Gandi Bar

Simple Hosting is live!

Ryan — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:15:00 +0100

After 4 months of beta testing, the Gandi team is proud to present our new hosting offer, now available to the general public. Simple Hosting has been designed to offer you the maximum possible flexibility and simplicity at a price that will allow everyone to use it.

Since its founding, Gandi has challenged itself to combine two things which don't easily go together: We want to be at the forefront of technological innovation in our field, and also to offer our services to as broad an audience as possible.

In 2008, we were among the pioneers of Cloud hosting in Europe, developing a complete IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). This offer, which has been very successful since it was introduced, and which is still growing in users, was primarily aimed at system administrators and architects; people used to dealing with dedicated servers.

We have continued to expand our IaaS platform, which constitutes the foundation of all of our hosting solutions, and this time we wanted to make the technology available to the largest number of people possible. The idea is therefore to combine the flexibility of the Cloud with the simplicity of the traditional shared-hosting model, and to offer all of this at a price everyone can afford.

We therefore present you with a service offer based on a PaaS (Platform as a Service), which will give you all the flexibility you are used to getting from Gandi, but which will be very easy to use. This will be appreciated by webmasters who don't want to have to deal with server administration, but want to benefit from the advantages of Cloud Computing.

We are launching our Simple Hosting offer with a server that has PHP and MySQL already installed, and comes with dedicated disk, RAM, and CPU core resources. The flexibility of the offer allows you to increase or decrease the power of the server in a few clicks (and a few minutes), without the need for migration. We are also keeping the minimum commitment period to one day, so that you can easily create and use resources for only as long as you need them.

Our prices (and all prices below are listed excluding VAT), are designed to give you a very attractive offer that is economically feasible for you and for Gandi. Prices start at €4 euros per month (or an annual cost of €48), and we are both proud and happy to announce that we can guarantee this price.

The starting offer, that we call the "S", or small size, corresponds to a server with 256MB of RAM, one dedicated core, and a MySQL database whose size is limited only by the size of your disk!

We have devised 5 offers in total, for this first instance family, and have grouped them by size, in order to meet your needs. Here they are:

S Pack: $5, £3.50 or €4 per month
M Pack: $10, £7, or €8 per month
L Pack: $20, £14, or €16 per month
XL Pack: $30, £21, or €24 per month
XXL Pack: $40, £28, or €32 per month

Each size pack will give you twice as much power as the previous size, an exponential increase in power, though the price increase by pack size is basically linear. All the packs come with 10 GB of disk. However, the disk space can be increased just as it can with our IaaS offer, and at the same price: $0.25 (£0.16, or €0.18) per GB per month, up to a maximum of 1 TB (1000GB).

So, what can I run off of an "S" instance?

Many things, in fact. Our engineers have implemented a web cache system that allows us to run many simultaneous pages, as long as they are in the cache. The only real limit is the strict number of simultaneous processes. By strict, we mean simultaneous connections by X number of visitors.

In the case of "S" instances, this limiting number "X" is equal to 2. What this means is that only 2 visitors will be able to call PHP/MySQL at precisely the same instant (the others must wait until the end of the execution of the script before taking their turn, typically a few milliseconds).

Our offer is well suited to people who have created their website themselves, or done so with the help of popular tools such as Magento, Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress, punBB, etc. With predefined sFTP access and phpMyAdmin already in place, the management of such a website is surprisingly quick and easy to set up!

To help you with this, we have written up some installation guides of a few popular tools that will help you get your website published on a Gandi instance of any size.

During these 4 months of beta testing, we have been focused on the feedback we received from our testers, looking for the right balance between ease-of-use and security. We have arrived at something that we believe is really easy to use, and yet without sacrifice in the area of security, which is a constant problem, and one not dealt with adequately by some of the more "traditional" hosting offers.

We have already written several wiki pages that will answer the majority of your questions. And for those of you that are eager to get going, we have even written up a Quickstart Guide that will show you the basics in a quick and easy way. Of course, access to our customer service is included in our offer.

Currently we are only offering Simple Hosting out of the Paris datacenter, as we initially needed to validate the technology and infrastructure before ordering up the expansions needed to enable the American datacenter. This has now been done, and Simple Hosting will be available from at our American datacenter at around the beginning of April.

Of course this does not prohibit customers from around the world from benefiting from the current offer. If your visitors are mainly from the United States, however, you might want to consider waiting until our offer is available out of the Baltimore datacenter.

For our customers that have been seduced by our offer but don't yet have a hosting plan with us, we are offering a promo code to all domain name customers at Gandi.

This promo code will give you a 50% discount on the price of any instance you choose, in exchange for a one-year commitment(*). A "S" size at €2 per month, for example, will be a total of €24 for the entire year.
(*) Warning, this offer is limited to the first 3 million customers who request it

We recommend that you choose a S pack (with monthly renewal), and test your site on it, and then adjust the size of your instance as needed (since you are free to do this at any point). When you are sure, just renew your pack at the ideal size, using your promo code.

We have done everything we could to have our offer meet your needs, while staying true to our mission of helping the greatest number of people possible to profit from this wonderful platform for free speech: the Internet!

One more thing: as you know, we do not purchase any advertising, or ever pay anyone to say nice things about us. It's all honest word of mouth (ok, and twitter plays a part too). So, should you like to help us continue operating like this, we would be very grateful if you would purchase a pack of Simple Hosting, but even if you don't, you can still spread the word. Thanks for your support, and we wish you a happy 2012!
The Gandi Team

The Evolution of Domain Names

Thomas — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:08:00 -0800

Here is a bit of context for Domain Names, where they have been, and where they are going, especially with the new gTLDs on the way.

Back in the late 70s, in the early days of the Internet, the network designers needed a method of telling the hosts on their network apart. They went through several iterations and changes to address schemes and communication protocols, eventually coming up with the Internet Protocol (IP) address scheme. They initially assigned names to addresses in a single file called HOSTS.TXT, which they copied to all of the small number of interconnected hosts.

