Gandi Bar - Hosting

An increase in the CPU of our VPS shares, and now add RAM on demand

Ryan — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 11:35:00 +0200

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

Power of a share

As you probably already know, up to this point the CPU power of our VPS shares was a pretty linear thing: two shares provided exactly twice as much power as one, and this ratio went all the way up to 24 shares.

We placed a CPU limit on how much a single share could use, but the downside of this was that heavy applications such as Wordpress or Joomla required at least two shares to run well. We wanted to change this to make better use of resources and give you more power.

We have therefore decided to round up the burst CPU power provided with your shares to the nearest core: so beginning with one share, you have a full core for your server. At 5 shares, you go to two cores, etc. up to 24 shares (6 cores).

Since we can migrate your VPS from one physical machine to another on demand we can keep a fair balance between the CPU usage across the machine which roughly handles60 shares, or about 40 servers per physical machine.

The bandwidth available to your server is still increased by a rate of 5Mb/s per share as you increase the number of shares you have. Increasing the number of shares is therefore still necessary if your website generates a significant amount of traffic, however you can stick with a single share if you only need your server for a simple blog without much need for bandwidth. This is because the burst CPU power is much higher.

So as a result of these changes:

1 share is now much more powerful with the new structure (we have carried out benchmarks that show this, and I will let you try for yourself :)).
The net CPU power of 2 shares is the same as the net CPU power of 1 share. This does not mean that the 2-share server is not more powerful (due to RAM and bandwidth), but there is clearly a reduced difference of power between them.
Allocating more than 20 shares to a server is only necessary if you need the corresponding RAM and bandwidth.
2 servers of one share each is better than 1 server made with two shares, so if you can build a distributed system, your service will be much better.

However, because of these changes to the burst CPU we have now removed the option of choosing the number of cores per server for the moment.

What does this mean for the concept of a "share"?

A "share" was originally defined as the minimum bundle of resources that would allow you to run a service with acceptable performance. Multiple "shares" could be bought as your service requirements increased. We will continue to evole what a "share" represents, but also allow you to stray from the share path by customising the resources at your disposal.

We therefore are pleased to announce that as of today, you can add RAM to your pool of available resources within increasing the number of "shares" you are using. We are going to manage RAM like disk quota. Each share comes with 256MB of RAM, but you can add additional RAM if you wish. You are free to create, for example, a 2-share server with 256MB of RAM (instead of 512) and to use the remaining 256MB on another server.

If you had bought 2 shares simply for the RAM increase and didn't need the CPU boost, you could now drop back to 1 share, and then add an additional 256MB of RAM as an add-on.

Additional Cores? Additional bandwidth?

Yes, definitely. However the "when" is rather difficult to pin down at this time, though it will probably be in the final quarter of 2010, or sooner (we have hired many new team members recently).

Is it already available?

The additional RAM is, yes. It is currently available from your resource management page. To learn how to use additional RAM, visit our RAM wiki page.

For changes to the way we manage CPU, all new servers created are already on the new model, and we will be gradually transferring the older servers to this new model as the new physical machines arrive.

Your first monthly share 100% refundable! Money back whether you like it or not ;-)

Ryan — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:48:00 +0100

Note: I am republishing this entry, because of the number of customers that are writing to us to express their surprise at the fact that they are not being charged for the renewal of their first share. As a reminder, your first monthly share is refunded whether you decide to keep it or not. So if you don't keep your share, we'll refund the cost of the first month, but if you do keep it, we'll renew it for the second month for nothing.

To help you test our hosting service without any risk, your first hosting share is 100% refundable! Which means you'll get your money back on your first share whether you stay with our service or not!!

(No, there's no fine print that says that this is only available for the next two days, 4 hours and 24 seconds, and if you have an IP address that ends in 256 and only if you have Hungarian nationality on your mothers' side and Finnish on your fathers... it really is for everyone )

So regardless of whether you stay with us or not, you will be fully refunded for your first monthly hosting share when you test our hosting service.

Yes, yes, whether you are SATISFIED OR NOT!

