Gandi Bar - Tag - Hosting

Simple Hosting API: Empowering Web Hosting Resellers

Thomas — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 04:58:00 -0700

Yesterday we added Simple Hosting management features to our public Simple Hosting API. If you are a reseller of Gandi's Domain Name and Cloud Hosting services, these features beg the question of reselling Simple Hosting: Can you do it?

Of course you can!

For example, imagine you want to resell hosted Ecommerce turnkey solutions to your customers. You use an app that runs in PHP on a MySQL database, and you know how to use an API. Then it's easy to offer Ecommernce solutions to your customers with Simple Hosting.

A simple command (paas.create) lets you create an instance. Another (paas.vhost.create) associates a domain or subdomain of your choice to the instance, and you then directly upload the code for your app to the the vhost, using sFTP. Presto, your customer is online in a few minutes! If you are short of instances, or need to beef one up to a larger size, the API supports commands to buy more resources as well.

Our API is XMLRPC, and supports many libraries. Lots of programming languages are available for accessing it (PEAR, for example, or PHP, or PERL).

Wondering about prices? Well, we've not implemented any sliding scale or reseller price breaks (mostly because the price is so low already) but, if you decide you want to resell our solution to your customers, either via the API or via the website, you can always contact us (reseller@gandi.net) to see what we can do for you.

U.S. Datacenter In Beta Testing!

marc — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 09:58:00 -0500
We're nearly there! Many of you have been waiting a long time for this, and after many months of work, we're pleased to announce that the U.S. data center is about to launch in beta testing mode. We will start giving away shares beginning Monday, December 13th. We're accepting a limited number of beta testers to assist with testing prior to our official release, but you can already contact us to request a trial share.
We have a little bit of tweaking to do, and so it's not recommended that you place critical sites on these servers during the beta period. To request a free 30 day beta test in the U.S. datacenter, go to https://www.gandi.net/hosting/trial/ and be sure to put the keyword Baltimore-Test in the description of your service. Each request will be processed individually, and chosen based on our specific testing requirements.

We have currently planned for an official release date of December 20, 2010. Once the beta period is over and the datacenter is released for general use, you'll be able to choose the location of new servers that you create.

Want to win a free t-shirt? Of course you do! And this is the much coveted, high quality, black t-shirt with blue Gandi logo, replete with our "No Bullshit" logo! For the next couple of weeks, I'll be randomly selecting a follower of our Gandi.net US Facebook page to receive a free Gandi t-shirt. Just click the LIKE link at the bottom of this posting. That's all you need to do! Oh, there is a little bit of "fine print": Offer limited to the continental US only, and employees and previous winners are ineligible. Winners will be contacted via their Facebook account, and will need to provide a shipping address located within the continental U.S.

Backup, increase in disk size and lower rates!

Ryan — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:39:00 +0200
Since our hosting service has been released, you have been requesting it, and here it is!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What to do if your server stops responding?

Ryan — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:53:00 +0200
As you probably already know, our platform protects you from hardware failures that might occur on your server.

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

There are three different cases:

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

"uptime" will give you the current load of the machine,

"free", will show you the amount of memory used by your applications in the “used” column,

"top" (we recommend that you install “htop") will show you the ranking of applications in realtime ordered by their use of resources (memory, CPU),

"dmesg" shows you messages from your linux server’s kernel,

Consulting logs such as /var/log/messages or /var/log/daemons with the command, “tail”, for example (tail /var/log/daemons) will also provide you with precious information.

"df –h" shows you the amount of disk space available on your disks.

The most frequent causes of error are:

No space left on your system disk: this situation is often caused by a lack of appropriate log management on the server, or by a database which fills up too quickly. The solution is to clean up wasted space, or enlarge the disk (see the guide on this).

Not enough RAM on the server, or too much memory used: the simple solution is to add more RAM by adding additional shares. If you have an expert server, you can also try to modify the behavior of the Linux’s available memory by using the command 'sysctl -w vm.overcommit_memory = 2'. Warning: so that the modification can be maintained following a reboot, you must also add "vm.overcommit_memory = 2" to the "/etc/sysctl.conf" and "/etc/gandi/sysctl.conf" files.