After passing this file around to all their hosts got a little impractical, they created the domain name system or DNS, in 1983. This grew into a global infrastructure, which, despite it’s relatively simple mission (returning a unique numeric IP address when given a text-format name) is now a multi level hierachical database, comprised of thousands of DNS and bind servers.

The Evolution of the Registry and the Registrar

At first, the US government doled out domain names for free, mainly to universities and research institutiuons. After the Internet migrated out of these institutions, and companies and individuals got involved, the free distribution of domain names soon came to an end. In 1993, registration of domain names became a private, subsidized business, at least for .com, .org, and .net extensions. In 1995, fees were introduced.

NSI (Network solutions), who had operated the handing out of free domain names, became the sole Domain Name authority for the Internet, taking over this function from InterNIC, who had contracted it to them in 1991. The initial fee was $100 per name, for two years.

This changed in 1998, with the delegation for DNS management to ICANN, originally formed to take over for IANA in the distribution of IP addresses. With this came the separation of the registry (the database administration portion of the task of updating the DNS system) and the registrar (the commercial business of collecting registration fees and administering the Domain Name registration process).

Dozens of registrar companies like Gandi SAS began to form, offering services that complement the ownership of a domain name, such as hosting services for web and email. NSI maintained a monopoly on .com, .net, and .org, but NSI was purchased by Verisign in 2000, and Verisign sold off the registrar portion of the business in 2003. NSI still runs as a registrar, and Verisign remains the accredited registry for .com and .net extensions.

Domain names continue to evolve. The separation of the registry and the registrar has allowed entities such as governments to form part of the picture once again. The ccTLDs (Country-Code Top-Level Domains), introduced in 2010, are mostly managed by different registries. These registries are sometimes government agencies or offices, sometimes independent companies on contract to governments. They are delegated the authority by IANA (http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/), and may implement a variety of restrictions and rules for who may register and for what purpose. This is why you need to be a resident of the EU to have a .it domain, for example, or an address in Germany for a .de.

In 2011, after long discussion, the .xxx domain was introduced, ostensibly to allow pornographers to more easily designate their domains as hosting adult material, though certainly not all pornographers agree that this is a good thing for their business, or that ICANN acted appropriately in allowing the xxx extension (see this lawsuit).

That’s where we are now, or where we were until last week.

Avoiding Friday the 13th , on the 12th of January, ICANN announced unrestricted gTLDs as available for application. If you are wondering what an unrestricted gTLD is, think “dot brand” instead of “dot com” and you will get the idea. Here’s a link to more info.

The new gTLDs certainly have the potential to disrupt the relatively settled state of domain names we know now and are more or less comfortable with. ICANN is moving ahead with the proposal despite the obvious potential for confusion, the need to rebrand millions of products and services around new names, and the resistance that is being put up from many entrenched interests like the ANA.

Critics of ICANN’s handling of the initial gTLD proposal in 2008 point out that the registries (and, for that matter the registrars, like Gandi) stand to make a lot of money when the new monikers start to be allowed. It is not unlike a real estate boom, with green fields to be developed. It is up to ICANN to prove to it’s critics that it is not bowing to inappropriate pressure from those who star to gain, and that it’s interests are not in conflict when it approves such regulations.

As big a deal as this is, we will have time to adjust to it gradually. Only 1000 gTLDs will be released a year, and the first of them won’t show up for about a year at the earliest. The application price is so high ($185,000 USD), that it puts a gTLD name out of the reach of most small businesses. The ability to obtain and resell a name that is not related to the business you do, or one that relates to many businesses, not just yours, will be restricted severely. It will be very hard to “typo-squat” or snap up gTLDs and resell them to later claimants.

Still, to really manage one of these names and all of it’s ancillary brand protection provisions is probably much more expensive than just the application fee.

Gandi is cautiously optimistic that ICANN will be able to manage the release well, and we are looking forward to what the creative minds in the community will do with the new digital real estate. It certainly will cost some businesses a significant amount of money to take advantage of the opportunity, but that’s true for a lot of things. It’s the businesses that manage opportunities and take risks that reap the benefits, and having more opportunities is never a bad thing.

New Domain Name and Email API

Ryan — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0100

Those that have been following our blog closely are aware that we have been doing a complete overhaul of our domain name platform over the past year.
With this overhaul comes a new domain name and Email API, replacing that already available to resellers. As a special surprise, the new API will also be available for non-resellers too!.

A new API, but still in RPC XML

We have made the decision to make the same API available to you that we use for the gandi.net website. This means that you will benefit from all our improvements at almost the same time as we do (like new extensions, new products, etc.).
This also means that you will have access to all of the extensions that Gandi provides, and that the price catalog can be queried directly via the API (thanks to new methods that allow you to query for the price at your price rate).
You can also create lists of operations, domain names, and contacts that you can apply filters to.
Finally, you may manage your Gandi Mail out-of-office reply via the Email API.

Documentation is already available at this address, and it contains examples in Python, Php, Nodejs, Perl, and Ruby.
You will find a step-by-step tutorial on how to use it, on this page or, if you prefer, you may download it as a PDF file.

The major differences

The idea from the beginning has been not to change everything, so your migrations will be smooth, using familiar terms and calls. Since we are mentioning migration, you should know that the current (old) API will not be updated, though it will be supported until June 30th, 2012 to give you time to start using the new version.
Concerning your migration, the two APIs are compatible and you can migrate between them method by method, giving you constant control over your transition to V2.
One point that may seem a bit trivial, but which will cause problems for some: there is no longer a method for logging in with a login and password in the new version. You must use an API key, which you can get here for your Gandi interface.
Finally, remember that this new API is open to everyone, whether or not you are a reseller. The only requirement is that you must have at least one domain name at Gandi and/or have a prepaid account that has enough funds for your operations.

What is an API used for?

Our API lets you do the same thing with domain names from your website as we do on ours. For example, you can use the scripts to program renewal reminders at the dates that you choose, provide your family, friends, or customers (if you are a reseller) with your own interface that will allow them to create email or web forwarding addresses, program out-of-office replies for their email, etc.

When will it be available?

The OT&E (Operational Test and Evaluation) test platform is already available at the address https://rpc.ote.gandi.net/xmlrpc.
The production platform will be available in 3 to 4 weeks.