This is not quite a classic 'satisfied or your money back' guarantee because as we are Gandi, we like to do what is right for all of our customers. So we will also add a satisfied AND money back guarantee! (So satisfied AND/OR money back guarantee. I'm sure there's a clever way to right that in code...)

This means that if/when you keep your shares and renew them, the first share will cost you €0.00 incl. VAT Or if you decide to leave us and cancel your share before the first renewal date we will recredit your account with the cost of the share.

Ah! This offer is of course only valid once per customer (same name, same address) and for monthly shares only

Hosting: Launch of multiple IP addresses for your servers

Ryan — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:08:00 +0100

Hello,

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

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

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

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

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

You can find documentation on this in our wiki here.

Your server on IPv6?

Leland Vandervort — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:43:00 +0100

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

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

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

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

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

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

Backup, increase in disk size and lower rates!

Ryan — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:39:00 +0200

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

For starters, we have built a dedicated backup infrastructure that runs separately from our servers and other data disks. This has led to a new type of data disk: the backup disk. Ok, so we probably could have found a more flashy name for it, but at least it's clear

The amount of disk space included in every share has risen from 5GB to 8GB
This is the first bit of good news: to help you create your backup disk, we have increased the disk quota that is included in each server share from 5GB to 8GB! This does not change much for customers that only have one share (as we give you an extra 3GB for the operating system), but beginning with the second share, you now have an additional 3GB of disk to take advantage of. This means that for a customer with 16 shares on his or her server, the hosting account will be credited with (15x3) 45GB of additional disk quota! Of course you still have the ability to purchase additional disk quota, though now I am getting ahead of myself with the second bit of good news

Lower rates for additional disk space
To make things simple and to avoid over-complicating your quota management with yet another quota to monitor, the quota used for backup disks is the same quota as what is used for other disks.

Therefore, we have decided to lower the price of disk quota, in order to establish a nice balance. The new rates are therefore €0.18/$0.25/£0.16 excl. VAT/month/ under A rates, down from €0.20/$0.28/£0.18 excluding VAT/GB per month: this is a 10% reduction in price. You also have the option of purchasing annual disk quota at an even lower price: €0.15/$0.21/£0.14 excl. VAT/GB/month versus €0.20 excluding VAT/GB per month: this is a 25% reduction!!

How to create a backup disk
Simply log into your disk creation interface and choose the type, "backup". Once the disk has been created, go to your server's information page and specifically the "backup" section, in order to attach it to your server.

How to activate and configure your Gandi backup robot?
We'll start by addressing Gandi AI customers.

Once your backup server has been created and attached to your server, go to the "backup" section at the bottom of your server management page, and then click on "Create a backup disk" to access the page where you can enter the name of the backup, the path to the directories where you want to store your backups, and indicate a directory on your backup disk (ex. /mybackup01). All that remains is to submit this page to start the process.

For users of our expert servers, following the creation and attaching of your disk, you must the install the 'gsync' package, which is available in the Gandi 'repositories' (apt-get install gsync with Debian/Ubuntu for example). Once this has been installed, you can either take care of the configuration yourself, or use our little configuration tool, which you can find on the bottom of you server management page, in the backup section.

How does our backup robot work?
'GSync' is a light agent that constantly monitors changed to the directories that you want to archive. You will therefore have a continually updated backup on an external disk. Then, depending on your configuration, it will keep a copy of past versions. By default, it keeps a recent copy in the current directory, and a number of versions that are three hours old, one day old, and one month old.

Using our robot is not mandatory: you can choose to use another one if you want. The robot's code is published under GPL license, and so you can also decide to improve it and submit your changes to our technical team.

But enough talk! I will let you play with your new toy!

Please feel free to get back to us with your questions and comments, which I am sure will be quick to come :D

Gandi AI 1.2 - update available

Arti — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:50:00 +0200

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

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

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

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

Launch of the server monitoring and response service!

Ryan — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:33:00 +0200

This afternoon, we are proud to announce the release of our new server monitoring service! As always, we have created a service that goes one step beyond simple expectations. Not only are you now able to have a complete monitoring of your server's resources, but you can even program actions to be taken automatically if, for example, there is an unanticipated spike in your server's traffic for example. This can scale your servers power and resources automatically and without your server having to restart, something unique to Gandi VPS Hosting.

