Change has helped out are:

Anjna Patient Education - Interactive Health Module
Occupy Wall Street - Federated General Assembly
SIRUM - Tooltips: Donation of unused medicines
Endowr "Enabler": Financial Aid Reform

Gandi is proud to support Code the Change. Check out their site!

What do you think of your registrar supporting this project?
Are we spending the money you give us wisely?
Tell us what you think! Leave a comment!

Monitor Your Domain Name

Thomas — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 22:41:00 -0800

Why Monitor Your Domain Name?

A domain name is a distinctive mark, one that lets your customers, your suppliers, all of your contacts know who they are communicating with on the Internet. Depending on the popularity of your brand, your domain name may be subjected to counterfeiting or abuse, in the form of cybersquatting. This can damage or abuse your online identity, allowing others to masquerade as you, to their advantage.

The abuse can take several forms. For example, you might find that someone has registered an identical second-level name to yours. Say you have the domain name “votremarque.fr”. You might find that a third party has registered votremarque.com, or .org. They might try inserting a typo, like “votrearque.fr”, or an alternate spelling like “lavotremarque.fr” or “votremarques.fr”. If you are monitoring, you can and take action to protect your domain and your reputation.

Gandi Corporate Services

Through the efforts of our Corporate Services team, we will be able to offer monitoring and reporting on the following types of events:

New domain name registrations that match or come close to matching your domains
Domain names where the content has been modified (activation, deactivation of a web site, or content of the page changing, for example)
Changes to the whois data on a domain name

You can get your results online, regularly. An email can be sent automatically informing you of the availability of your monitoring results for a given period. It may be quarterly, monthly, bimonthly, weekly and even daily.

For each newly registered domain name, you get a time-stamped screen capture, an automatic, customized label, court case data (if available) and the whois details.

For more information about Gandi Corporate Services click here .

WARNING: Corporate Gandi does not give legal advice. Be sure to check with your legal counsel should you need legal help to pursue those who abuse your online identity.

Price Increase for .COM/.NET/.BIZ

Leland Vandervort — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 12:25:00 +0100

As you may already know, ICANN, the regulatory authority for domain names, authorized the principal registries (.com, .net, .org ...) to increase their pricing in 2007. Of course, the registries were not slow to take advantage of the opportunity. A 7% increase in 2007, and a further 7% in 2008, was followed by yet another 7% increase in mid 2010. Now, Verisign will once again be increasing prices, theortically for the last time, on 15 January 2012 by a further 7%. This makes for a total real increase of 31%, which, given the margins on the product is an enormous pill to swallow. Here is what we will do for you...

Not wanting to pass these price increases on to you, our customers, we absorbed the increases in 2007 and 2008. We were helped in this by the low dollar to euro exchange rate, and you benefitted accordingly: our pricing did not change. In 2010, we did increase prices, but eased the pain by applying the increase solely to domain renewals, making sure that we would maintain your confidence through our hard work to be more efficient. Of course, we were also hoping that the economic situation would not deteriorate, destroying this delicate balance.... you know the rest, unfortunately.

We have now reached the point where, if we wish to continue to improve the quality of our service, keep the passionate, dedicated, development team we have happily innovating (a rare and wonderful thing), we are forced to pass on this latest price increase by the registries. That is why our domain creation and renewal rates will finally change.

Looking at our global sales figures, we can see that you place high value on our honesty and our long-term competence in this industry, traits we stay true to, and are constantly seeking to improve. We think this honesty, the respect we have for your privacy, and our dedication to quality are all the more important in a market that is being consolidated by unscrupulous companies. It seems that for some, the domain name services have no value in themselves, and are used merely as bait to capture new clients. These companies seek to sell you other products, where they make a profit. In coming years we believe they plan to be far less generous.