Too may processes are running simultaneously on your machine: you will need to lower the values in the configuration files of your applications (the number of simultaneous connections on Apache, for example) or increasing the power of your server by adding shares.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to turn your website into a "Web Infrastructure"

Ryan — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:38:00 +0200
Many websites start with a single server solution, a box acting as a web server and database server all in one. Simply, easy, cheap. The problem comes when traffic gets too high (a victim of their own success!). Many customers want a bigger box, but the answer is actually changing your architecture from "web server" to "web infrastructure". You can duplicate web servers, use the DNS to load balance them and ramp up your capacity very fast and very far.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gandi Hosting Team

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 VPS 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.

Hosting improvements - more, more, more

Joe — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:00:00 +0000

So here we are, proud parents of the Gandi hosting infrastructure. Our little baby has now been live (or alive) for 4 months now since the full launch on 1st Oct. Like any new parent everything is possible for our hosting baby, and the future is really exciting. But also like any new parent, there is lots to learn and always things to be done.

The reaction to the product has been great, and the industry is becoming more and more agreed that hosting products based on cloud infrastructures will be the future. In fact Gandi was recognised in the Tier1Research Industry report on Hosting as a company and service to watch:

"Gandi has all the hallmarks of a true cloud infrastructure service, with scalability, redundancy against single points of failure, and flexible, pay-as-you-go billing schemes." - Tier1Research Winter 2008.

But we are not going to rest on our laurels. In fact since we launched the full service we've been monitoring performance, taking feedback and putting in place additional tweaks and fixes to optimise our infrastructure. And today we are pushing out the first set of improvements!

Based on the analysis of existing customers (over 5,000), their usage patterns, needs and performance, we have been able to double (yes double) the CPU limits available to each and every share on our system. This means that you will be getting more bang for your buck, with no compromise in performance. It will also continue to ensure that the more shares you buy the more CPU you get, as performance has been doubled at every level.

And you can feel good about it too! Too many servers run at only 10-12% utilisation (based on recent data published by Dell and confirmed by Gartner), which means the hosting industry produces a lot of waste! This has always been one of the benefits of virtualisation: use servers more efficiently, cut waste, be more green. So a feel good side-effect of this improvement is that the servers will be better utilised, so you benefit and so does good old mother nature.

But that's not all. We've also made a dramatic improvement to the IO wait for filer access with a few well targeted fixes in the device drivers. So again you'll notice the extra zip in your share.

We've also seen more people using Gandi Flex (our flexible share booking system to allow you to scale your resources on schedule), so we wanted to say thanks by lowering the price per Flex share from €0.07 ($0.10/£0.06) per hour to €0.03 ($0.05, £0.04) per hour. So this is yet another way to up and down scale your needs.

And finally, if you're not convinced, we're giving new customers the opportunity to test drive the Gandi system. So if you have any doubts, go to our hosting page and submit a request for a hosting test drive and we'll give you some shares to have a go.

We hope you enjoy the improvements, and you can be sure that we are working on more. Now back to work

Virtualisation - and why it is the future of web hosting

Joe — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 09:52:00 +0000

As you know we've been working on our hosting product at Gandi for 2 years now and getting the technology right was very important for us. If we don't believe in what we're doing we can't expect you to too. Now we've fully launched our virtualised hosting offer based on Xen technology and have 5000 customers already upon us, so we hope this is some indication that we're getting it right. But why did we choose virtualisation? Because it is the future for web hosting. Why is it the future of web hosting? Because it can do anything other types of hosting can, but with greater flexibility, more resilience and often cheaper too.

On thing we've been proud of following our launch has been the industry reaction. For example, our technology partners Dell and AMD (whom we use for our servers, storage and processors) were impressed with our new offer and invited us to present it as a customer case study at a press event at Chelsea Football club in London a few weeks ago (we seem to be doing lots of Football club visits at the moment, the Nominet conference a few weeks ago was at Wembley Stadium. Who knows perhaps Arsenal is next...). It was a European wide event with over 50 journalists from different countries, so it was a great opportunity to share what we've been up to.

