Gandi Bar

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

IPv6 for Gandi (coming soon!)

Leland Vandervort — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:37:00 +0200

As a long-time registrar, we are aware of the importance of keeping up with the internet, as well as trying to be at the forefront of changing technologies as we have done for the past four years. Now it's time to do the same with IPv6!

As a result of this and requests from our customers coupled with the ominous depletion of IPv4 address space, I am pleased to announce that we will be offering IPv6 connectivity for our customers. Given that IPv6 is the future of the Internet, it is perfectly logical that it is something of particular interest to us.

This is, of course, not an overnight affair, and will take some time to be able to fully offer the service for all customers, and at the moment we expect to pass through several stages of testing before general deployment. In any case, we hope to have IPv6 fully available for our customers before the end of the year.

What is the current deployment status?

We have already deployed IPv6 across the core of our network, and a few hosting servers that our technical teams are using for alpha testing. In general, so far, the tests are working quite well, but there is still a lot of work to do.

The next stage, will be a beta testing stage involving a small number of our hosting customers. We will nevertheless want to keep the number limited, and we will expect those customers participating in the beta test to assist us by providing feedback on the service in terms of performance, security, connectivity, and also any suggestions that you may have. We expect this beta phase to be implemented before the end of September 2009.

Finally, we hope to have full general deployment and availability of IPv6 for all our hosting customers, as well as DNS services by the end of the year. Other Gandi services (blogs, mail, and our own web presence) are likely to follow suit in early 2010.

I would like to participate in the beta test! How do I sign up?

When we are ready to propose the beta test, we will open a link on our website to allow those hosting customers interested in participating in the beta test to apply. Numbers will be limited though, as this is only a beta test stage, and we will be working closely with the customers participating in this trial throughout the testing phase so as to provide the best possible service to all of our customers. Therefore, we obviously cannot accommodate everyone at this stage! We will provide further updates through our blog and our website as we progress.

What about glue records for IPv6?

Our DNS system already supports IPv6 AAAA glue records for DNS servers, and you can create these via the management interface for your domain just as you would for an IPv4 glue record. The only limitation at this time is that it currently must be a unique glue record. In other words, you cannot create a glue record for a DNS server whose name already exists and has an IPv4 glue record associated with it. This also assumes that the IPv6 DNS server is external to Gandi, and that the DNS zone is managed on your own server and not through our system (in other words, the domain is registered with us, but using your own DNS servers). This limitation will be removed in due course, however.

What does this mean for those who don't use IPv6?

There will be no change for existing users at all. The deployment of IPv6 capability is supplemental and transparent to the existing services, so you will not be impacted at all. You will, of course, have the ability to include IPv6 capability at any time you wish after the general deployment later in the year.

What exactly is IPv6 and why is it important?

IPv6, or "Internet Protocol, version 6" is the next-generation internet protocol to replace the current IP version 4. Most of the internet today uses IPv4 which was created over twenty years ago. Unfortunately, with the growth of the internet, the 32-bit addressing handled by IPv4 has inherent limitations to the number of unique IP addresses available, and there is now a shortage of availabiity meaning that it is becoming more and more difficult to obtain new allocations to meet the needs of further expansion.

IPv6, with it's 128-bit addressing, resolves this problem while at the same time adding significant improvements to network infrastructures in terms of routing and network autoconfiguration. It is expected that IPv6 will ultimately replace IPv4 entirely, with a period of coexistance during the transition period which will last several years.

Out of curiosity, what does an IPv6 address look like?

It is a 128-bit hexadecimal address with octet-pairs separated by a colon (":") and often includes a prefix-length identifier to represent the equivalent of a netmask. An example of such an address is: 2001:4b98:1:3e:17:3ca:8:44/120. There can be short-cuts in the address if there are octet-pairs which are all zero. Example: 2001:4b98:1::fa:121/48.

It's an acquired taste, but believe me, it's actually quite logical once you get used to it!

Expert SEOs give their opinion on Liberalisation

Joe — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:37:00 +0100

Looks like our ICANN report has generated quite a bit of buzz. We've been covered in hundreds of online publications in 10+ different languages all over the world (summary will follow towards the end of the week).

