Gandi Bar

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.

DoS attack on the Gandi network tonite

Ryan — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:40:00 +0100

As some of you may have noticed this evening, we have been the victim of a large-scale Denial of Service Attack.

Our service was heavily affected from about 17:30 to 17:45 GMT, the time necessary for us to coordinate with our transit providers to absorb the resulting traffic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

You would have seen problems with network connections during this period, which is currently over.

We are paying close attention to the situation tonite to act if there are any subsequent attacks.

The Gandi Team

What's up week 9

Ryan — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:26:00 +0100

We are now in the 8th week of Beta testing for Gandi hosting. We are confidently heading into the 3rd month now, with far fewer bugs throughout all the various services and a level of stability in the platform that is approaching our goal of achieving a flawless level of quality in our service.

For all that, we are not forgetting our work on domain names, and as the majority of you have seen recently, GandiBlogs have not been sitting still either. Here is what we have done this week:

Launching of .IT at Gandi
the .info for 1€ excl. VAT (see the related article)
The blog export works again \o/
Hosting: possibility of cancelling an operation in progress when it is taking an unusually long amount of time (and we are working on the rapidity of all operations)
Many more tools that the support team can use to process hosting issues
Gandi supports the FIDH (International Federation of Human Rights).

By supplying more monitoring tools to the support team, we are increasing their reactivity, and better yet, we are dedicating a part of our team to proactive problem resolution: solving problems before you are detecting them, that is the level of quality that we are going after.

Of course, this also allows us to have a more efficient management of minor but annoying bugs. The next versions should include notable improvements in Gandi AI, as well as new packages.

Finally, Gandi Webmail is in the process of getting a code update, the results of which will be visible in a few weeks.

Presents for a bit of colour

Arti — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:03:00 +0100

As we announced yesterday, GandiBlog now has a new theme called "Blowup" which allows you to customise many presentation aspects.

Furthermore, this theme proposes a module which allows you to copy the code of a defined style. This allows users to share their customised styles with other users. The "Blowup" theme also offers some pre-defined styles, but there are only few for the time being.

We're going to add more in days to come and thought you could help out as well. To do so, nothing simpler: configure your Blowup theme until you're happy with the result. Once you've done so, click the "+" by "Import / export" and copy the code in the text field which comes up. Then, you can just paste it right here as a comment (and give it a name if you feel inspired).

If you lack inspiration, visit Kuler http://kuler.adobe.com/.

The authors of the styles we will choose to add to the list of pre-defined styles will be given a Gandi t-shirt or a one-year domain renewal, as a token of our gratitude.

What is more, those who feel really inspired can design header images. Only one condition: These must be 800 pixels in width. PNG transparency is allowed (and encouraged). Leave the image's URL as a comment.

Note: Gandi personnel are allowed to participate, but won't get any presents...

Happy colouring to all

GandiBlog Update: The Return

Ryan — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 08:56:00 +0100

You may have noticed your GandiBlog running faster this afternoon.

No, we haven't added 50 new machines, we've just updated GandiBlog. In fact, we've doubly updated it.

Your blogs definitely respond faster. We've set up a very efficient cache system on your blogs' public section, therefore avoiding avid RSS-feed-upaters penalizing everyone else. If you happen to witness any cache-related problem (pages that no longer updates, for instance), please let us know.

That's for the performance side of things.

And because good news always comes in twos, the curious among you will have noticed a new theme in the last of GandiBlog's available themes: "Blowup". Note that the screenshot in the list of themes is only one possibility.

Activate the theme and then click its configuration link. Would you like to change the background color? the title font? change the banner's position? All of those are possible with this theme.

You'll even be able to place an image in JPG or PNG format (800 pixels wide, imperatively) so as to completely personalize the top banner of your blog.

And if you lack inspiration, you'll be able to chose from a list pre-defined styles and ready-made images. There are only few for the time time being, but we're going to add some more and are also relying on your help. That will be the topic of the next post.

Recently, a reader wrote: "...you need to be a real expert in CSS and the like... Isn't there something between the 2? It would be really great to be able to choose a basic theme and simply change the photo...". I think that the Blowup theme will satisfy this need.

More news coming soon...

What's up - Week 7

Ryan — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:35:00 +0100

Our fingers have been going clickity-clickity-click during this end of the Beta phase - so even if you have not seen many changes, things are advancing quite nicely!

Resellers

A new contact management interface is available through the "Contacts" tab that you will now see when you log into your reseller handle. Feedback is welcome! The interface will be improved even further with more options for the contacts, and the possibility of merging contacts that are doubles.
The Gandi Mail API XML will be available next week in the the OT and E test environment. We are currently writing the documentation.

Gandi Domain Names

Tests and modifications of the interfaces for .IT domains is almost over, the ccTLD will be available next week.

Gandi Mail

A section of the Gandi Mail backend has been updated in order to correct bugs that were encountered with the management of quota.