The theme of the event was data centre efficiency, looking at ways to improve performance and lower cost, which is something all businesses are thinking about as the recession kicks in, and the potential impact on the environment. For Dell, virtualisation was part of the story for how to achieve this. According to their studies, most servers run at around 10%-12% capacity. We have seen this ourselves in the 10 years we've been running hosting projects (in our life before Gandi). This means that roughly 90% of the machine resources are idle, consuming power, creating pollution, but not producing output. This also means that most customers are buying servers that are nearly 10 times over spec'ed for their requirements.

You might think this would be an unusual thing for Dell to point out. It implies that by using virtualisation you could take the jobs from 10 physical servers and put them onto a single server running 10 virtual shells that would now be running at 100% capacity. This would lead to 9 less servers sold for Dell, which is obviously not a great thing.

But Dell have been very brave here and recognise that virtualisation is so powerful that it is going to drive this market forward anyway, regardless of what they do about it. So they can either pretend its not going to happen, or they can educate their own customers, provide support and software to create virtualised environments and lead the way in this changing market.

And this is precisely why they were so interested in what we are doing at Gandi. We built our virtualisation offer so that you, our customers, can benefit from this kind of technology and efficiency without having to have large Dell contracts, or extensive IT teams.

With our offer you can create virtual servers to perform the tasks of dedicated physical servers, vary the power of each virtual server to your needs and save the power you're not using. Because of the flexibility of our system you can increase or decrease the number of shares (power) to meet the actual needs of the server, e.g. get it running closer to full capacity. This will lead to less cost and less waste.

And this is why it is the future of hosting. If you can have all of this power and flexibility which can scale up or down from the size of a small shared hosting pack to a large dedicated server (or cluster of servers), plus less pollution, less wasted space, why would you choose anything else?

Now if only someone would invite us to a conference at a decent football club we'd be really happy

Get your site at Gandi!

Ryan — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:29:00 +0100
No, we're not referring to healing the blind, although with our new online website creation tool, Gandi SiteMaker, you are indeed able to work with accessibility features to help the visually impaired...

Gandi SiteMaker is a product that has been developed by our English subsidiary, Moonfruit, since 2005. It is certainly the most impressive web 2.0 application that I have ever used, and this in an atmosphere where everything these days is being called web 2.0. It is really for this very reason that we asked them to join us at the time.

I can hear you saying right now, "...there’s already a boatload of WYSIWYG website creation applications out there”! And you could not be more right. Except that is has now been 9 years since they began the project, which has not stopped improving since then… And yet, I am not one who is really destined to appreciate this type of simple tool! I'm “Old School”, an old HTML tagger that still tries to optimize my gifs to be just the right hues… But to help Gandi, I have gone with Gandi SiteMaker, in order to see what it can do and experience its strengths and weaknesses.

What we are offering today, is an application with a extremely wide range of possibilities that will let you create a website of amazing quality in the blink of en eye! Dozens of templates are available to you as a basis for your site and for inspiration, while those of you who are graphic designers will find themselves a type of QuarkXPress of the web (yes – I did mention that I was old school…).

Now just hold on there (because I can hear the skeptics snickering in the background, thinking that I am going to launch into a sales pitch). I am not selling anything here! It’s free! Yes, that’s right: for those of you that have a domain name at Gandi, you can now create a website without any technical experience necessary. There are so many features that we had to create a lengthy FAQ just to cover all the questions of the product.

Features? Excluding the possibility of creating a website from an existing template (or a blank page for those of you that prefer it, of course), you may choose pre-established structure to help you along, and finally, with one click, you will find your website ready to be published or modified!

I recommend that you have a quick look at this video, which is no longer than 3 minutes long, and will show you just how easy it all is:

Now it’s your turn!