But it seems we've hit a rich vein of SEO implications and generated a bit of buzz in that community. I've just come across this blog summarising the view of many of the SEO big boys. http://www.cornwallseo.com/search/2009/06/16/what-is-internet-liberalisation-and-why-should-you-care/

Interesting stuff and some good issues raised.

Jeff Behrendt says "The only clear winner of the proposed new TLDs is ICANN - at $185K per application, that’s a gravy train they are going to want to ride for many years."

That may be a little unfair. The fee is partly in place to make sure that ICANN can provide a good oversight to new extensions being created and protect trademark holders and general internet users from people setting up dodgy extensions or without the technical competency to run them. They've said this may come down (or up) as they get into the process. The fee should be high to ensure a higher quality of registry. This could be the beginning of the internet name space clear up, with higher standards leading to fewer squatted, speculative or advertising domains.

Michael Gray says - "In most cases opening the web up with more TLD’s is just going to create confusion for consumers". A point also made by Patrick Altoft about consumer confusion.

Well that seems to be what our consumers have said in our survey, so they agree. Though this liberalisation does open up the opportunity for specific TLDs and therefore potentially more simplicity and order. Michael's example of .movie is precisely along these lines, why have spiderman3themoive.com when you can have spiderman3.movie. The film industry could create this extension and protect its use solely for films. I think consumers could get used to that, and it will make more logical sense. More literal meaning to the name space. Roll on the sematic web. Tim Berners-Lee would be so proud

Hugo Guzman talks about the importance to big business - "The liberalization of domain extensions is already grabbing the attention of Fortune 500 companies".

This was supported by our research too. Still 2/3 were unaware this was happening, but those that did know were both excited and afraid of it, depending on which department you spoke to (e.g. excited = marketing, afraid = legal). Owning .brand could allow you to more effectively manage your brand as you create the association with customers that only sites on .brand are really yours. Though Steve Russell is right, this will cost a lot more than the $185k setup fee.

Anyway, food for thought, and thanks guys for your views.

Liberalisation of the Internet - Special Report

Wendy — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:01:00 +0100

In 2010, the geography of the Internet is set to expand significantly, as ICANN will liberalise the market for domain name extensions. Gandi have commissioned a report from The FutureLab to see how consumers and businesses view this change.
More about the liberalisation process

Is this a squatting opportunity or a branding opportunity?

2/3 of businesses don't realise domain extensions are being liberalised next year. But those businesses that do know about this (like Deloitte) are excited about the opportunities in the areas of global branding. However corporates are also concerned that brand protection mechanisms need to be in place at the new registries, a view that has been raised by Microsoft.
More about the impact on businesses. Inc video interview with COO Gandi.net

Will the net become full of pointless domains?

Many consumers are confused about what liberalisation means and are concerned by the rise of squatting, phishing and advertising clogging up the domain space. However they do feel a real connection with localised domain names, e.g. .london, .paris. nyc, etc., and communities they are interested in, e.g. .music, .movie, .sport. There is also a growing Generation Y group interested in self publishing and being associated with certain brand names like .facebook, .myspace, .moonfruit.
More about the impact on consumers. Inc video interview with Marketing Director Gandi.net

Will this mean the end of 'Dot Com'?

Will 'Dot Com' decline with the advent of new geographical, brand and interest group based extensions. Or will this give Dot Com a chance to clean up its act and reclaim its prime real estate from pay per click ads, squatters and unresolved web addresses.
More about the evolving landscape

The evolving landscape of the internet following liberalisation

Why did Gandi commission this independent report

At Gandi we feel strongly about the future of the internet. We commissioned this report because we want to keep the domain space free for consumer and commercial use. We think this is an important enough issue that people need to understand the impact on them as consumers and businesses. How do you want these new domain territories to be governed? and are there lessons to be learned from how we've used our existing domain space?
More about the report

Download the report in full

To comment on this come to our special report pages

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.

Spring makeover: Gandi is changing its colors! (or colours!)

Ryan — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:15:00 +0200

It is true that the summer vacation - lounging about, and getting a nice tan - is on its way, though we have chosen to do the opposite! By staying in doors and slapping on the sun cream we will be making our website lighter and brighter!