At Gandi, as our 10th anniversary promotion last year proved, we have a different approach. We believe that each year we need to actually prove the quality of our work is worth the price we ask, that we have a stable and sustainable business, and that you can trust us to tell you the truth, just as we are right now. The fact that we do this is why our loyal customers are our best ambassadors, and the reason why we value these customers so much: you ensure our success by believing in us. We hope that you know we understand the importance of your domain names, and that you can continue to trust us to manage them with complete honesty, transparency, and stability, like we always have.

In conclusion:

- On 15 January, the rates for .COM, and .NET will rise by $0.50 (fifty cents) on creations and transfers across all pricing grids, and for renewals.

- On 1 February, the rates for .BIZ will rise by $0.50 (fifty cents) on creations, transfers and renewals across all pricing grids.

As always, we are available to discuss these increases with you. Please feel free to share your comments.

Happy Holidays!

marc — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 10:10:00 -0500

We hope that the coming year will bring you peace, good health, good cheer and much prosperity!

Our US center is going well, with lots of shiny new servers humming busily away! Response has been excellent, and we couldn't be more pleased! Don't forget that you can test drive a Gandi VPS for free! Request a free test drive

We're still offering .COM / .NET transfers at only $7.50 until March 31st, 2011!

Also available now, Gandi skins for your phone! We have 4 models available for 4 different phones (iPhone 3, iPhone 4, HTC Desire, and Samsung Galaxy S). Here's an example!

We're going to give away 20 of these skins between now and January 3, 2011.
To win one, all you need to do is retweet our news announcing the opening of Gandi US http://twitter.com/gandibar/statuses/17279985270128640

We will select 20 winners at random on January 3.

For those who haven't won, or don't participate, we're providing some free wallpapers made by our talented Steven for your iPhones! No android version yet, but we should have them soon!

Click here to download free iPhone3 Gandi wallpaper

Click here to download free iPhone 4 Gandi wallpaper

We wish you all a joyous holiday season, and a fruitful new year!

Contest winners
We would like to thank everyone that participated! The winners are:

lordgun_
element62
LoxDev
io2a
nicoladiaz
pixxelboy
emencia
Ti_Pierre
Apteno
haikumore
thunell
jalencas
MikeMGB
cyphermaster
niclavoie
jalencas
solugeo
spipcreation
Floxcie
cymen

If you are in the above list, simply send us an email at direction at gandi.net with your address, cell phone model (Iphone 3, Iphone 4, HTC Desire, or Samsung Galaxy S) and your skin preference (our stocks are quite limited so please make 4 choices, in order of preference).

Verisign announces COM and NET price increases for July 2010

Joe — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:08:00 +0000

With its contract with ICANN allowing for 7% price increases per year Verisign has announced that it will again be executing this and raising the prices of COM domains to $7.34 from July 1 2010, and NET domains to $4.65. This has increased the COM price from its original base of $6 in just 3 years.

When we last spoke to Verisign at ICANN Sydney 2009 they suggested further price increases were unlikely. What's changed?

With the approach of the ICANN domain name liberalisation due early next year, this could either cement COMs status as a premium extension, or drive people to look for and explore other extensions. What do you think?

European weekend!!!

Ryan — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:49:00 +0200

Over the past few months, hopefully you will have noticed that we have been offering you an increasing number of European extensions. This is our current mission, and I can assure you that it sometimes borders on epic proportions!

This is so that we do not forget that are are part of a larger union, Europe, and that all of us have an important role to play this weekend: vote!

So in honour of this special occasion, Gandi is having a promotion that will help your presence be felt more strongly across the various European extensions.