Wouldn’t it be nice to make a website for your parents of photos of your newborn? With one click on “insert”, then on “object”, I select “Pop-up Gallery”, and voilà! I now have a photo gallery, for which the most difficult part was to choose the order of my photos.

Have you been wanting to create a website for your local sailing club? Nothing could be more simple: a video player to show clips of the year’s bloopers, a web page where you can add a forum in just a single click, and a subscription form where you can manage the rights of members of your forum.

Aspiring artist, are you tired of non-lucrative expositions, and do you dream of having your own website with a gallery, an order form and an online payment system, so that you can sell your works all around the world? Once again, only a few clicks are needed to build your own website, and you do not need to know any computer language!

Hey! Let’s add a guestbook, ah…now that really is nice for visitors. Perfect!

Do you have a domain name at Gandi? Congratulations! You also have a Gandi SiteMaker Free Pack that you can already activate in your account, and begin to see this wonderful tool for your self – a tool that will truly let you create your online presence in no time at all!

Professional and customized

We have limited the Free pack to 2 pages, because we feel that this is enough to make a presentation page (a welcome page and a personal résumé for example) and in order to let you try out SiteMaker whenever you want. This is not a limited-time offer, it is a given for you.

Our two fee-based backs are for those of you that are more convinced that this is the tool for you, and who greater needs – still within an affordable price range. See for yourself: our Starter Pack, at €4 euros (excl. VAT) per month, allows you to create 50 pages, and to store up to 500 MB of files, and to benefit from all the advanced modules (with the exception of e-commerce). This latter feature is available with the Professional Pack, which costs €8 (excl. VAT) per month, with an unlimited number of pages and having 2GB of disk space. You can refer to our pack comparison page for more details.

Many of you have been requesting a service between free hosting and our Gandi AI virtual dedicated servers. With Gandi SiteMaker, we now hope to meet this demand, since the hosting of your websites is included in all the packs!

Cloud Infrastructure is finally concrete!

Ryan — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:39:00 +0200

We've made it!

For some it has been a four year labour of love, for others, less. In any case, an important step has just been taken by the team, of whom I am ever more proud: our Cloud Infrastructure is now operational. Yes, we are pleased to announce the grand opening of our Gandi Hosting service!

This wild dream is fuelled behind the scenes by the desire of a team to create something truly different, that will provide a unique combination of flexibility and transparency - two crucial elements often missing in the market. The desire to see people only consume what they really need, to provide them with the ability to migrate their resources from one location to another when needed, to move about freely...in short, everything that we dreamt about as customers ourselves.

The entire industry, all the players in this market, know very well that this technology will replace shared hosting, and possibly even dedicated hosting. The advantages for customers are too great to be ignored, which is why the traditional players, having down played this new type of hosting, are using buzzwords around virtualization in order to continue to sell to customers who are insufficiently informed.

It is our mission: to explain, again and again, why everyone needs flexible and dedicated resources, and those that accept this are turning to these solutions. Today we are talking about web hosting, but the infrastructure is really based on and can be used for "Cloud Computing". In other words, the rental of 'super computer' processing power which can be accessed from anywhere in the world for needs as diverse as 3D rendering, gigantic databases, etc...

To get back to hosting, our choice has been to offer a product with the following components:

- a technology that allows a degree of flexibility and security that is unrivalled among current web hosts/discounters,

- a price that is within reach of the largest number of people, maintaining one of the the core values of Gandi,

- a service that is worthy of being called such, or even more! Our mission is to serve you individually as best we possibly can, not to create an enormous mass of faceless customers.

I sincerely believe that, every day that has gone by and is yet to come, every effort is being made to meet our objectives, whether they are technical or personal.

Of course, the miracle solution, the one with the biggest pipes, the most massive machines etc.. that many players in the market are bragging about, does not exist. No technology will ever be flawless and we would not be providing you with an honest service if we made that claim.

But we do believe that:

Our role as a partner in your online presence (which is far more than simply hosting of your website), includes knowing that we need to help you see that you must use common sense in all situations, for example, the prominent mention in our hosting contract of the necessity to perform regular backups of your data.