Changes to come

What we will soon be integrating into the new domain name API (and not into the V1 API) will please many of you. The finishing touches are being added to DNS zone file management. Additionally, we expect DNSSEC to follow a couple weeks after that. Owner changes are in the works, however we still have one more migration to do in our system before it will be compatible with the API methods.

Price Increase for .COM/.NET/.BIZ

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

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

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

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

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

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

In conclusion:

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

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

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

Gandi's Opposition to the SOPA Legislation

Thomas — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 08:02:00 -0800

Several of our customers have asked us what our official position is in regard to the controversial SOPA legislation. We oppose it. These are our reasons.

Our position at Gandi is that censorship is generally a bad thing. So is piracy, and both need to be fought, but they must be fought by means that both assure accountability and the protection of private data. We support the free flow of Information, since we believe the only way a society can truly be free is when all of it's citizens can know the truth.

Governments need to keep secrets, and companies need to have their intellectual property protected. On this point, we agree with the goals of anti-piracy efforts, both technical and legislative. This goal can only be accomplished, however, with respect for the rule of law and by implementing fair use and due process. These are proven ways to prevent abuse of power.

SOPA presents a challenge to those charged with policing the respect of intellectual property protections, in that it is, at best, vaguely written, and it appears to roll back many of the due process safeguards and safeguards for free speech that US citizens, and those of many other countries, enjoy and have come to expect on the Internet.

SOPA also stocks the armories of law enforcement (in this case, the US attorney general) with a huge pile of anti-piracy virtual weaponry, which is largely indistinguishable from censorship weaponry, such as blacklists and takedown powers. We do not think blacklists are the way to go. They can be abused far too easily by those with political agendas and competitive axes to grind.

SOPA does not seem to us at Gandi to be an ideal solution to the piracy problem. The debatable effectiveness of SOPA aside, it is never a good idea to allow authorities huge powers of information control without also building in due process. SOPA has been criticized by many for removing due process, at least as it is currently written.

For these reasons, Gandi does not support SOPA. We encourage you to not support any business that does, and we welcome your comments and opinions.

The United States Congress is Set to Enable Internet Censorship Tools

Thomas — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:01:00 -0800

The US Congress is pushing through a controversial set of bills to protect copyrighted material from piracy, but that also threaten innovation and the free flow of information on the Internet.

In an open letter to lawmakers, the CEOs and founders of several innovative tech companies have cautioned that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the senate version, the PROTECT IP act, would have a "chilling effect" on innovation.
Some critics go so far as to compare the provisions of the bills to laws in place in counties such as China, which routinely blocks sites that the government deems undesirable. Certainly a lot of people see this legislation as a threat to the free flow of information. Mozilla went so far as to modify their Firefox browser logo (that gets displayed when you upgrade Firefox) to have a blackout bar across it.

Some in congress are suggesting alternative proposals, such as Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who offered the Online Protection and ENforcement of Digital Trade Act ( OPEN act ). Others have offered amendments that would reign in the most radical powers that SOPA would grant the US Attorney General, but these amendments have so far been rejected by the committee.
The issues with SOPA are many: it would effectively end the DMCA safe harbor provision, in favor of immediate takedowns. It would even ban linking in search results or social media to offending sites. Because of these provisions, Youtube would likely not exist if SOPA had ben in effect when it was invented. Others complain that the definitions of criminal activity as so vague that they could be used to criminalize common uses of the Internet.
SOPA may not even accomplish it's stated goals: many, including Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt say that SOPA will be ineffective against piracy, and that it will fundamentally change the way the internet works.
It also may force companies to introduce instability to systems like DNS. For example, SOPA could require ISPs to cause DNS resolution to fail for sites that are suspected of piracy, even when such failures compromise the integrity of the Domain Name resolution system.
Who would benefit if SOPA passes? Apparently, RIAA, no stranger to copyright infringement lawsuits, and others with large investments in copyrighted material. See their open letter of support here.
It remains to be seen whether the interests that back SOPA as written will prove more powerful than the tech innovators and citizens groups who value the free flow of information.

Gandi is moving!

Ryan — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:45:00 +0100

Gandi is moving it's French headquarters to a larger and more modern location in Paris this week.

This is something of a big change for us, since our headquarters at Place de la Nation in downtown Paris were getting a bit cramped. We have therefore chosen a more modern and spacious location in the southern part of the capital.

A view of our new offices:

We will be packing up our things on Thursday, December 15th and will be fully operational once again as of Monday, December 19th in the morning.

What does this mean for you? There will be a slowdown in the processing of support tickets during this period, and an interruption in telephone support for resellers from Thursday the 15th at 13:00 GMT to Monday the 19th at 8:00 GMT.

Our new address in Paris is:

Gandi SAS
63/65 boulevard Massena
75013 Paris

Gandi Pricing Compared to Amazon EC2

Thomas — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:20:00 -0800

Wondering how Gandi's prices for hosted Linux compare to others in the industry? We were too, so we looked. This post is a “no bullshit” approach to comparing the prices of similar configurations at Amazon EC2 and Gandi.

In any price comparison, it's easy for the party making the comparison (Gandi, in this case) to select the parameters to their advantage. They just need to find the sweet spot in their offering, and make sure to choose the competitor's highest-priced offer to compare it to. We will take a “no bullshit” approach to this comparison, and be completely transparent about what we find.

Amazon came out with Xen-based hosting with the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) just prior to Gandi's introducing VPS hosting, so it's no surprise that they are similar. They both address the need in the market for low-cost Linux-based cloud computing. Amazon, with its extremely large infrastructure and plenty of systems programmers, was able to add lots of nice features to EC2, and integrate the S3 cloud storage system. They do charge for the use of those features, naturally. Gandi has a somewhat different model, and packages storage, bandwidth, and CPU cores in flexible shares that you can adjust, and pay for the package you use. For this comparison, we have taken the most cost effective Amazon instances and comparable services, and constructed Gandi share packages to match as closely as possible what Amazon offers.