Gandi Hosting

The kernel of Gandi Hosting servers was modified Monday morning to correct fot the Linux security flaw that was uncovered this weekend. (Note: you need to reboot your server to implement the correction).
The Gandi AI agent was updated on your machines in order to disassociate the the disks from the agent itself and to allow for the upcoming addition of new functions.
The backend is also being improved in order to correct bugs that were noticed by our beta testers and to speed up operations on your servers
The wishlist for Gandi AI packages is an endless source of pleasure for our developers. We have an impressive list of packages to choose from and we would like to go faster, but we also have much stabilization to do, so that the Gandi machine is running as smoothly as possible. The BSD based systems are not progressing very rapidly, as certain project managers of those projects do not believe in virtualization. We are beginning to see the implementation of OpenSolaris however...we'll give you an update on this again soon.
Otherwise, to come back to the wishlist, I have a question to ask of of those of you that voted for SVN/CVS...Far from belittling these version tracking systems, we use SVN here at Gandi as a development tool, but I don't quite understand the large number of votes for this as a Gandi Auto-Install package...can you please explain?

Gandi Blog

We'll tell you here, before it comes out in the international press, but it is not excluded that we will consider the hypothetical possibility of significantly updating the Gandi Blog service in the beginning of next week, but hey...who knows!

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.

The .ASIA

Ryan — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:57:00 +0100

You may be wondering why GANDI has not been talking about .ASIA...?

For reasons that are well known to those of you who purchased a .eu domain, Gandi does not wish to go through another "period of deception".

The rather unique approach of the .ASIA registry is to allow you to purchase a domain name without any guarantee that you will be able to obtain it - an approach that does not correspond to Gandi's values.

The landrush is from February 1st to the 20th, and is an auction-based system; if more than one person applys for the same domain name, then it shall go to the highest bidder; There is no guarantee that you will have the domain name, unlike what is normally the case, where you can obtain and use a domain name if it is available. During the Landrush 1 period (or, LR1), only one other person needs to request the same domain name so that it enters into an auction with a starting price at $0.

We will let you read between the lines and imagine what such an environment could lead to. This is all the more noteworthy as...Pool.com, .ASIA's partner, was very present during the launching of .EU.

The auction-based system that .ASIA is using goes against what we stand for. The different points below will help explain our opinion on why this is the case:

There is no guarantee that our client will be able to acquire his/her domain name,

An auction-based system opens the door to a rapid increase in price,

An obligatory payment of a domain name, though without the guarantee that it will not enter into a contest for the highest bidder,

Auction prices with a starting price of $0: if several persons would like to purchase the same domain name: an incentive for cybersquatting, against which Gandi does not want its customers to be confronted,

An auction that is only held in English,

Pool.com, the unique partner of .ASIA already mentioned in the press for its massive purchases during Landrush 2 of .EU domains in 2006 troubles us,

Gandi does not want to advertise for speculators,

Quite simply, Gandi does not want to engage in a process that has a high risk of deceiving its customers.

On the otherhand, Gandi will be present during the LandRush 2 in March 2008 and is currently working on the possibility of offering .ASIA domain names for EVERYONE, whether or not you have a local presence. We are working on the final details so that this will be possible in a way that is just, durable, and...without an auction!

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.

Network Solutions Caught Red-Handed

Ryan — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 10:23:00 +0100

Have you ever gone to register a domain name, only to discover that that between the time you made your whois search (perhaps you looked it up during your lunch break at work), and the time that you purchased it (say, when you came home in the evening), that the domain name was suddenly no longer available? That the domain name you once thought could be yours for 12 euros at Gandi was now being sold on a restricted basis for a higher price and at a different registrar?
What happened?

"Front running" is a term to describe what occurs when an unscrupulous system logs the domain name searches that you type into a whois search engine, and if the domain name is available, the system automatically registers the domain name for itself. For what purpose? For selling the domain name at a higher price, and for only their customers...

It has just been publicly acknowledged that Network Solutions engages in just this practice.

Incredible. If you go to Network Solutions' website and enter any domain name in their whois search engine, it will be automatically registered with Network Solutions as the owner and contacts. Then, if you try to register the domain name at a later time (within 5 days), you will only be able to register it at Network Solutions, and at a higher price than normal!

The excuse given by Network Solutions is that - if you can believe it - is that they are doing this to protect their customers. As far as I know, however, one does not become a customer by simply doing a whois search, and I hardly see how the practice of front running protects one from front runners...

Though there are now many bloggers and reporters discussing this, you can read about it in more detail here, and see an example of this being done before your eyes.

Needless to say, Gandi does not engage in this practice. Anyone is free to search domains using our whois search engine with the knowledge that we will never go behind your back to steal your domain and try and sell it at a higher price to you, or the best bidder. Want proof? Use our whois search engine to test random domains - you will see that they will remain free

We will be happy to answer any of your questions regarding this, and welcome any discussion regarding domain name registration or the whois database. Has something like this happened to you before? Please share your story!