We have months, or even years ahead of us to adapt our service to meet your needs, to perfect it so that it increasingly becomes one that cannot be ignored.

We are asking for the thing that is most important in our eyes, your confidence, to show you the way to go, not to hide from you all that we are doing, and to ensure that the service is as good as it can be. In our mind, this is achieved by proving the quality of our products to you.

When you entrust your online presence with us, we must be responsive if things go wrong (and this, even if I obviously do not want it to occur, does happen), be transparent with regards to what is taking place, and to do everything in our power to fix it, and of course to back this up with a commercial gesture.

All of this is clearly mentioned in our contract with you.

I do not know what you, our customers, will do with this service. Judging from the thousands of you that have joined us, even before the grand opening, it has already been a huge success, and one that all of us here wish to continue!

Despite the length of this entry, please allow me to warmly thank all the beta testers that have been with us these last nine months, without whom we would not have been able to make the right choices. I hope that by keeping the current rates for a few more months, and that the various rate schemes will encourage you to stay with us. As a side note, our American customers find that our offer is quite inexpensive for this type of service, compared to other offers of the same type.

As a conclusion, I just wanted, before totally delivering this service, to say to my team that they did a simply fabulous job, and that this can never be taken away from them. Simply put, we have suffered, but this is one of those things that can be remembered for ever with pride.Thanks to all that have contributed to this project!.

If I have been smiling in recent weeks - while I should have been more "stressed" due to the accumulated "delays" - it has been for this very reason: we are doing something long-term, and I am very proud of this, given all that we have achieved.

PS: The hardest part is just beginning, hang in there!

Stephan

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta...

Ryan — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:19:00 +0200
We have grown, and we have burned
We have worked and we have learned
And now our new service is ready to
Present as a final gift to you!

Granted, I was not hired to be a poet. Still, my heart is lifted at the very thought of how much progress our superb team of developers has made!

And all this just to bring you up-to-date on the latest developments in our hosting offer!

We'll begin then, if you please, by discussing storage:

- our initial storage architecture was based on RAID 6 SATA hard disks. This has been upgraded to RAID 60 on SAS disks. Since everyone prefers hearing about performance rather than norms and acronyms, know that our disks' access time has been divided by 3! This in itself is wonderful, but in addition to this you will also experience a far better quality of service.

And the network?

- As we preferred the color of the diodes on the Cisco switches better, we replaced all of our old switches by those made by this well-known brand. Actually, it was not just for looks that we did this, and the experts among you will know the truth. Those would be some expensive diodes!
- We have also installed a second data center which is nearly finished, and which will really allow us to go crazy with redundancy, backups, fail-overs etc... more about this in due time.

All this is just wonderful: a hosting platform that has offered an excellent level of service for over 9 months now, including a massive upgrade three months ago (correct me if I am wrong, dear Beta-Testers). And all of this as part of the beta! (even though not all of our customers have migrated to the famous new storage architecture! This will be done in the coming weeks, when the new customers, the non-beta testers if you will, will be comfortably installed directly on the SAS disks).

Wait! Stop throwing the tomatoes at me! Let me finish! This is the part where I mention money

All the recent changes and improvements in our network have obviously been at a cost. And since you, dear customer, have stopped being naive a long time ago, believing that you can give away a domain name just for fun or sell high-quality hosting for a buck without any trouble in the world, you are quite naturally going to ask me how much a Gandi hosting share will be once we are in the final version of our hosting service. The truth is that service and reliability have a cost.

Don't worry - I'm not going to dwell on this topic. I know what it's like to skim over a text, looking for an answer among the many lines; your eyes involuntarily jump around the page, in the hope of catching a number somewhere, the one you are looking for...

Yes, I know that I am playing with you here. So I have written the magic number in letters, so that it discretely blends into the surrounding text, so that you have to read everything. Enough said - I hereby announce the price excluding VAT of sixteen dollars (twelve euros, or nine pounds fifty depending on your currency) per month. Well, there you have it! Sixteen dollars excluding VAT for a share as you have come to know and love it with all its flexible options, while simultaneously being beefed up by SAS and thus having all its resources improved overall.