Another factor that drives the cost of Amazon's service is usage: They charge for transferring data to and from an instance, as well as storing that data. We made some assumptions that we will be very up-front about: We assume you will actually use the network and the storage capacity you contract for from Amazon. It turns out that if you make light use of the Amazon instance while you have it running, it's actually quite cheap, even relative to Gandi's prices. The question then becomes, what is the point of having the instance (and paying the minimum price) if you aren't going to use it for something?

So, what did we pick? Well, we chose 3 basic instance sizes from Amazon's price list:

Small (1.7 GB Ram, 1 core)

Large (7.5 GB, 2 cores)

Extra Large (15 GB, 4 cores)

Gandi charges by the month, if we ignore Gandi Flex, a feature Amazon does not have. Amazon charges by the hour, so to be fair, we decided to compare running the instances for a solid month.

Next, we considered storage. Gandi offers disk management, backups, and snapshots, all of which Amazon also offers, but only if you use EBS-backed disks. If you don’t, the primary storage on Amazon instances vanishes when you terminate the instance, so it’s not really comparable to what Gandi offers. We therefore decided to compare the more expensive EBS storage to Gandi’s disk images. We chose small (by today’s standards) 32 GB disks for the small and large size instances, and kicked it up to 160 GB for the Extra Large.

Finally (and yes, this is getting to be a long post!) we looked at network usage. Amazon charges by bytes transferred out from the instance, and not in. Gandi charges for a block of bandwidth (5 MBits per share). We will assume that you have a reasonably data-centric application, and you use, say, half the available bandwidth to constantly transfer data out.

For Gandi’s resources, we just adjusted the shares, RAM, and disk to match that of the Small, Large and Extra Large instances using the slider here.

Putting all these costs together, adjusting for Euro/Dollar exchange rates, and excluding VAT, we get:

Instance Size	EC2 Cost	EBS Cost	Data Transfer	Amazon Total	Gandi Total
Small	$61.20	$3.20	$96.00	$160.40	$50.37
Large	$244.80	$3.20	$96.00	$344.00	$197.68
Extra Large	$489.60	$16.00	$372.00	$877.60	$444.95

It looks to us like Gandi’s prices are from a third to a half of Amazon’s for similar resources, without support, which Amazon charges for separately as well.

Of course, if you need to run MS Windows on the cloud, or take advantage of some of the other features Amazon offers, it may make sense to use Amazon. Also, Amazon is free to adjust their prices to compete. If what you want is Linux hosting, though, Gandi is a lot easier on your budget for the same resources.

XXX almost live!

Ryan — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:01:00 +0100

The new XXX extension that is dedicated to the adult entertainment industry will be officially open to the public on December 6th, 2011.

After a launch consisting of Sunrise period (over 100,000 reservations), and then a Landrush phase (reserved to just the porn industry), it is now time for the general opening of the extension to the general public. This latest phase will also allow those who were unable to protect their name before to try again.

If you are not part of the adult entertainment industry, then there is nothing more that you need to do than do register the domain, which will be blocked. By "blocked" we mean that it may not be used in any way at all: no link, no DNS, no forwarding, or mail etc.

If, however, you are a member of the sponsored community, you must, after purchasing your domain name, go to the Registry's website to fill out a form to confirm that you participate in the porn industry in order to make your .XXX domain active, and therefore, usable.

In both cases, the domain must be renewed each year, for €65 per year excl. vat under A rates (see all .XXX prices). Only those that blocked their domain during the Sunrise period will have their domain blocked for life and will not need to renew it.

The first orders for the general opening must be sent to the registry on December 6th at 5 PM CET. Also, since the landrush is over, we are now be able to take your per-registration requests.

These will be sent to the registry upon the opening of its technical platform. As usual, and without being able to guarantee that you will indeed get the domain you requested (many people will be simultaneously trying to register), we will do everything possible to send the orders in the order that they were received. Failed orders will be fully refunded to the prepaid account of the handle used to pay (or to the credit card used, upon request to support).

.FR domains available to Europe

Ryan — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 17:39:00 +0100

The registry in charge of .fr domain names, AFNIC, will soon be changing many of their rules, as well as taking over the management of several other French extensions. On Tuesday, December 6th 2011 at 10:00 Paris time, AFNIC's changes will take affect. But what will change precisely?

The new extensions that AFNIC will manage are .YT (Mayotte), .PM (St-Pierre and Miquelon), .TF (The French Southern and Antarctic Lands), and .WF (Wallis and Futuna).

Also, all of the various prerequisites will be homogenized: there will no longer be different rules for .fr, or .re, etc. All of the extensions managed by AFNIC will have the same rules.

What are these rules?

Both individuals and companies are now able to register domains in these extensions, as long as they are located in the European Economic Area or in Switzerland. Organizations no longer need to provide a license number, though it is strongly encouraged, as this will facilitate any verification that AFNIC might perform at a later date.

Concerning reserved domain names, it is necessary to prove that you are registering the domain in good faith. The list of reserved/forbidden terms is still not public however it includes city names and is identical to what is reserved with the .fr.

When can you start to register them?

You can already place your orders for these extensions via our usual registration interface! Prices for .YT, .WF, .TF, and .PM are identical to those of .FR and .RE. In the event that the domain you requested is reserved, you'll be able to provide your justification for registering it from your Orders in Progress page. As always, orders that are unsuccessful will be fully refunded to your prepaid account (or to your bank account if you request this).

.XXX end of the Sunrise period

Ryan — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:49:00 +0200

The first phase, called the Sunrise, that was designed to let you protect your domain name in the .XXX extension and that was expected to end today on the 28th of October at 16:00 GMT has been extended until Monday, October 31st at 15:00 GMT. I'll take this opportunity to let you know what will happen next:

End of the current Sunrise period

If you have not yet taken advantage of the Sunrise period, you have until Monday afternoon (GMT) to block the xxx extension for your domain for the reduced price of €150 (excl. VAT) for a minimum of 10 years (versus €65 excl. VAT per year after that date)
If you have registered your domain name as a type-B applicant (to block a domain) and the validating agent asked us for more documents in order to validate your application, you have until November 25th to send them to us. If nobody contacted you, then everything is going well, and you will receive a confirmation of the domain's being blocked from us in November.
If you have registered your domain name as a type C applicant (pornographic use), you will need to demonstrate your rights to existing qualifying websites, and you also have until the 25th of November to proceed with this validation. We resent the mail this morning describing how to do this. You also need to validate the domain (see mail sent by the registry), with the acceptance of the charter.
Finally, if you have registered your domain name as a type A applicant (pornographic use), you also have until November 25th to reply to the registry's mail in order to proceed with the charter acceptance procedure.