Note! this promotion will only be valid as of 2:00 PM CET today, and will run to midnight on Sunday. Here are the rates (excl. VAT) that we are offering, and which are only valid for creations:

.EU at €9 instead of €12
.FR at €9 instead of €12
.BE at €9 instead of €12
.LU at €23 instead of €30
.DE at €9 instead of €12
.CH at €9 instead of €12
.LI at €9 instead of €12
.CO.UK and .ORG.UK at €10€ instead of €12 for 2 years
.IM at €15 instead of €18
.ES at €9 instead of €12
.CAT at €32 instead of €36
.IT at €10 instead of €12
.NL at €9 instead of €12
.AT at €4 instead of €12€ HT (registry promotion underway)
.PL at €9 instead of €12
.ME at €14 instead of €16
.CZ at €13.5 instead of €18
.RU at €25 instead of €28

(Note: the rates have been lowered in the other currencies as well see http://www.gandi.net/domain/price/info)

And even if you don't want anything do to with these extensions, please...get out and vote!

New tools for .TEL domains

Ryan — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:30:00 +0200

Two months after the launch of the .TEL extension (March 24th 2009), the registry Telnic, has announced that over 200,000 .TEL domains have been registered.

Just to remind you, this extension is different from other TLDs in terms of how it is managed and used. This is because it does not allow pointing to an A record. In short this means that it cannot be used for a website! What a strange type of domain name!! No, not really: the registry wants this extension to be a kind of digital directory, where the purpose of the DNS zone is to add contact information, which may or may not be publicly accessible. The .TEL domain would be, in a way, your digital address book on the internet!

For this, the Registry has recently put in place a range of new tools for its users that I will share with you:

.TEL on your BlackBerry
With the wide range of free downloads here (depending on the version of your BB), you will be able to find .TEL domains, send and receive TelFriend invitations, save the profiles of your friends in your directory, manage your .TEL identities (notably personal and professional), and even update your own synchronized data with the Registry.

.TEL on your iPhone
Downloadable directly from the AppleStore, the application provided by Telnic allows you to manage your .TEL domains, to find you via the GPS of your iPhone (for authorized contacts), to choose the status of your profile at any time (available, busy, out to lunch, etc.), to choose the keywords of your .TEL domains, and the information that you would like to publish/hide depending on your contacts, and thus fine tune the management of all the privacy settings.

.TEL plug-in for Outlook
If you are a happy Outlook user (they exist!), you can use a plug-in provided by Telnic that will allow you to search .TEL contact files, add them to your directory, and even manage your own records, update them with the registry and choose your level of privacy depending on your contacts. There is a guide to help you with this here, and the plug-in is available here.

.TEL. on your website as a contact page.
You can also add and integrate your .TEL domain to your existing website as a contact page. This page will be automatically updated if you change your .TEL information (via your iPhone, for example). You may also choose the links that you would like to display, and the way that they will appear so that they will match the look and feel of your website. You can see an example of this here, and the kit for installing this system can be downloaded here.

For those of you that do not have an iPhone or BlackBerry and who prefer to avoid Outlook (they exist too!), you can edit your records on the platform that Gandi makes available to you. Remember that we have changed the URL of the website and now, rather than going to https://telhosting.gandi.net you can go directly to https://www.teladmin.net. Your handles and passwords remain the same.

Virtualisation - and why it is the future of web hosting

Joe — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 09:52:00 +0000

As you know we've been working on our hosting product at Gandi for 2 years now and getting the technology right was very important for us. If we don't believe in what we're doing we can't expect you to too. Now we've fully launched our virtualised hosting offer based on Xen technology and have 5000 customers already upon us, so we hope this is some indication that we're getting it right. But why did we choose virtualisation? Because it is the future for web hosting. Why is it the future of web hosting? Because it can do anything other types of hosting can, but with greater flexibility, more resilience and often cheaper too.

On thing we've been proud of following our launch has been the industry reaction. For example, our technology partners Dell and AMD (whom we use for our servers, storage and processors) were impressed with our new offer and invited us to present it as a customer case study at a press event at Chelsea Football club in London a few weeks ago (we seem to be doing lots of Football club visits at the moment, the Nominet conference a few weeks ago was at Wembley Stadium. Who knows perhaps Arsenal is next...). It was a European wide event with over 50 journalists from different countries, so it was a great opportunity to share what we've been up to.