And if I constantly stress the flexible aspect that you are already familiar with, it is because we have also created a special offer for a new type of share that is part of the same technology, but without the flexibility in both time and price: an "annual share". Annual shares are purchased for a contractual period of one year, but are only fourteen dollars (ten euros or eight pounds) excluding VAT per month. An annual share is therefore purchased for an entire year for fourteen dollars a month, or one hundred sixty-eight dollars per year. Think of this share as the first one that you purchase in order to keep your cost to a minimum, and play with adding more or less shares depending on your needs.

The cherry on top is for the beta testers. In order to thank you for your confidence, your trust, and also your patience at the beginning (here I am thinking about the famous filer 13 incident), we are going to keep giving you Beta rates until the end of the year. I nonetheless must mention that the annual share, (the one that is fixed for twelve months), is not covered by this reduction - there have to be some limits!

Of course there will be some that will be unhappy with the rates. Those that honestly thought that our rates could remain at six euros per share forever... Realistically however Gandi has had to make major investments to offer a level of service that is worthy of its name in both technology and level of service, and these investments have had a direct impact on the price of a share.

We honestly believe that we are providing a high-quality service at a price that is within the reach of the public. The future will show you that you made the right decision to give us your trust; we are sure of this. And are working hard to make it come true. We have also kept in mind those of you who do not necessarily need all the power of these resources to launch your project. But require just a little bit of power. We will soon start to talk about an offer that we have been working on that is specifically designed for those of you that fit this description: a way to create a professional-quality website in the blink of an eye.

Innovation, my friends, innovation

PS (Stephan): So that our enthusiasm is not seen as simple arrogance, I feel the need to stress that we are doing our utmost to deliver the best quality of service, but that nobody is perfect. We may have the best machines in the universe, white rooms with millions of square feet at our disposal, pipelines capable of absorbing everything that moves etc... but there is always room for improvement.

You can, however, be sure of two things:

- that our infrastructure and technology can respond to meet the varied hosting needs of the general public

- that we are and will be doing everything, no matter what the circumstances may be, to serve you as best we can.

Friendly reminder on how to renew your hosting account

Ryan — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:28:00 +0100
Precisely one month after the launch of our hosting 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 hosting 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!

(4/6) Our hosting will be innovative

Ryan — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:00:00 +0100
When setting out to create a hosting service in the Gandi spirit, we made a point of doing something innovative.

Having come from our previous experience in the area (we just popularized shared hosting via Multimania roughly 7 years ago), we wanted to build a product that would bring something truly new to the market. To do this, our way of proceeding was to ask ourselves, "what would I like to be able to do with this solution (and adding, 'that I cannot do elsewhere')"?...
Each person has a different conception of the word "hosting", as well as different needs. This makes it easy for us to make a list of key points and possible innovations that would be able to drive this service in the right direction: yours.

To put all this down on paper, we use what we call "user cases"; these cases are just as diverse as the needs of all our customers.

Here is an exclusive look for you, our blog readers, of some examples, and we hope that you will be the ones to describe your own here shortly

Gandi AutoInstall

Automatic installation that is rapid and functional, and that lets you choose the level of customization you would like:

"I always wanted to have my own server, but my knowledge in system administration is not good enough...I'm always asking my friends how to install and configure this or that service. With Gandi AutoInstall, I can choose my applications, and specify the settings that I want. I then submit my request and the server is created and installed all by itself in a few seconds- and it works perfectly!"

Rapid and diverse installations to manage your wide range of needs:

"I am a reseller of complete internet solutions, with the number of customers that I have and their wide range of needs, I have found in Gandi AutoInstall a quick and reliable way to create multiple pre-configured servers in just a few clicks."

Gandi Hosting: Modularity of resources
The very principle of our service is based on the idea of providing a modular use of resources that can be changed in real-time, via the addition, removal, increase, and decrease of server shares and disk space.