Beginning of the Landrush phase

Starting on October 31st at 15:00 GMT you will be able to pre-reserve domain names in order to participate in the Landrush phase, which is from November 8th 2011 to November 25th 2011. The rate will be €120 per domain name for 1 year under A rates. This phase is reserved to members of the porn community, and you will not need to provide any proofs other than the validation of the charter on the website of the registry and your commitment to host a pornographic website. There will not be any first-come, first-served process used during this period. The registry will take all orders, and if there is only one for a domain, you will get it. If there are several requests for a domain, an auction will be held by the registry that will allow you the possibility of winning the domain.

General opening on December 6th, at 15:00 GMT

Beginning on November 25th at 15:00, you will be able to pre-register your domains for the general opening on December 6th. Starting on this date, the rule of first-come, first-served will apply. If you missed the Sunrise period and you would like to protect your trademark, name, domain, etc, you will then be able to once again do so without having to provide any proofs, at a rate of €65 excl. VAT per year under A rates. The domains will be inactive. For the porn community, after the registration, you just need to click on the link sent to you by the registry and accept their charter in order to actively use your domain name.

What about our IaaS hosting?

Ryan — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:34:00 +0200

Since the launch of our Simple Hosting service in beta testing, many of you have asked us when we will implement the improvements that we have been promising to make on our IaaS servers.

Yesterday, a new version of Gandi's website was activated. This update moves the payment of server resources over to our new billing system. The visible part of this is that you can now configure and purchase your server by simultaneously combining shares and optional resources.

Being on the new new billing system means that you will soon be allowed to renew all of your resources at the same time. Also, you can set them so that they all expire on the same date for example.

Here is a list of some product improvements that we will be releasing over the next 6 months:

The ability to take Snapshots: This is already available online for all the disks created since March 2011 (by the way, if your disk was created before this, we recommend that you migrate it to a new disk). The first feature that we are going to add will be to make this operation automated. You will therefore be able to schedule an automatic backup of your website every X days or Y hours.
We are then going to work on giving you the ability to purchase additional bandwidth The bandwidth of each share will be increased, and there will be a bandwidth quota added (with a high limit) along with the possibility of modifying the both parameters as an option.
For private networks, something that many of you have been looking forward to for a long time now, we are getting closer to providing this, though there are some problems that need to be solved first. We are currently updating our network's hardware so that we can test how it works under real conditions. We will be able to release the product once we have fixed all the stumbling blocks, and when we are pleased with the results.
The load balancers, which were developed a few months ago were not up to our standards. With Simple Hosting, however, some of the technology used will allow us to offer you an alternative to that.

Gandi Simple Hosting: The best of both worlds!

Ryan — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 09:31:00 +0200

Do you want hosting that is simple, inexpensive, flexible, and that provides real service quality? In short, hosting Gandi-style?

Simple hosting is a new phase in the evolution of Gandi. Back in 2008, when we launched our VPS cloud hosting service, many people thought we were crazy. Some who have since changed their stance claimed, incorrectly, that it would never work. Others were disappointed, since the offer was too advanced and complex for their needs. To meet the needs of this latter category, we are proud to introduce our new Gandi Simple Hosting service.

What is Gandi Simple Hosting?

Gandi Simple Hosting is Gandi's version of simple web hosting. There are no "shares" to worry about, no servers, resources, or even "distributions" to deal with. No system administration either. We offer a platform built on our Cloud infrastructure that offers you the easiest possible hosting. In short, you get the ease of shared hosting and low-cost dedicated servers, but with the inherent advantages of using a Cloud infrastructure, combined with our usual excellent service.

What makes it Simple?

We let you choose the type and size of instance that you want to host. You can think of an instance as a server that has a specific set of applications.

For example, for our Beta testing phase, we are providing you with a PHP/MySQL instance, which is the most in-demand type. These will be limited in size to the Small package during Beta testing, and to hosting at our Paris datacenter. Though it is our smallest instance size, it still gives you 10GB of storage and will support about 100,000 pageviews per month. This corresponds to the needs of a personal website with many visitors, or a professional website with an average number of visitors.
Once the Beta testing period is over, it will be possible to simply modify the size of your instance with a few clicks, without the need for any content migration.

A closed, but still accessible, Beta testing phase

The reason we are having a closed Beta testing phase is so we can control the number of participants, test the limits of our system, and deploy the instances on just a small segment of our platform. This lets us see how the system reacts in a sort of "micro-environment", without risking any potential negative effects on the regular users.
If you participate, you will have the chance to test the new product before everyone else, totally free of charge. After the Beta testing phase is over, we will grant you a limited free period (probably 3 months).

The inconveniences of a Beta testing phase have to do with the volatile nature of the instances created. After all, it's a test, and so it is possible (though we will do everything possible to prevent this) that your instances might disappear due to a bug, or simply because we run into a situation where we need to reinitialize the platform, for example to correct a potential problem. You will also not have access to all the features of the product, such as the ability to resize your instance, to perform snapshots, or automatic configuration of your DNS.

Our customer support is not totally in place either, and will not be able to assist you during the beta period in the event of a particularly difficult case. The objective is to open the Beta testing phase to only about a thousand accounts.

Who are we looking for?

The profile for beta-testers that we are looking for is rather diverse. You only need to know how to configure your domain's DNS to point to the Simple Hosting server (or only use the gpaas.net service URL that is available to you). You must know how to use an FTP client and it is preferable that you know how to manipulate a database (via PHP or PhpMyAdmin).