3 years after the big makeover (Gandi V1 to Gandi V2), we felt that it was time to brighten up our website. So that's what we did!

This version is not yet Gandi V3, it is more of a transitional stage, which has incorporated only subtle changes here and there - lightening up the graphics and making everything easier to read. Let’s call it Gandi V2.5!

As always, we welcome your comments, criticisms, reactions, large random shipments of candy…

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.

Gandi SiteMaker competition - Spring 2009

Ryan — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:43:00 +0200

Spring is here! Spirits are lifted and it is time to enjoy fun in the sun, and sharing colorful postcards all over the web! This is why we have launched our second Gandi SiteMaker competition with the theme: Vacation get-aways!

Is there a special place where you dream of spending your vacation more than anywhere else in the world? Do you want to share it with everyone so that they too can have a wonderful time?

Create a website about this dream location using Gandi SiteMaker and you might win a E.P.C Inspiron Mini9 offered by our partner, Dell, as well as a free year's subscription to Gandi SiteMaker Pro.

To participate, you simply need to have an available Free Gandi SiteMaker plan. We will only accept sites made using the free version of Gandi SiteMaker, so that everyone has the same chances of winning. If you would like a quick example of one, here is one that I made in under 2 hours (I am slow), only using elements available in the Free pack, as well as some personal photos.

Your websites will be judged on the following criteria:

General ergonomics, the graphic cohesion of the site, originality, clarity of information, final touches, and finally, the warmth that it gives off! We want you to give us the desire to go there and to dream of a vacation at that spot.

As we enjoy visiting your websites at Gandi, our entire staff will be voting on the websites. For once, it will be us that judge your work...

Ah, there is one more thing! The goal of this type of competition is to make the internet more colorful, and so let your imagination run free! We are not limiting the number of websites allowed and you can even make your website on one page if you want. And as always, we are keeping the competition fun and laid-back. There are no rules, no lawyers, etc. We are just doing this out of pleasure and as among friends; Fewer rules means more fun

The competition has already begun, and it will end on June 30tht. Please send your website address to us at whoisdabest@gandi.net.

As for us, we will be putting on our sunglasses!

The current competitors are:

http://www.marolles-rando.fr/
http://www.thelostislands.com/
http://www.scouteo.fr/
http://egypte.gandi-site.net/
http://palermo.gandi-site.net/

How the domain name industry works - polluting the name space

Joe — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:22:00 +0100

Would you trust a 'for profit' company to represent your best interests? Perhaps. But when your interests diverge, will they represent you or themselves?

Following the overwhelming success of our first article on the domain name industry (1 comment ;-), we naturally thought you were begging for more! I know, I know registrars and registries can be a bit dull, but it is important. Believe me when something goes wrong with your domain name, understanding this can be quite important. So if we look at how and where issues can be dealt with, and who has influence in the industry it sheds a bit more light on the subject.

So now we know who's who in the tree (ICANN, Registries, Registrars, Resellers and You) we can see how the influence the landscape and who has control of what. In a nutshell:

So you as a customer will rely on your Registrar (or Reseller) to represent your needs and solve your problems for you, though they may have to do this at the Registry or ICANN level.

The crazy thing about this is that the Registrars (or Resellers) which are purely commercial entities have voting rights at the registries and ICANN to influence overall policy in the domain space. In some registries (e.g. Nominet for UK), they have voting rights based on the number of domains they manage. So the bigger the commercial entity, the more influence on policy. Hmm. Would you trust a for profit company to represent your best interests? Perhaps. But when your interests diverge, will they represent you or themselves?

Imagine this problem - the domain name space is being filled with squatters, domain speculators, parked/advertised domain names, etc. Now as 'you' the consumer of domain names or visitor to sites online, this is probably not a good thing. You can't get the addresses you want because they are taken, and when you do browse the net you often come across pointless, cluttered sites that offer nothing but invitations to buy them and ad links to other services.

So what would 'you' like. Probably to get rid of all this junk domain space to free it up for use by people who want to publish actual sites or services online, not just profit from the namespace.