The possibility of adapting to any situation in just a few seconds, without performing any changes:

                "I launched my new social networking website one Thursday evening, and the buzz occurred faster than anticipated - hundreds of visitors tried to connect to the website at the same time on Saturday night! The website was not able to handle the load, and it was a catastrophe for the launching! I immediately went to the hosting management interface page and saw that I could increase the capacity of my website in just a few seconds: I tripled my capacity, without even having to restart the server, and I was able to absorb the demand"

Quick power adjustment for a very short time:

                "I ordered a small server at Gandi to setup a TeamSpeak and an Americas Army server to play with my friends online. With Gandi's tutorial, I saw that it was easy to install, however, given the size of the installation file (2GB), it would have taken all day to install, all the more so, since we wanted to install several huge maps to customize the game. I therefore multiplied the power of the server by 4 and was able to download 4x faster! I was then able to go back to my original configuration, just 2 hours after having increased its power!"

Increased data security

Guaranteed reliability that is not found in similar offers:

                "At Gandi, the disks run with RAID6, which strongly reassures me, even though this does not prevent me from performing regular backups of my database. Knowing that 5 disks are running at the same time to save my data, this is a real guarantee of security that is normally only found in a distinct service at an extra cost."

Gandi Wi

An active and reactive community, based on the Gandi spirit: peer-to-peer help for all:

                "I am not a geek at all, but I would like to control my own server and choose the services to install on it. In addition to using AutoInstall that did all the basic installing tasks that I was happy to pass on, I found some great guides written by people in the Gandi community, who were also ready to help me with my questions. This really gave me the desire to participate myself."

Your right to be heard and to choose what technology Gandi offers:

                "Many of us in the Gandi community wanted to see the addition of the Linux Gentoo operating system. Thanks to the Gandi wishlist, we suggested the idea, and rallied others who wanted it as wel. The project was accepted by Gandi's developers and will be added within two weeks! It is nice to be heard and granted one's wish!"

Gandi Flex (AutoFlex) * under development, available in early 2008
The idea was to offer you a scheduled and/or automated update of the number of shares of your Gandi hosting.

An advanced scheduling system to meed my needs and assure that I have a high-quality service at the best price:

                "My website sees a lot of traffic on the weekend. Consequently, I was either under-sized for the times when the website was the most visited, or forced to have a hosting service that was over-sized for 5 out of 7 days, with the additional costs that go with it. With GandiFlex, I schedule the desired capacity on a day-to-day basis, and the server adapts itself to the volume of traffic. I therefore improve the quality of service, and avoid spending money needlessly."

A flexibility that allows changing one's needs depending on real and immediate use:

                "Our team holds regular training matches of Quake Wars. We are 8 and the server runs well with 4 shares. But hey, our matches are rather random, and we give them the password to our server, and so we can sometimes have 16 players, with the necessity of having a perfect level of quality at that time. With Gandi AutoFlex, there is not even any need to touch the interface, the server will automatically change from 6 to 7 shares during our matches and the game stays super fluid."

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It would be difficult at this time to describe the technology that will be used (server shares) in order to reach our goals: know simply that we consider our service to be a huge pool of machine resources, and that our role is to empower you to profit from it depending you needs, and this, in real-time.

We must also offer you services that will simplify your life, and we must remain at the leading edge of trends in terms of distributions and languages, thus freeing you from all the usual restraints... in short, invent - with your input - a new type of use, a new way of thinking about hosting, to consume more intelligently, and if if possible ... less!

(3/6) Our hosting will be for everyone

Ryan — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 16:23:00 +0100
You only need to glance at our list of customers' domain names to see that Gandi's community is made up of far more than just a group of enlightened technicians.

There are some real neophytes among you and we are proud of it - as much as we are of having the more experienced people as well! :D
Remember that our mission is to share the internet with the largest number of people possible, and to make it accessible to all. Not just in terms of quantity, but with an emphasis on quality, a quality that is designed to be felt by all of you who want your presence to be felt on the internet, no matter what your level of experience with the web may be.