The theme of the event was data centre efficiency, looking at ways to improve performance and lower cost, which is something all businesses are thinking about as the recession kicks in, and the potential impact on the environment. For Dell, virtualisation was part of the story for how to achieve this. According to their studies, most servers run at around 10%-12% capacity. We have seen this ourselves in the 10 years we've been running hosting projects (in our life before Gandi). This means that roughly 90% of the machine resources are idle, consuming power, creating pollution, but not producing output. This also means that most customers are buying servers that are nearly 10 times over spec'ed for their requirements.

You might think this would be an unusual thing for Dell to point out. It implies that by using virtualisation you could take the jobs from 10 physical servers and put them onto a single server running 10 virtual shells that would now be running at 100% capacity. This would lead to 9 less servers sold for Dell, which is obviously not a great thing.

But Dell have been very brave here and recognise that virtualisation is so powerful that it is going to drive this market forward anyway, regardless of what they do about it. So they can either pretend its not going to happen, or they can educate their own customers, provide support and software to create virtualised environments and lead the way in this changing market.

And this is precisely why they were so interested in what we are doing at Gandi. We built our virtualisation offer so that you, our customers, can benefit from this kind of technology and efficiency without having to have large Dell contracts, or extensive IT teams.

With our offer you can create virtual servers to perform the tasks of dedicated physical servers, vary the power of each virtual server to your needs and save the power you're not using. Because of the flexibility of our system you can increase or decrease the number of shares (power) to meet the actual needs of the server, e.g. get it running closer to full capacity. This will lead to less cost and less waste.

And this is why it is the future of hosting. If you can have all of this power and flexibility which can scale up or down from the size of a small shared hosting pack to a large dedicated server (or cluster of servers), plus less pollution, less wasted space, why would you choose anything else?

Now if only someone would invite us to a conference at a decent football club we'd be really happy

Who is Dabest?

Ryan — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 17:11:00 +0100

Do you like a challenge? Competitions? Win a prize thanks to your talent, rather than by chance? I have something for you!

You have certainly noticed that we now have a website creation tool that is available for everyone to use. If this is not the case, I recommend that you have a look at my previous post

In its free version, this graphic-based tool provides you with two pages that you can use, for example, to present your domain name while simultaneously trying out our new service.

Today, we are giving you the possibility of creating this page via Gandi SiteMaker. One page is all you need: it is up to you to make it moving, silly, descriptive, scary… anything that you want, as long as it sends a positive message

Once you are satisfied with the result, just send us a quick mail to whoisdabest@gandi.net. We will then select the 5 best works (that we will judge internally), and will reward them with a free Pro Pack for one year.

Beyond simply celebrating the launching of this product, we would like to have your help in adding more color to the web. What is more drab that a page that simply says that there is no website configured for your domain?

Rules? As few as possible. Common sense is the golden rule, of course. What we call common sense is that there are no images, videos, sounds, texts, etc that are shocking, pornographic, racist, that sort of thing… There is of course a sales contract that goes into those things in more detail, but if you follow your own common sense, that’s even better.

Happy clicking! I’ll check back with you on this at the end of January 2009!

Current contesters :
junkflowers.gandi-site.net
terrasse-en-kit.gandi-site.net
www.pascalecondamine.com
www.famillemuller.fr
gwadatones.gandi-site.net
www.diveandsea.net
www.fm100.ch
www.prestigehouse.fr
www.histoiredoceans.com
www.philippecostes.com
lesrmp.gandi-web.net
poneypassion.com
www.sourcesetvie.fr
www.gitesalsa.fr
www.mascotovilla.fr
www.columbusohiostockphotos.com
www.uncoindeverdure.com
www.le-pays-magique.fr

The contest has ended!
The winning websites can be seen here.
Thank you all for your participation, and for the quality of your entries!