This service will let you to monitor all of the statistics of your server that we already make available to you, and to automatically perform a certain action if you wish.

We have (for now) implemented 3 types of alerts that you can set up:

Exceeding a threshold
In this case, your alert will be activated and your action list will be executed when the parameter that you are monitoring exceeds a certain value (x) over a certain amount of time (t1). The alert will stop once it falls below the limit for another predefined time period (t2).

Dropping under a threshold
In this case, your alert will be activated and your action list will be executed when what you are monitoring falls under a certain value over a given amount of time. The alert will stop once it returns above the limit for another predefined time period.

Inactivity of one of your parameters
Finally, our alert will be activated and your action list will be executed when the parameter that you are monitoring seem to no longer be active. The alert will stop once the probe detects that there is a return to activity over a chosen time period.

When an alert has been given, you have the possibility of executing an action list such as:

- Emailing you a warning. You can choose the email address that you want to receive this alert, and when you want to be warned.

- Send you an alert by instant message. This way, you can be alerted by ICQ, AIM or even IRC (MSN will soon be available as well)

- automatically add a Flex Share to your server. This way, you can optimize the quality of your service by having your server's power increase automatically with the load. Imagine, for example, that you are enjoying a peaceful vacation, sunbathing on a nice beach somewhere and...(ok, I need a vacation haha...).

Simply imagine that you are unavailable, and do not have an internet connection right at hand, when a nice journalist publishes an article about your new website. Suddenly, the 2 shares that you estimated for your service are no longer enough to handle the load: our new system will now act on your behalf, and so you can now have the time to calmly analyze the situation in detail. Adding shares to your server and increasing its power will happen automatically and without having to restart your server.

The interface is currently available for everyone to use. It may be found on your server's management page, right under the performance monitor graph. We will be adding additional actions to this list (such as the possibility of rebooting or stopping the server) in the near future.

1,000 additional free servers

Ryan — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:05:00 +0200

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

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

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

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

Explanation of the outage that lasted 4 hours

Ryan — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:08:00 +0200

Dear Customers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your server for free this summer!

Ryan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:23:00 +0200

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

So in this summer spirit, here are some things that we have come up with to please you:

Have you not yet tried our cloud hosting service? If not to help you make your change, we are going to give you a free server this summer! Yes, from now until August 31st (and by request from this form) you can have a totally free server (equal to one free share). And like any Gandi hosting share, you can expand the power/performance instantly with no downtime by adding additional shares at your convenience
Are you already a Gandi Hosting customer? If you feel like it is terribly unfair that you cannot benefit from this promo and are already getting ready to write a nasty comment in reply to this article: there is no need, since the price of fixed annual shares has been lowered from €10 excl. VAT per month to €8.34 excl VAT per month, in other words, €100 euros for a year, instead of €120. This is the equivalent of 2 free months! This promotion will also only last until August 31st.

These rates last until August 31st

What to do if your server stops responding?

Ryan — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:53:00 +0200

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

In the event of a problem on the machine, or if we suspect that a problem might occur (abnormal temperature, corrupted memory, etc.), your “server” will automatically be migrated to another machine. However, if you have an internal problem on your "server" that is not to due to the physical machine, and if it no longer responds, then you will need to take action.
The first action to take is to be sure that your server’s status is shown as “Running” on your Gandi interface. This is because the status may also be “Stopped” or “Paused” if, for example, it has not been renewed. So given that it is "Running" and non-responding, here's what to do.

There are three different cases:

1. You can still connect to your server via SSH. In this case, the following commands will help you analyze the situation:

"uptime" will give you the current load of the machine,
"free", will show you the amount of memory used by your applications in the “used” column,
"top" (we recommend that you install “htop") will show you the ranking of applications in realtime ordered by their use of resources (memory, CPU),
"dmesg" shows you messages from your linux server’s kernel,
Consulting logs such as /var/log/messages or /var/log/daemons with the command, “tail”, for example (tail /var/log/daemons) will also provide you with precious information.
"df –h" shows you the amount of disk space available on your disks.