But what about the Registries, Resellers, Regsitrars and even ICANN? Well unfortunately they get paid for every domain name sold. If you were to cut all these domains out each of these bodies would see a substantial drop in revenue. For ICANN or the Registries, this might result is less resources to support or manage the name space. For Registrars and Resellers (and some private sector Registries), this would lead to lower sales and profits and 'shareholder value'.

So if you were running a company would you push for something that was better for your customers, but resulted in a 25-50% fall in sales? Hmm. Perhaps not.

The fact that some Registrars like us (but not us, we don't do this!) are actually taking available domains out of circulation, so customers can't get them, and then advertising on them for profit is extraordinary. We're crapping in our own garden!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running http://domainnamewire.com/tag/domain-warehousing/

At Gandi we do believe that our industry needs to clean itself up and not accept this 'pollution' of our own domain name space. Gandi has always stood against these activities and will not engage in them. But as an industry we have to grow up and accept lower sales volume for the sake of maintaining a useable and available name space that is in the interest of all internet users, and not just the commercial companies that have privileged access to domain buying and domain information.

If we just go all out for profit, much like the current man made global pollution problem, we'll just trash our own domain name space.

So when you buy a domain name, you are in effect taking a vote for the company that you want to represent your interests in the definition of global domain policy. Think about it.

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 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 virtual 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

How the domain name industry works - part 1

Joe — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:40:00 +0100

Registry, Registrar, Registrant, (Registratum, Registrata, Registrunt). Ok, so the last 3 are made up words, and the domain name industry wasn't really founded in ancient Rome nor part of your everyday Latin dialect, but what do the first three words actually mean and how does the domain name industry work? We've been working in the industry for years, so we have a pretty good idea. But we can also understand why all this really can just sound like ancient Greek to many people and not mean a thing. So in the spirit of lifting the lid and keeping things honest (as Gandi likes to do), we thought we'd give you a quick overview of what it all means.

Who's who in the domain name world?
Which one are you? Well you're the registrant, the purchaser of domain names and the last link in the chain that runs from ICANN at the top to you at the bottom. But there are several layers it passes through to get to you. Let's take a look.

ICANN - Top Dog

Let's start with the big dog itself ICANN. ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a body in charge of managing the domain name space. In its own words "ICANN was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers." It loosely the gTLD registries (see below), and sets policy around new domain extensions. Generally its a good guy, and the last word on domain disputes, though it is sometimes lofty, intellectual and bureaucratic (not that those are all bad things, an organisation like that needs to be careful).

Registries - They're Wholesalers Only

The registries are the managers of the TLDs (Top level domains), either gTLDs (generic, like .com), or ccTLD (country code, e.g. .uk, or .fr). When you buy a domain.com it is recorded in the registry's database and that is the ultimate record of your ownership of the domain.

The TLDs are created by ICANN and the rights to manage them are tendered to commercial companies in the case of gTLDs (e.g. .com is managed by Verisign), or for ccTLDs given to the national governments who in turn assign/tender their management to other organisations (e.g. Nominet in the UK for .uk, or Afnic in France for .fr).

But the registries generally don't sell direct to customers (or can't in some cases), so instead they sell domains wholesale to the registrars.

Registrars - They Sell You Domains Direct

Here's Gandi. Hurray! The Registrars are the commercial companies that sell one or more domain name extensions direct to you and me (or through resellers - see below). The top tier of these are ICANN accredited which is a greater 'seal of approval', but nowadays there are so many this doesn't necessarily mean much. (Gandi was one of the first to be accredited in 1999).

Registrars interface directly with one or more registries, they manage your details and billing relationship. They represent your interest at the registry and will usually be the first port of call for domain disputes. So they are important to you, particularly their service and policy towards disputes. Know your registry!! Which brings us to Resellers.

Resellers - They Sell on Registrars Domains

Resellers look like registrars, but they aren't. They are commercial companies selling domain names, but they don't have direct relationships with the registries, but instead use the technology of another registrar to manage the domain names. This means if your domain provider is a reseller, it is using another registrar, and you may not know who that is. Many domain companies are registrars for some domains, and resellers for others. Interestingly in the UK, most of the big domain companies are not registrars for the gTLDs, e.g. .com, .net, etc., instead they use the technology of other companies. This can be problem when it comes to registrar behaviour or disputes (more next time).