Dodgy domain practices, the story contines...

Joe — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:49:00 +0000

Follow our recent article "Why domain name services are not all equal" we thought we'd keep you up-to-date on some other industry articles along the same lines. Techcrunch has published this great summary about top registrars using "domain warehousing" to profit from their customers expired domains. The article cites an original article by Andrew Allemann at Domain Name Wire who gathered the information. Interesting stuff.

ICANN - domain name extension liberalisation - who benefits?

Joe — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:04:00 +0000

Some of you may have seen earlier in the year that ICANN (the body in charge of regulating the domain name space) announced that it was going to liberalise the market for domain name extensions, e.g. the bit that follows the last '.' in a name, .com, .net., .co.uk, .eu, etc.

What this means is that in theory anyone can apply to become a registry in their own right, and get .theirname so that you can buy domain names from them and get yourname.theirname. ICANN have now announced that the 'evaluation' process for new extensions will be costly, $185,000. Well costly for you and me, but perhaps not for funds or speculators.

But what is point in all this? Does it matter? Should we care?

The justification for doing it is that the internet is growing, more people are coming online, it allows more choice, blah, blah, blah. Which has some truth to it. But in some ways there is already an infinite number of domain names available across each of the roughly 280 existing TLDs (from .ac -> .zw - there should be a catchy alphabet song for them!).

But what does it mean for you, the customer? Well, it does mean you can get more choice. You will be able to buy yourdomain.something. Whether this helps is a different matter. Many of these new extensions will be quite specific, which may help, e.g. myplace.restaurant, or myhouse.london, but it may just create more and more confusion that your chosen name can have so many different extensions, which one is really you?

One result of this will probably be that more and more people will want to authenticate that their domain name, whatever unusual form it takes, can be explicitly linked to them. The most common way to do this at the moment it through SSL certificates, where a third party will guarantee that the domain is owned by a particular individual/company, and that you are browsing on that site in a secure way. So this is something to think about and watch out for...

There is one group of people that will undoubtedly benefit from this liberalisation and that is the spammers, advertisers and squatters.

In the old days if you wanted to protect your brand you could buy all 280 extensions. No longer. With a potentially limitless number of extensions, there is no way that you can get yourbrand.allofthem, so even the most well protected global brands may find a few more lawsuits on the horizon. The beneficiaries of this will be the squatters and advertisers who will use establishedbrand.newtld as an advertising site, or domain auction target (buy this one back, for $xxx).

And then there will be the increased volume of ad sites, just showing endless streams of ad feeds on domain names with no real purpose except to make money for their owner. I always think about this in terms of domain names as property: if the best properties in your town (domains on your tld) were closed down and became advertising bill boards, would you stand for this as a resident? This is exactly what is happening online. Most of the best names/words are turning into bill boards, and it will only continue unless there is a regulatory change to stop or limit it.

So there you have it, the change is coming, the benefits are unclear. But one thing that is clear is that unless ICANN take more of a role in setting and enforcing codes of content for domain ownership/usage, we may find as customers we are browsing in a larger and more polluted domain space.

What do you think?

Why domain name services are not all equal

Wendy — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:47:00 +0100

We believe in domain ethics – your domain is more than just a name, it’s your online presence, your company, profile or project. It should be protected and you should get what you want and what you expect with no tricks. But, you say, surely all domain names are the same? Why should it matter who you buy a domain from as they all come from the same place anyway, right? Well no, unfortunately that’s not true. There are many reasons why different domain providers offer better or worse deals, and it's not just price.

Not all domain offers are what they seem. Different domain name providers allow you to do different things with your domain. Some have service restrictions and sneaky pricing. It's not just the restrictions on the domain that can be limiting, it's the little surprises you might find out after you've paid. Sometimes you only find out about a bad deal once you've been caught by it, but we've put together a list of a few things to watch out for in the tricky domain market.