The most frequent causes of error are:

No space left on your system disk: this situation is often caused by a lack of appropriate log management on the server, or by a database which fills up too quickly. The solution is to clean up wasted space, or enlarge the disk (see the guide on this).
Not enough RAM on the server, or too much memory used: the simple solution is to add more RAM by adding additional shares. If you have an expert server, you can also try to modify the behavior of the Linux’s available memory by using the command 'sysctl -w vm.overcommit_memory = 2'. Warning: so that the modification can be maintained following a reboot, you must also add "vm.overcommit_memory = 2" to the "/etc/sysctl.conf" and "/etc/gandi/sysctl.conf" files.
Too may processes are running simultaneously on your machine: you will need to lower the values in the configuration files of your applications (the number of simultaneous connections on Apache, for example) or increasing the power of your server by adding shares.

2. You can no longer connect to your server under SSH, and it does not respond to ping or it has a slow response time.

The virtual console which you may activate from your account (guide available), gives you direct access to your machine as if a monitor and a keyboard (still virtual) were directly attached to the server.

In this case, you can stop all the applications that are causing problems, and once again get access to the server.

The 'sysreq' shortcuts are available from the console of your server. The commands can be given by pressing Ctrl and “o” (as Oscar) in order to enter the sysreq mode, and then you can enter the command. By doing this, you can stop all the processes by: Ctrl+o +i (to kill). Ctrl+o +h gives you quick help to all of the available sysreq commands.

3. Your server may be “unreachable” but may nonetheless be working normally, and without any technical problem.

This may happen if your server is the victim of a DDoS attack for example. Your server will therefore be isolated from the rest of the network in order to protect our infrastructure and the quality of service for other customers.

You may verify whether or not your server is in this state by performing a “traceroute” command on the IP address of your server. If it stops at its arrival at Gandi, on one of our routers for example, it is likely that your server has been isolated from the network. You may then connect to your server via the console, though you will need to contact the support team to correct the problem (they will usually contact you first). This sort of isolation happens only very rarely.

After that, if you are still blocked, then this means that you are in the 4th case: your very own case ;-). Please send an email to our support team indicating that your server has been blocked, and you will get an answer as soon as possible.

How to turn your website into a "Web Infrastructure"

Ryan — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:38:00 +0200

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

For simplicity's sake, let's take a real example. As some of you already know, we support the Millenium association in their promotion of online video games.

The increasing success of the website, millenium.org, made us re-design the architecture of the website so that it could handle the numerous videos shown on the website to its 17,000 unique visitors per day far more easily and efficiently.

Following a major update of one of the games served by Millenium (WOW patch 3.1), we increased the server power to 16 shares in anticipation of an increase in load. Our expectations were quickly exceeded with over 50,000 unique visitors the first day, and just as many over the following days.

The website received between 500 and 1,000 simultaneous visitors and a large number of videos, which is not viable for a single LAMP server. We immediately changed the infrastructure, by moving from a unique-server model (which is often the starting choice) to an infrastructure-based model. We went from a vertical system (more power) to a horizontal system (more servers):

As you can see in the diagram, we moved the database to a separate server and duplicated the web server to two machines. The load was therefore split by the domain's DNS (using a simple DNS round robin technique). We could also move to dedicating a 1-share server to load distribution, though such a solution would take a bit longer to implement. In our case it took 2 minutes to add the shares to the account, 6 minutes to create the 2 servers, 10 minutes to transfer the data, and 2 hours to configure the services.

Today, the platform easily handles 1 million unique visitors per month, for over 3 million pages viewed - a good thing! Best of all the platform is now capable of evolving. If the database suffers, all we need to do is to add more shares to the database server. If the web front starts to become saturated, we just need to add another.

Because our cloud infrastructure allows you to create as many servers as you want from the hosting resources in your account, you can always add more, and always change your web architecture without replacing physical servers. The VPS hosting system is flexible and allows you to increase from a 1-share server (1/64 of a machine + 1/64 as reserve, 256MB of Ram) to a 16-share server (1/4 of a machine + 1/4 as a reserve, 4GB de Ram) at any time and as often as you want.

If you find yourself confronted by this type of problem, please feel free to contact us, as we would be more than happy to help you.

Gandi Hosting Team