Gandi Bar - Hosting

Friendly reminder on how to renew your hosting account

Ryan — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:28:00 +0100

Precisely one month after the launching of our Beta trial version, some of you may be wondering just how the renewal process works...

Our service is without a minimum contractual period. You can cancel your service whenever you want. We will refund your prepaid account for the amount of time that you did not use your service. The renewal only consists of extending your account's expiration date by one month.

There are two ways to renew your account:

"manually", via our website by clicking on the renew button.
"automatically", by activating the auto-renewal system (also available for domain names).

In both events, it is necessary for your prepaid account to have sufficient funds for the operation. But there is nothing to worry about: you will be sent reminders alerting you that your account is approaching its renewal date. You can also see the renewal date of your account in your Server Overview page.

If you would like to cancel your account, simply delete all your servers and disks, and remove the shares associated with your account.

If ever, despite our renewal reminders, you forget to renew the account that you use for your servers, it will be put on "redemption" period for 7 days. Your servers will no longer be accessible, though you will have 7 days in which you can still renew your account if you wish.
After this period, the servers and disks will be permanently and definitively deleted.

Renewal during the Beta period comes to 6 euros excl. VAT per share. We will alert you to the end of this period when the date has been fixed, thus allowing you to renew your account at the Beta rate one last time. Finally, for those that have missed the announcement, the price for the final release version has been set at 10 euros excl. VAT per share, and we have increased the dedicated bandwidth from 1.5 to 5 Mbits per share.

Gandi Hosting in public beta is open!

Ryan — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:20:00 +0100

Here we are: the moment that many of you have been waiting for, for days, weeks, or even months. Personally, I have been looking for to this for several years now, but then again I'm an incurable dreamer :D

You will discover a new navigation tab on our website that has been discretely highlighted (don't laugh...it's our version of publicity) so that you will not overlook it: Gandi hosting has been launched in public beta testing, we trust, to provide you with an even higher level of service.

The fact of calling this launching "beta testing" does not refer to the intellectual capacity of your servants (at least, we hope not!). No. Simply, it is because we are careful people, and we want to underline the fact that we want to gradually increase the load of the truly new product that has been the result of the hard work and talents of all involved.

As with every project of this type, which does not involve reselling solutions that already exist and have been tested (or 90% of the market), we are going to go through difficult periods. We will come out for the better because we will be - as we have always been - reactive and passionate about what we do. We will also need your patience and indulgence: We would like to thank you and your teams in advance, who will help make this possible.

As you have been able to see in the previous blog entries on our hosting service, we have tried to create the product that we would like to have as a customer, with the principal criteria being flexibility (at all levels) and quality. The product that you have under your eyes today is only the first version of an even larger project, and we will everything possible to assure that we can write the rest of the adventure with you.

Adventure? In my eyes, yes. To dare to create a product, in France, that is for customers around the world, at the cutting-edge of technology in the field, while nobody has been expecting this from us, all the while restructuring a company in difficulty and solidifying its core metier, was not without periods of concern during the past three years. But here we are, many of our customers have been asking us to move in this direction, and it was something of a wild dream; Or perhaps simply we had confidence in our vision, persisting until we have transformed it to something tangible.

It is therefore with immense pride that I would like to thank everyone at Gandi who has made this possible, I know - because I have shared this with you - all the effort that you have put into this project, for your company, and am confident in our ability to fulfil our promises.

I would also like to thank all of those in advance, and those - you, who are reading this - that will allow us to continue our journey in this new direction by buying hosting server shares, and in spreading the word to your friends and colleagues the same way to have a presence on the internet :D. One that will last!

I will let you discover this new service for yourself, and even if it is not the objective of this entry to explain how it works in detail, let me share with you a few useful links to:

The Wiki of the new Gandi community (Gandi Wi) http://wiki.gandi.net/ which will allow you to post all the problems that you might happen to come across, or even to start to contribute your own knowledge to enrich this community. You may connect to the Wiki via your usual Gandi handle and password.
The blog of the same community, which is a sort of copy of the Bar, but devoted entirely to hosting, and which is located at the following URL: http://hosting.gandibar.net/.
The IRC chat channel, where we will be happy to welcome you and try to be available to answer your questions. This may be found on the freenode network (irc.freenode.net) and in the channel #gandi-hosting.
The Gandi newsgroup/forum via your newsgroup reader on the server groups.gandi.net or on the web at http://groups.gandi.net. For information, a new version of the Gandi groups is being prepared and will be released next week at the latest.

The team at Gandi joins me in wishing you a happy new year 2008!!!

(6/6) Our hosting will be of high quality

Ryan — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 19:14:00 +0100

Here we are ... almost at the beginning of the year 2008 and the start of a new adventure for us!

We have come to the end of this long series of teasers that, we hope, kept you waiting in expectation :D

Anyway, at the same time it was important that we hunted down all the bugs on our hosting platform, and so it was not a waste of your time...

At any rate (^^), before letting it all out, let me speak to you about the quality of our hosting. And yes, I must profit from the title of this entry :D

First, the quality of our equipment. The most common hosting solutions rely on profiting as much as possible from each server. The best way to do this is to go as cheap as possible - both in rates, and in equipment - by buying large quantities.

You've guessed it, I'm talking about discount hosts. Gandi does not want to go in that direction because that is not a position that is based on the long term, and the durability of our solutions is an integral part of our reputation. We have therefore purchased our hardware from a major global supplier, with whom we have worked for years, and have established as-hoc guarantees that meet our criteria in terms of quality: pay a bit more, but with the knowledge that this give us a bit more guarantees "just in case".

The quality of our platform and our infrastructure is also part of this chain of operation. It has now been 18 (long) months that we have spent working at several sites in order to bring every bit of quality possible to our network and to our hardware. Yes, several mirror sites are in the process of being completed that allow us to protect you against as many incidents as possible, since our technology allows it. We are already in a closed loop on 4 sites, and 2 are done being equipped with servers. Our objective is to have at least 4 access points completed before June 2008.

Finally, the principle quality in our eyes, the service, must be stressed. Even if it has been long-established with regards to domain names, from the word-of-mouth of our clients alone, we have yet to prove ourselves to you with regards to hosting.

You can be assured that our work ethic will remain the same, our spirit identical, and our investment policy will continue to spurn all advertisements and marketing. Our viral force is YOU. It is therefore up to us to exceed your expectations.

This choice is not insignificant: to engaging in advertisements allows us to keep our mojo (sorry, I meant "attention") focused during the period directly AFTER the purchase, and not just BEFORE, which consists of trying to convince you that we are the best choice. A company can rarely do everything: recruit new customers and provide them with an irreproachable level of service. We have made a clear choice, against the current trend of the sectors of activity, and which comes at a cost, notably in terms of rapidity of development. But we believe that we are making the right decision for the long term, which is clearly our objective.

And here we are: Gandi hosting will be released in version BETA, and as a nice surprise, the opening rates will be lower than the final version.

This is because:

- not all the services will be available,

- some processing latencies are still present,

- some servers are still being installed at the various sites.

In addition, we remind you that our hosting service is without engagement of any time, you are free to test and stop your account if you want - the minimum billing period (for the moment) is one day. We have also put in a system to avoid abuse and avoid problems before they occur.

There are only a few days to wait now, we'll let new year's pass, and I promise, we will open the great gates of our new hosting service.

Happy new year!