1. Sneaky pricing - Different pricing for register (buy now £0.99 per year!) and renewal (oops it costs more next year) - Different pricing for transfers out (oh, you want to leave, that'll be £xx) - The cost of a .co.uk at the registry is £2.50 per year. Companies selling below this have an ulterior motive!

2. Service restrictions - Can't get full DNS control - pay more for additional services

3. Front running/'sniffing' - Using your domain search data to buy domains before you do, or selling your domain search data. More references.

4. Account lockins - Locking your account for a period following changes, prevents transfer outs. More by Slashdot.

5. Domain ownership - Not the owner of your domain, some companies buy it on your behalf and then rent it to you.

6. Privacy - Selling your whois data/customer data

Gandi offers full DNS control, no sneaky pricing, no front running and no account lock ins. Our prices are fair, but profitable, so we have no incentive to constantly upsell things you don't need and bombard you with marketing messages. As one of our customers Miconian writes, ‘I used to see gandi as a discount registrar, but I now see them as offering a premium service: the implicit agreement to leave me the hell alone and let me register my domains in peace.’ We make sure you own your domain, this was one of the early reasons for Gandi's success. We do not sell your data and offer protection from whois spam and the ability to hide personal details.

We talk about domain ethics but do we follow through? We think so but what do you think?

Gandi UK Team

Have a read of this follow up article talking about other dodgy registrar practices.

DNS flaw : corrected on the first day

Stephan — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 01:21:00 +0200

On July 8, 2008, the US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team) announced that they had discovered a new way to quickly take advantage of weaknesses in the DNS protocol. This method targets non updated 'recursive' servers, allowing the 'attacker' to fake an answer as coming from an 'authoritative' server.

Gandi, as a registrar, only owns 'authoritative' servers and was not affected by this flaw.
However, we are also a webhost now, and our customers go through 'recursive' servers. These servers were updated by our technical team, just a few hours after the announcement.

All right, but what are recursive and authoritative names servers?

There are two types of name servers:

1. The recursive servers, when questioned, get the information from other servers.

2. The authoritative servers have the information requested by (among others) recursive servers.

Recursive servers are those usually provided by ISPs or webhosts for their customers.
To simplify : when someone enters the URL of a domain name in his web browser, if the domain is entirely managed by Gandi, a DNS request goes from his computer to his ISP's recursive server, which in turn, requests the information from Gandi's authoritative server, and get the address of this domain name.

Gandi's authoritative server answers politely to the recursive server, which temporarily stores the answer in a cache, and finally, the answer is transmitted to the browser. The temporary cache is used to speed up the answers to a ''recursive' server, and thus avoid too much repetition of the same question. This way, there are less exchanges between ''recursive" and authoritative servers, and the Internet's general behavior is improved.

And so?

This new method allows a bad person to trap a vulnerable recursive server into believing that an answer comes from an authoritative server. The recursive server, sure that the answer is correct, stores it in its cache. Does this sound abstract?
Just imagine that you have the ability to pretend to an ISP's customers that you are gandi.net, gmail.com or even amazon.com, and do this for serveral hours at a time... You get the picture.

What you should bear in mind (for our more technical readers)

First of all, the flaw of the DNS protocol is not new. It was identified quite a while ago and is inherent in its design. The technique allowing someone to use this flaw was first published on July 21st and showed how to simply bypass the existing barriers.
Once again a new barrier that has been put in place to prevent this. This new procedure has been recommended for several years and works by using a random source port in the request.
It is important to remember that this measure does not fix the flaw but means that any attack would take longer to succeed.

The DNS protocol does not guarantee the identity of individual machines, which makes preventing such attacks more difficult. The DNSSec protocol that might replace it, is designed to correct this flaw (among other things). However, and for several reasons, it has not yet been put into place.
In any case, the solution is to use secure connections, such as SSL (certificates, signatures and encryption...) when you wish to be sure of the identity of a site.
But even with all these tools and technologies, it is still important to pay attention to your web browsers SSL warning messages

Yet another "Nu" extension!