Gandi is a registrar for all its domains, and there are some reseller companies that use Gandi as their registrar.

You
It's you! Hurray!! You may be a company, an individual, an organisation, a ghost (well maybe not a ghost), but you are the purchaser of the domain name. You buy it from either a registrar (like Gandi) or a reseller. You should be the ultimate owner of the domain (you are with Gandi), though you should check the policies of your domain company to make sure they are not taking the ownership themselves and leasing it to you. You manage your domain via your registrar/reseller and they manage the records of your domain in the registry or registries (if you have lots).

So there you have it! Now you can entertain all your friends at dinner parties with your extensive knowledge of how the domain name industry works. Or hope that you get onto "Who wants to be a millionaire" and the last question is:

"In the domain name industry, the manager of the .com domain extension is know as":

a) Registrant
b) Registrar
c) Registry
d) Regicide....

(the answer is (c), (d) is about killing kings or something). Good luck!

What's new : .DE, .RU, service status in real time...

Ryan — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:20:00 +0200

We are pleased to release 3 new improvements this week, .DE domains for everyone, launch of .RU and live service status directly from Gandi's homepage:

.DE domains for everyone

We are now able to offer the German extension to everyone! This is done by setting a local German contact (trustee) as one of your domain contacts when you purchase a .DE domain. The local contact (a German lawyer) will automatically become the administrative contact at the registry on your behalf, though you will of course still own the domain name, and have administrative rights through Gandi.

.DE rates range from €6 to €12 excluding VAT per year: https://www.gandi.net/domaine/prix/detail/de/

Launch of .RU

With nearly 2 million active domain names, this ccTLD is among the top 15 in the world. However, for technical reasons, purchases will be limited to non-Russian companies only. Individuals (whether or not they are in Russia) cannot register .ru domains with Gandi. Additionally, transfers involve a different process and we do not manage them yet automatically.

The .RU information page is available here: https://www.gandi.net/domaine/ru/info

.RU rates range from €21 to €28 excl. VAT per year for creations and renewals.

Live service status

Last but not least, you can now see the state of our various services directly from Gandi's home page! For those that have not yet noticed the little light (green, I hope) at the top our home page, it indicates the state of our DNS, Hosting, Mail, Blog, Sitemaker, Network, and other services in real time.

This allows you to monitor the status of various Gandi services. These statuses are represented by three colors:

all of Gandi's services are running normally
part of the service is experiencing a problem, or maintenance is scheduled
the service is experiencing a problem or maintenance is underway that has caused an interruption in service

The link will take you a detailed description and explanation of the problem.

As indicated in an earlier post, major hosting features (backups, snapshots, additional IP addresses...) will also be released in the coming weeks.

Thank you for your trust!

10 things I bet you didn't know about domain names

Wendy — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:04:00 +0100

A pulling back of the domain business curtain to reveal a few shady practices undertaken by unnamed sources…

1) Transfer Out Fee. It is essential to read the small print when signing up to a domain registrar. There are all kinds of pitfalls waiting for those who couldn’t be bothered to go through the terms and conditions with sufficient care and attention. For instance, hidden deep in there might be an agreement for a charge to be made to your account as a ‘transfer out’ fee if you want to switch your domain to a different registrar. What’s worse is this fee might be several times the price of your original registration.[|/post/2008/12/04/Dodgy-domain-practices-the-story-contines#comments|en]

2) WHOIS Change Fee. When you register your domain, the details get published in the WHOIS database, which is accessible to the public. Your registrar will be able to change those details. Some companies entice customers by registering a domain for a very cheap fee but then hit them with a high administration charge for editing the WHOIS entry.

3) 60 Day lock Down. Another shady practice is locking down a domain for 60 days every time the WHOIS record is edited, thus preventing the domain owner from moving to a different registrar.

4) Contact Detail Harvesting. As previously mentioned, your information on the WHOIS database is available for all to see, and this means it can be ‘mined’ by spammers and marketers. So bots could harvest your email, address and contact numbers.