We wanted the same thing to hold true for our web hosting service: to allow everyone to step foot on our boat and to take control of it in a way that best suits them.
You are an expert: climb up the main mast, raise the sails, and choose your heading: you are the only master aboard.

You are an amateur: choose your heading - we will help you stay on course, and give you your Captain bars.

You are a total beginner: take your place on the bridge - we will clear off for you and steer the boat to where you want it to go.

You are a major merchant and dream of having your own fleet: thanks to our web hosting API, you can wear your Admiral hat.

Whether you would like to learn how to sail your ship solo, or whether you prefer being allowed to drift along with the currents, it makes no difference - we will be there beside you to help if needed.

Whether you are a professional of the high seas, renting large merchant ships, or a hobbyist that only needs a small pleasure boat and a megaphone, it is all the same - you will have tools that are perfectly adapted to your journey.

Let me recapitulate without the metaphors. Gandi will provide hosting solutions for:

web hosts that want to focus on their level of service,

experts that want to get their hands dirty in order to meet all their needs,

professionals that want a highly stable solution,

amateurs and beginners, so that we can help them,

those that don't have any experience at all, but want to learn more.

In short: our hosting will be for everyone.

(2/6) Our hosting will be flexible

Ryan — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 11:28:00 +0100
Flexibility, this is the capacity to adapt to a given situation. And this is how we have designed our hosting service.
There are so many of you, and you all have radically different needs from each other. Would that mean that we would need to have just as many different hosting plans? We are definitely not going to provide a simple shared hosting plan: it is our job to adapt to your needs, and not to force you to you to choose a plan from a category that only more or less fits your needs. Our service will be flexible!

We also re-examined the question of obligation. We, the consumer, are now accustomed to the tradition of signing a contract for a set time period, that to use a given product, you must sign a contact for X months. This tradition applies to nearly all the hosting services we have seen. It is also against the very nature of the very flexibility that we want to give to you.

As a user, for example, one might like to rent a server for 3 months (to launch a website, a brand, etc.), or even, why not... a day, in order to work by remote connection with a team located in Ireland. And even, hey! let's be crazy: 3 hours, tonight, to play a round of Quake with some friends who live far away!

Also, why we are being flexible on duration, we might also be flexible on the capacity: Would you like to assure the good performance of your machine during the launching of a product, and then reduce its power once the initial surge has dropped off? Why should this not be possible? This works in the other way as well of course, and to an extent that you might not even have dreamed of

All of this, and without a set contractual period, holy cow!

I'll sum up all this up for you: You choose what you want, how long you want it for, you pay, and you get it

(1/6) Launching of Gandi Hosting

Ryan — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 12:24:00 +0100
From Santa Claus's sack we are getting ready to pull out a revolutionary from of web hosting. In other words, we are doing everything that we can to assure that a public Beta version of a product that we have been working on for some time now will be ready by Christmas. :D

Why in Beta?? Honestly, we have been behind schedule in recent months on the development of this service. This is simply because the existing products take precedence over a totally new one, however enthusiastic we may be about it. We have been in an internal testing phase for several weeks now, and reset the majority of variables to zero each morning to test different possible configurations, and there are many!

By the end of the year, we should be able to open a Beta version that is clean and ready to go (with a price that is worthy of the Christmas spirit), which will only require being tested on the new network.

Why revolutionary?? The word is a perhaps a bit pompous, put it is nonetheless one that fits the best. This hosting offer will not be like any other one that is on the market. We wanted to create an offer that stays true to our core values, one that we would be proud to have among our services - with a Gandi spirit inside. We have done this by putting You, as usual, at the center of the project. Doing this has assured that Gandi Hosting will be perfectly adapted to real every-day use, both immediately and in the future.

I will soon go in more detail here on how our offer of hosting in "shares" works. A bit like an Advent calendar, we will be opening more and more of our new offer as we approach the launching, in order to prepare you for what you have been waiting so long to see.

In the meantime, if any of you feel like being a tester, please let us know at the address alpha.hosting @ gandi.net. There will certainly not be enough place for all of the willing volunteers, but we will be pleased to have some of you on our test machines.