Sam — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 12:59:00 +0100

Yes, Gandi has a little "nu" born in its growing family of TLD's: .NU!
The new ".nu" extension is commonly used in Scandinavian countries (as 'nu' means 'now') for websites that cover new/trendy products. It is is also sometimes used for "Nordic Union".

The .NU extension is open to all, and can be registered for a minimum of 2 years. Its particularities and details may be seen here:
http://www.gandi.net/domaine/nu/info

And .nu the price can be found here:
http://www.gandi.net/domaine/prix/detail/nu/

The next available TLD should be .IT (Italia!) currently in testing phase.

Happy Holidays!

Ryan — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 11:32:00 +0100

In anticipation of all the highly-awaited new services (GandiBlog, transparent URL forwarding, API/XML, etc...) that will be released in the upcoming weeks, the entire team at Gandi joins me in wishing you happy ~~indigestion~~ Holidays!

Thank you for your trust, this is quite simply the thing that we are the most proud of.

Here is a little stocking stuffer (view from our balcony and a great environment in which to daydream during this time of year):

The "HATW", Part III

Stephan — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 14:25:00 +0100

Sorry for the title, I admit to a certain laziness doubled by a worry concerning the clarity of this blog… Meaning, it’s all about the story of the purchasing of Gandi. This week, I’m going to look at the choices to find capital...

Where were we? Ah, yes. Eirik and Joe were ready, we were working on the presentations to look for the money we were missing. And even if we have all created companies, none of us had experience in raising funds. Even the typology of this "market" escaped us. What’s the difference between all these abstruse (OOPS) and Anglo-Saxons terms (no cause and effect relationship between the two)?

Like everyone, I’ve heard talk about these "VCs" and other "business angels", that were covered so much by the media in the years 99-2000. But through lack of luck or will, I hadn’t met them on certain Tuesdays over the course of a few months in those years (the famous "First Tuesdays"). Maybe, also, because for them I was no one. Mind you, I hope it’s still the case for some of them when I reread some articles. Anyway, we weren’t interested in people who were only motivated by their short-term return on investment. We wanted people or companies giving us the most guarantees possible on the durability of the project as a whole...

Well, I’m telling the story this way, but at the time, we went to make a certain number of presentations. Just to learn. The selection of first meetings was easy, the number of these companies / people not put off by an Internet project was "very limited". Moreover, the nervousness in France was more tangible than elsewhere...

So, when we saw how some people met with us and analyzed our proposition, we even thought how we could go to a bank for a loan… I can just imagine the look on the face of the loan officer: hi, it’s concerning a 13 million euro loan!!! Should I leave now?

However, one thing always made us believe in it. Everyone who said "no" (too small, too big, too I don’t know what), and those who said "yes", but who we didn’t want (seeing their conditions), had a point in common: they all thought the project was coherent and had a great chance for success.

Especially, we had chosen this brand, this emblematic image of the French Web, supported by simple but great principles… We couldn’t give up. So, we continued.

We saw individuals, institutions commercial banks, companies, funds, etc… in France and in England. With the hope of getting more information, to grasp the different existing models, in short, to know how to reconcile our search for funds with our quest for independence over the long term.

And, like in every happy story, we had a little bit of luck.

Destiny smiled upon us, a friend of Joe’s wife, the founder of… "First Tuesdays", put us in touch via her company with the person who, after 12 months of negotiations, became our latest associate. One thing that we quickly understood: get advice, even if you have to pay for it, rather than run around in circles.

In the end, we started a project that we named "Management Buy In", which is in fact when executives from outside the company buy it. With their own means (no project without cost) and credit backed by a family foundation, with a history of stable and transparent investments.And over generations, in sectors clearly marked as "acceptable".