5) Phishing. Unfortunately, as well as spammers, less-than-reputable registrars can mine your WHOIS information, leaving you vulnerable to domain ‘phishing’. You could be sent scam renewal notices with the intention of fooling you into transferring your registration.

6) Do You Own? Because of the above problem, there are registrars who offer privacy services, replacing your WHOIS information with their own on the database. However, from a legal standpoint this means that they own the domain, not you.

7) Registrar Lock. A way of avoiding your domain being transferred by stealth is a registrar lock – this is a special code which is required before any transfer can take place. However, if you don’t have full control over this yourself, it could cause problems should you want to transfer.

8) EPP Protocol. Similarly, certain domains operate the ‘EPP’ protocol to guard against unauthorized transfers. A domain is allocated an eight-character ‘auth-code’ which is required for transfer to take place. The current registrar holds this code and should give it to the domain owner when they wish to transfer.

9) Domain Parking. Sometimes a good looking deal isn’t all it seems. Certain companies offer low registration fees because their aim is to make revenue from ‘domain parking’. This is when multiple domains are created from the original domain name but using various typos. These parked domains are usually low quality search pages carrying pop-up ads and the like. It’s big business and registrars can make a lot of money for themselves off the back of your domain.

10) Pop Up and Under Ads. Another way for domain registrars to make their money while charging low registry fees is by selling pop-up and pop-under adverts on your domain. They might offer you free url forwarding but they could be making money from these ads, not you.

Goes without saying really, we don't support these practices at Gandi.

Give your data room to grow!

Ryan — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:09:00 +0200

We are pleased to announce the release of a new feature that you've been eagerly anticipating for some time now : the ability to increase the size of your disks!

You will need to perform two steps to do this:

Change the volume of your disk,
Run the necessary update on the file system itself.

This operation is totally automated for servers running under Gandi AI, though it's only possible to do this on data disks for the moment.

For expert servers, only the volume change phase of the operation is done via our website. You will need to manually run the file system update on your own.

Please remember that you will need to have enough quota available in your account to expand your disk to the desired size.

You can view our prices at the following page: http://www.gandi.net/hosting/proposal/price/

For step-by-step instructions to guide you along the disk-resizing procedure, please visit our wiki at: http://wiki.gandi.net/en/hosting/manage-disk/resize-disk

We are continuing to work on adding additional key features to our hosting service, such as the ability to perform backups, snapshots or copies of your data, and even the sale of additional IP addresses. And of course, many other surprises as well...

Hosting - server performance statistics

Joe — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:12:00 +0100

The best way to see if your server is doing well and check that you have optimized its power is to have server statistics!

We finally have some nice graphs that let you see your server's CPU usage, network traffic, and your disk's read-write usage. These graphs will give you precious information on how your server is used, and when various usage peaks or low-points occur, so that you can optimize your services - with our virtual hosting service you can add and remove shares without taking your service off-line and use our 'flex' shares to plan for peaks.

Below is an example of a server that is "active". You can see that the processor is only using on average 16% to 18% of its power (over a 24-hour period), with a peak at 40%. The server is running on 2 shares, and is therefore the hosting is clearly too powerful for its current needs:

The following example shows the contrary. This server is in serious need of additional shares:

In the image below, you can see that the data disk /xvdb/ performs far more writing (light orange) than reading (dark orange):

Finally, the Network usage graph shows that there is more outgoing traffic than incoming. The server is using about 0.5Mbits, and so here too, you can see that it is too powerful for its real needs:

As a conclusion, your server statistics give you:

help in establishing the right size server for your needs. Imagine, that you run a website on a server with two shares, observing your statistics over a week, you see that your CPU usage is 20% to 25%, and that you are using less than 1Mbits. You may then remove a share and monitor your statistics for the next few days. With Gandi hosting your service will remain online and undisturbed while you make these changes. At the same time you save money and make an eco-friendly gesture by not wasting resources.

the ability to create a real "Flex" strategy. If your statistics show a steady wave, or if your peaks occur at distinct times, you can schedule your Flex shares to be added to your server for these periods - at only 3 cents (Euros) per hour, you will again save time and money.

Demotix wins Guardian Independent Media Award!!

Joe — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:45:00 +0000

You may remember we recently told you about www.demotix.com, a citizen journalism website and photo agency, which is one of the companies supported by Gandi.