If you have a website that is totally built on PHP/MySQL and you know how to import/export its database, you can also test the installation of your website on a Simple Hosting instance. As a reminder, when the product is fully released, we will also offer an instance for static websites that will also allow you to host HTML files.

Do you want to participate?

The sign-up form for the Beta testing phase is open to all customers that have a Gandi handle that was created before September 13th 2011.

Just go to the Simple Hosting, main page. Let us know why you would like to test it, whether or not you are already a Hosting customer at Gandi or elsewhere and for what type of offer, and your level of experience working with web hosting services*...,then, all you need to do is configure your instance.
Once we have validated your request, you will get an email that will tell you your connection settings.

NOTE: Each request is read and treated manually, so we ask that you be patient, and that you don't make multiple requests

How to give us your feedback

Did you encounter a problem? Have you found something that does not work and is reproducible? Do you have an idea for something that could be done better and how? Your participation in the beta is partly to help us make a better product for you, so don't hesitate to contact us by email at beta-simple@gandi.net to give us your feedback.

When is the Beta testing period over?

The right answer is: when it's ready!
We still have some interfaces to finish, notably the linking of the domain name to Simple Hosting, and some parts we know we need to make easier to use. The Beta testing phase will hopefully let us identify some problems that we have not yet seen, however we are confident that the final version will be ready for release in October.

With that, we'll let you discover the PaaS infrastructure and its many advantages for yourself

* this information will not affect your eligibility. We just need to be sure to have a variety of profiles in order to qualify the feedback we get.

Update on the new gTLDs

Ryan — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 16:30:00 +0200

After much discussion, ICANN finally met in Singapore this July and confirmed the launch of the new gTLD process that began in Paris three years ago. As a result of this meeting, in 2 to 3 years from now, we will see a major change in the internet, and an increase in the number of extensions to choose from.

It is only natural to wonder what interest there is in launching tens, hundreds, or (in a few years) thousands of new extensions, knowing that there is already over 240 of them to choose from.

It is widely known that the domain name space (and particularly that of .com) is currently saturated, and yet that extension is the most popular on the web. .com domains are clearly recognized as a generic worldwide extension for company websites. Only a few markets such as the United Kingdom and Germany more readily identify with their national extensions (.co.uk and .de).

If these new extensions turn out to be a success, how long will it take before we change our habits? The opening of each new extension will require colossal efforts in terms of communication.
You will see your favorite shoe brand have websites such as lunarglide3.nike instead of http://nikerunning.nike.com/nikeos/p/nikeplus/fr_FR/products/lunarglide3?pid=408950 for example...

And it's not hard to imagine adds with something like

...or having an address such as arcdetriomphe.paris

We're not there yet, but this is what we can expect to see in the near future, say, in 2014-2015.

For those who wish to manage an extension like .brand, .country, .continent, .sport, etc. applications will begin on January 12th 2012 and will end on April 12th 2012.

There are a few reasons why a company might like to have their own TLD:

- Marketing, because having your own TLD amounts to owning your own piece of the internet, since it is you that define your own naming policy. It is difficult at this time to measure the impact that these new extensions will have on search engine algorithms, however.
The new extensions nonetheless provide for a very interesting opportunity for companies that are holders of a trademark. By registering a larger number of domain names, searching becomes more intuitive for customers, and can even sidestep using search engines. For example: f-150.ford.
This requires, however, a lot of configuration and forwarding towards the appropriate content. Nonetheless it will help assure that the customer does not land on a page that does not correspond to unofficial content that is not under the control of the company. This is a way to put the URL bar back in the center of navigation, which is all to often ignored by users in favor if the search form on the various search engines.
The existing TLDs and notably the country extensions, will remain precious assets in domain name policies, however they may not have the same role as they do today. They must be maintained for a certain number of years however.

- Legal, because once the TLD will have gained a certain notoriety, the company will have a "space" all to themselves, that they control, and that they will have a stronger legal hold over.
Third party attacks on other TLDs than the official TLD will therefore be less important, even though one should not ignore them altogether.

- in terms of security too, since a unique TLD may offer more security for its users, even if criminals are never short of ideas in terms of phishing.

So, are we really going to witness a big change? What is certain, is that the launch has taken place during the ICANN meeting last June in Singapore. The new extensions will therefore most certainly see the light of day.

It will become essential to assure domain name monitoring, as both the scope of the research and the number of results will be larger. It will be, of course, necessary to increase the budgets ties to domain name portfolios.

We hope that this information has been useful. Feel free to contact our Corporate division if you envision launching your own .brand, as we would be more than happy to help you in the preparation of your application to submit to ICANN, as well as the technical aspects inherent to the role of a registry.

Time is running out: despite the calm summer we're having, it is nonetheless the calm before the most important revolution that our industry has seen since the beginning of the internet.

New website creation tool (HTML5)

Ryan — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 10:26:00 +0200

After having listened to the many pertinent remarks that our customers have made on this topic, we recognized the importance of finding a new website creation tool that we could provide you with. This tool would need to allow you to create a website in pure HTML5/CSS, import and export your website as easily as possible, and all the while being sure that it is easy to use and to create a professional looking website.

After more than a year of scouring the landscape of online website creation tools, and after looking at many different companies and projects, we are pleased to announce that we have chosen BaseKit! This London-based company is full of dedicated geeks that love what they do, continue to find new ways to improve their business, and are people-oriented. It should therefore come as no surprise that we are rather fond of them

We have a couple of projects in the works right now, and so you won't see their integration for a couple of months yet, however to let you in on what's going on behind the scenes:

BaseKit will use Gandi's VPS Cloud Hosting service,
BaseKit's domain names will also be provided by Gandi,
Gandi will integrate the BaseKit tool directly into our website by the end of the year,
You can visit their website at http://www.basekit.com to get an idea for yourself in the meantime (We are working with BaseKit to launch their site in French too, at the address http://fr.basekit.com ).

The tool will be updated shortly however; The new version is much more ergonomic and is really a joy to work with.

On a final note, I would like to stress that our strategic partnership is based on the product, and will assure that we always have the best and most up-to-date HTML tool on the market.

Happy website building!