This "MBI" is the combination of an "LBO" (Leverage Buy Out) and an "MBO" (Management Buy Out). Clearly recognized as one of the new governance models, as opposed to quoted companies, for example, where one is naturally pushed to manage in function to the stock price, something we didn’t know existed before this.

There were no guarantees, only time would tell if our choice was the right one. I can only assure you of one thing: the negotiation with the shareholders of Gandi was "simple" compared to that with my associates. Simply because, at the most, I wanted to protect our chances to achieve our project, in the way that we had thought.

Sure, other solutions were possible, including models that mixed some of them: I’m certain that we could have arranged to set up the purchase in a thousand different ways. That’s not really important, in fact. The essential point is that we did it, that this project exists under the right conditions.

Oh yeah, one clarification: At the moment that I set up the dossier to purchase it, before knowing if it was going to work, I was unemployed. The few liquid assets (laid-off from Lycos) that I had, were spent on the project, at the moment of the arrival of our second child. Risks are necessary in every entrepreneurial project, just try to limit them as much as possible^^.

The "How" after the "Why", Part II.

Stephan — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 14:24:00 +0100

The follow-up to the return of the revenge concerning the purchase of Gandi, or "how to know if we’re ready for this type of adventure, then how to choose our associates"…

My god (small ‘g’, because I’m not sure if you’re actually reading this), everything seems so far away at the moment. 15 months have passed since the very beginning of this adventure and nevertheless it feels more like 15 years… this must be the magical effect of the “Internet“ dimension.

Normally, we are at the end of the year 2004. Thanks in advance for not being upset by any errors concerning dates or any imprecision in my story. I have two extenuating circumstances: I’m from Nice (IE, High speed connection), and what’s more, it's friday :).

I’m alone. In any case, after the impossibility of setting up the project with the two people in "the family", financially nice and morally healthy (or the opposite, I can’t tell anymore), it all seems terribly difficult: make the presentation (which must include the sacrosanct business plan, the description of the team!, the project, and especially clarify my financial needs), find the people to set it up with, etc…

I leave my office, I speak (a little) about it to the people of my closest trusty team, and right from the beginning they all found it was…. ambitious. But I spot that small smile on their faces, that I interpret to be a "you sly Devil, you" encouragement. After 5 years of both physical and mental stress, it was the right moment to take a good look at my professional situation, to see if I was ready for it or not (i.e., to work from 8 AM-11 PM every day, assuming the workload of the strategy, the product, the financing, the marketing, management, reporting, etc…) and especially to identify the things that I knew how to do, but where others associates would be valuable.

The decision was quickly made to find associates who naturally had to share my values, but also had to be complementary, so as to distribute the load among several people. My wife was expecting our second child, and in view of the shock of the first one, it was impossible to start again on the same basis if I wanted to have a family life. And you’re going to laugh, but that’s the most important thing for me in this tough world...

The choice was quick, as Eirik and Joe, together, were just what I was looking for: honest (we had worked together on a project with Lycos and Moonfruit for two years), hard working, intelligent, with each one having his special talent but with a capacity to understand the others’ "world".

In addition, they were also both English (Gandi had a lot of clients outside of France), founders and directors of a company developing an excellent product within the framework of a long-term project… and not to wreck it, we got on very well.

Plus, I had told them that we would set up a project for a company together and as the last time when I had had this sort of “Revelation," I ended up getting married, it looked like it was going to be good....

The discussion was short and they didn’t take long to say yes: the project – constructing an alternative independent group around the values of Gandi – thrilled them. We were now three to attack the next step, knowing that time was going by, that the news about Gandi being up for sale would quickly spread among the "milieu of those in-the-know."

Each of them participated in the presentation of the project, a group effort where we had to, right from the beginning, explain the uniqueness of Gandi (for those who didn’t know it), the real backbone of our project. From there ensues our next big issue: identify the way to find the money, what we lacked to complete our budget, while at the same time respecting all these issues…

[To Be Continued] …