Well they've just won the Guardian newspaper Independent Media Award!! This is a fantastic recognition for demotix who are starting to make inroads to the heavily dominated media industry. More and more of their photos and stories, provided by real people all over the world, are starting to find their way into the traditional press, and this accolade from one of the most respected UK newspapers will do a lot to support this progress.

Well done Demotix!

http://www.demotix.com/news/demotix-wins-media-guardian-award-2009

Launching of .TEL - Full opening on March 24th at 4 PM (Paris time)

Arti — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:48:00 +0100

After the Sunrise and Landrush phases (underway until March 23rd), .TEL domains will finally be available to everyone as of March 24th.

Online pre-reservation for this final phase is available at Gandi. Registration will be made on a first-come, first-served basis. Registration requests that failed will be fully refunded. The price for a .TEL domain has been set at 14 euros per year excl. VAT under A rates.

As a reminder, please do not forget that the .TEL extension is unlike other extensions! You will be unable to have a website with an address like example.tel. The purpose of the extension is to store and manage your personal contact information in a format that can be easily handled and accessed by everyone or specific persons via DNS records.

We invite you to discover all of the possibilities that are available to you on the registry's website at http://telnic.org/

In any case, I invite you to read our contract.

Please feel free to contact our customer service department if you have any questions concerning the registration process.
Click here to search for a .TEL

Customer satisfaction index at Gandi

Ryan — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:29:00 +0100

At Gandi, our customers are our best advocates.

We do not put out any advertisements, contrary to our competitors, to sell our services. We rely on satisfied customers to be our sales force. Our objective is to concentrate on your satisfaction, not to pay for television ads or armies of sales representatives to recruit new customers.

This policy keeps us focused on quality. This is why we monitor your level of satisfaction carefully and do everything possible to treat you as we would like to be treated ourselves. Put simply, your satisfaction is an essential part of our success and our future. So how do we calculate this index?

Support requests

When you contact our customer support team via the online form, your case is read by one of our support team members, who will take care to answer you as soon as possible and as an individual as opposed to a number on a ticket. When they feel that you have received the final answer to your question and that your ticket is "closed", a special footer is added as a signature to the mail e.g:

--------------------------------
Are you satisfied with the quality of the reply you received?
YES: http://www.gandi.net/faq/feedback/yes
NO: http://www.gandi.net/faq/feedback/no
I would like to give more detailed feedback: http://www.gandi.net/faq/feedback.
--------------------------------

You can send us an opinion on the quality of the reply that you were given, through a simple click. You can also follow the links to give detailed feedback that includes your comments, suggestions etc.

We understand that you will not always get the answer you want (e.g. "...you did not renew your domain and so it was deleted"), however we do ask that you, as Shakespeare so eloquently put it in Henry IV, "Don't shoot the messenger", and use the feedback links as intended. There are technical and legal limits that we are required to work within, and even the 'Jedi' in Gandi's support team have limits to their powers If you would like to complain about a particular product or feature, we recommend using the full feedback form where you can actually leave your comments.

Good or bad, we take your voice into account. We do not exclude the extremes when we calculate the satisfaction index, in fact, it's the extremes that we are interested in. We are confident in the quality of our customer care service and we are happy to display the raw data of your feedback in real time on our Support page as testimony to this.

On this page, we display the satisfaction index as a bar graph, on a scale from 0% to 100%, in real time, for both the current week, as well as the average over the past 3 months. This not only "keeps us honest", but it's also a way to show everyone how you feel about the quality of service you receive.

So how do we use your feedback?

All of us here at Gandi use your feedback to compare changes in customer satisfaction and look for areas of improvement:

for our support team, it indicates how changes in the volume or style of tickets changes your satisfaction,
for our product teams it helps show the impact of product issues or where improvements can be made.
For the management team it is a good litmus test to check all of our teams are collaborating in a way that maximizes the quality of our products, and as a direct result our key advocates: you.

When you take that extra step to provide more detailed feedback using our online form, your comments and suggestions are systematically read by senior management, who will analyze them and undertake the necessary improvements to services concerned.

Please give us your feedback so we can better serve you.