Quicker inter-domain and server navigation

Ryan — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 17:43:00 +0200

The optimization of Gandi interfaces is something that we work hard at. We have many ideas as to how to improve things (display rapidity, ergonomics, etc.) and you, our customers, frequently submit very interesting ideas with regards to this.

We are pleased to present a new feature that will make your life easier

If you have a large number of domains and/or servers, and if you frequently make operations on them (DNS changes, website creation, checking statistics, etc.), you have probably already noticed that it is rather annoying to keep having to go back to the list of your domains.

This is why this little improvement will make those of you concerned really happy

As always, an image is worth a thousand words:

This navigation feature is therefore visible as soon as you are in the domain's or server's control panel, and if you have more than one and less than 200 (a temporary arbitrary limit).

Release of .XXX

Ryan — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 16:47:00 +0200

Having been in the news for the past few years, the highly controversial .XXX will be released in September 2011.

Participate in the Sunrise period :

What's the current situation? How will it work? How can you protect your brand, and how much will it cost? We will try to address these questions below...

For starters, what is the .XXX extension? Even its name is rather explicit: it is an extension that is aimed at professionals in the adult entertainment industry, primarily pornography. The founding idea was to group together all of the adult websites under this extension, and thus help control access to these websites more easily.

Discussions on this extension have been going on for more than 10 years now, and despite many reports and political opposition, its final approval was given on March 18th 2011 by ICANN. The extension's official public release date has not yet been defined, but it should occur by the end of the year. Nevertheless, as with the majority of new extensions, there will be several "pre-registration" and reservation phases for the .XXX, which will begin in September 2011. And in the case of this extension, the Sunrise (reservation) phase is a bit particular. Here is why:

There are three profiles that can participate in the preliminary reservation phase, which has a single price of $200.00 (£135.00 or €150.00) excl. VAT at Gandi.net, and which begins in September:

the profile, that we will call type "A", corresponds to trademark holders that meet membership requirements of the XXX community (ex. professionals of the pornography industry),
then there is the group that we will call type "B", which consists of trademark holders that are not part of this community, but which to protect their trademarks against cybersquatting and/or its use in association with pornographic content.
we can also designate a type "C' which is a bit like type "A" except that instead of demonstrating that they own a trademark, they must own a pornographic website (in an extension that is recognized by IANA) that has been in existence since at least February 1st 2010.

These customer profile types only matter during the Sunrise period. Know that once the general opening of the extension occurs, only professionals of the porn industry will be able to purchase a .XXX domain (and this, without restriction, other than the Premium and reserved names).

This means that if you are a member of the "type B" population, and if you own one or more trademarks that you would like to protect from potential cybersquatting, then the Sunrise phase in September is the only occasion when it will be possible for you (before several months), and at any rate, after the general opening!

This being said, how does the Sunrise period work, and what makes it special?

The main particularity of this extension is that it will have the majority of registered unusable domain names. Why? Because type "B" customers will want to protect their brands (register .XXX domains that correspond to their brand, so that they cannot be used by type A and C customers.

Even if this may seem a bit shocking, the idea is not altogether outrageous: the Registry's goal (other than making a lot of money), is to manage an extension that only publishes adult content. In order to make this extension credible in this role, it must therefore be sure that there are not a bunch of commercial .XXX websites without any relationship with the community in question. And all of this, by allowing other brands to be protected. The idea is to make the protected brand unusable, for anyone.

What is nice, however, is that the fee is only requested once: you will not be asked for any renewal in order to maintain the domain's reserved status.

The domain names that are granted for type B requests will be blocked by the registry for a minimum duration of 10 years (the length of the contract between the Registry and ICANN).

Such blocked domain names do not belong to anyone and cannot be used, rather, they point to a page that simply indicates the blocked status of the domain.

On the downside, in the event of a similar request by a member of the A or C populations, they will be the owners...

I will give you a concrete example in order to help make things more clear. Imagine that, at Gandi, we would like to protect our trademark. We are clearly in the B population, and we do not necessarily want there to be a gandi.xxx website that displays pornographic images, because this would harm our trademark's image. Therefore, we will proceed with the protection process by choosing to pay the one-time, non refundable fee asked by the registry. So, we will therefore follow the protection process by submitting a request along with the non refundable fee requested by the registrar. At Gandi this will be $200.00 (£135.00 or €150.00) excl. VAT*.

If no member of the type 'A' or 'C' groups makes a similar request (and provides the necessary proofs of registration trademark of course) for "Gandi", then the at the end of the Sunrise period, the domain name will get a "reserved" status, and will no longer be able to be registered by anyone.

We will not even have the domain name on our interface, because we will not know who the owner is: it will belong to the Registry, who rendered it unavailable.
It is to be noted that this status is permanent. If, say, in 5 years, we transform Gandi.net into a pornographic film studio, we will not be able to recover the domain.

Now if for example, during the Sunrise period, there is a company called Gandi that is specialized in porn magazines (and therefore is type "A"), and they own the trademark in their country, makes a similar request at their registrar: they will be granted ownership.

Nevertheless, the registry will warn the type "A" customer of a request by a type "B" customer of the possibility of withdrawing their request. If the type "A" applicant does not withdraw their request before the end of the sunrise, then the domain gandi.xxx will be granted to them, and we, the type "B" customer, will not be refunded.

Of course, the same thing will happen if it is a type "C" application that occurs. For example, let's say that the owner of the website gandi.com has been streaming amateur sex videos since 2008. In this case, he will be more eligible for ownership than you.

Finally, let's imagine that all three requests were made at the same time. As a type "B" customer, we have been taken out of the race. But what will happen to the type "A" request and the type "C" request? The registry will contact them to organize a private auction among them in order to determine the lucky winner!

The Sunrise phase will last 30 days, and the arbitration will occur at the end of this period, so that all of the requests will be processed at the same time.
Next, a 14-day pause will occur before the beginning of the Landrush phase, which will be exclusively open to members of the adult entertainment industry.
Finally, after a new pause, it will be open in a 'normal' manner, however still reserved to members of the porn community, and for a price of €60 excl.VAT per year.

The registry has already announced that a new trademark protection phase will occur, however they have not yet set an exact date.

For more information on .XXX, I recommend going to this site.

Finally, if you would like to trust Gandi for the protection of your trademark or to register your .XXX domain please go here.

* This price includes participation in the Sunrise period as well as the 1st year of registration for Type "A" and "C" customers.

VPS Cloud Hosting: Say Cheese!

Ryan — Tue, 17 May 2011 14:57:00 +0200

Don't see the relationship between Gandi's VPS cloud hosting and photography? How about if I give you a hint by referring to snapshots? ...now do you get it?

That's right! The week is starting out on a good foot, with a snapshot system that is currently available for disks that you have created on the new disk platform that has been in place for the past couple of weeks now.

For the uninitiated, a snapshot is a quick 'picture' taken at a given time of a disk (data or system) that belongs to you. This will allow you to, for example, perform a rollback in the event of a risky operation...

You will find this formidable option within the disk interface and not the server's (it is a snapshot of a disk that is taken) and this is therefore only possible on recent disks, since they must be managed by the ZFS filesystem.

How can you see whether or not your disk is compatible with this option?:

You may always make this option available, by replacing your current disk with a new one, however it would be necessary to import a total copy of your old disk into the new one. The snapshot is however, as its name indicates, instant.

And how can I restore a disk from a snapshot? This is just as simple as a snapshot, a button, a confirmation, and your new (well, actually only) disk is reconstituted:

Be careful, however, when using a snapshot: it will totally overwrite the target disk, by destroying it. If you are not 100% sure, then I recommend that you make a copy of the latter first. This brings me to the following point...

What is another use of an instant snapshot? The immediate duplication of a disk! This is also possible from your disk interface, right next to it: a simple click and it's done!

And finally, for those who wonder if it is possible to launch it automatically, I'll say yes... however not right away. We are in the process of fine-tuning our profiles and managing the snapshot calendar; however it should be available in a couple of months, with three different profiles, depending on your use!

GANDI is reinforcing its Corporate offer

Ryan — Wed, 11 May 2011 14:36:00 +0200

The idea in itself is simple: too many companies that want to have a real management of their online identity pay too much for their domain names just because they are companies, and because they are approached by providers either vaunting their service or through glossy marketing brochures. Being very aware of this, we introduced a new approach to this a while ago to try and bring about another way of handling this situation.

For many years now, we have been working with large groups, institutions, associations, SME, as well as consulting and law firms, to bring them a service that is even more customized and complete, all the while remaining ourselves, meaning, clear and honest.

A dedicated and experienced team has recently been hired to develop offers and services that are unique to this type of customer. Gandi is therefore developing its Corporate offer, with the goal of being able to provide you with an ethical alternative to your professional needs.

Thanks to their specific knowledge of this demanding market, developed over the past twelve years in dedicated companies, Michael and Stéphane bring their experience to the teams already in place and that have also (isn't it true Sophie and the others) proven their added value to our "Corporate" customers.

The creation, protection, and promotion of your brands on the internet require personal assistance, and a strong commitment. We make it a point of honor to offer you a service that is 100% customized to your specific needs. Our objective is to create a real lasting partnership with each customer.

Our values are at the foundation of our company: following-up, flexibility, transparency, dedication, and listening to our customers. Yes, this resembles the usual marketing line a bit. However, we want to truly refresh the practices of this market, all the while not making any compromises on what makes us who we are.

Therefore, our ethics will not change; no broken promises, no misleading advertisements, no over-billing for domain names: simply forcing ourselves to do our job honestly and correctly, meaning that we provide you with the best product or service for the right price, and in a way that is transparent.

We offer you a real quality of service, one that is clearly measured and explained depending on your demands. This constitutes our best sales argument, and we commit ourselves to keeping our promises. For us, this is the best guarantee of a relationship based on confidence and one that must last.

We are in the process of working on a group of services that are dedicated to the needs of companies. These services will be progressively made available by the end of the year, though some corporate services are already available such as:

Management of dedicated accounts,
Transfer and rationalization of entire portfolios,
Registration and management of domain names in extensions that we are not or cannot be accredited for,
Payment by invoice,
Management of your domain name strategy,
Local contacts.

Please do not hesitate to contact us, to tell us how the Gandi Corporate model may be extremely advantageous for your company versus the existing.

Gandi switches to 3.0.11

Arti — Fri, 06 May 2011 11:35:00 +0200

The V3.0.11 is one of the last major updates (Gandi BackEnd) before the much awaited 3.1.0, which will introduce the new reseller API.

This version includes a lot of "invisible" changes, but a few "visible" ones too:

the Gandi Mail pack now goes through the streamlined purchase process. You can still pay with the usual means of payment. You can also view the price as well as cancel a mail pack before its expiration.
we have also updated some of the contact management processes, especially for domain name transfers. Some verification mesures are now performed to follow the Registries' requirements and, thus, reduce the number of failed transfers.
the orders in progress list for your domain names is a new feature that lets you quickly view your domain name operations. It can be accessed directly from your domains list. Just click on the "Operations" button at the top, just to the right of "Domains". For example, DNS updates and glue records management are now managed in quick asynchronous mode.
you can now do a "grouped" search for various domain names on the purchase page. Here is a preview:

4 new stylish country extensions have been added to our portfolio: .GD (Grenada), .TC (Turks and Caicos Islands), .VG (British Virgin Islands), and .WS (Samoan Islands). The first three extensions are €40.00 excluding VAT/year in the "A" price list, and the last one is €24 excl. VAT/year, also in A list.
our datacentre in France now uses the same storage technology as our US one. So we now have plenty of new disks using ZFS technology, ready to serve you even faster than ever! A more technically detailed article is available in the "Gandi Kitchen".
Disk snapshots, available only for disks created in the new system, are now for public test for 2 to 3 weeks by our group of testers. Feel free to contact us if you want to be a part of it!

The 3.0.12 will allow us to finalise the migration of our internal processes for domain names (renewal, contact management among others) and billing. Once the migration is over, we will work on V3.1 in order to give everyone an access to our new domain name API.