Gandi Bar - Tag - VPS

The new Gandi cloud is on its way!

Thomas — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:37:00 -0700

We are making huge changes to our Cloud VPS systems. In a few weeks, several features that the market expects and that our customers have been demanding will be available. This will mean big improvements in the flexibility and operation of our IaaS products.

We are making huge changes to our Cloud VPS systems. In a few weeks, several features that the market expects and that our customers have been demanding will be available. This will mean big improvements in the flexibility and operation of our IaaS products.

First, for Gandi Cloud VPS servers, payment in advance for resources will vanish. It will be replaced by a single, simple, Gandi credit unit. You will be able to purchase these credits on demand from your Gandi prepaid account, or in packs at a discount proportional to the amount you buy. The more you commit to spend in Gandi credits, the bigger a discount you get.

To enhance flexibility, we are switching from a daily charge period to an "hourly" model, allowing us to charge for use with precise granularity, and to free ourselves from the concept of "shares".

Yes, the famous "share" will disappear, allowing you to resize your servers according to your whim, with the resources you want, when you want. You can kind of do this now, with a rather coarse daily scale, but the new system is much better, allowing you to pay just for what you play.

If you need more CPU, it will no longer be necessary to have CPU resources available in your account: you just add the desired number of processors, and the number of credits consumed per hour changes, and that's all. When you no longer need the extra power, you lower the number of CPUs, and this lowers the hourly consumption and price, and that's all. Really.

Another great (and frequently requested) benefit is the synchronization of the renewal dates for resources. All that remains is for you to keep an eye on the number of credits and the estimated time remaining for your use of resources available in your account. No more calculations for available resources!

We have included a cost-saving gradual reduction of price, based on the resources used per server. That means, for example, a single server with 8 CPUs and 8 GB of RAM will consume a little less credit than 8 servers with 1 GB of RAM each. You will see the levels of price reduction when you create your server:

To give you even more flexibility, if you want to stop a configured server and return to it later, just stop it. You will only pay for the static resources it consumes, namely the storage and IP address. When you want to restart the server, click it to wake it up

The billing will also be much easier. You will always have access to a clear picture of what you consume, by resource and by server, and the corresponding credit/cash balance.
You also can set alerts, and automatically purchase credit packs.

All these simplifications make use of the API, which is much easier as well!

Bandwidth management is also improving. The current model requires you to buy more shares to access more bandwidth, but soon, when the famous share disappears, you will be able to freely create your network interfaces, giving them limits of 1 to 100Mbps. Throughput will now be charged for, based on consumption per month. We will charge for use that is more than 90% of the maximum our current customers use, so nothing will change for the vast majority of users. For the remaining 10%, the reduction in price/resources on large servers offsets the additional cost for the extra bandwidth. For just a handful of high-bandwidth consumers, the rate will increase, and so will correspond much more precisely to our costs.

What about migration? We will start in May. The first thing we will do is send you an email (soon!) summarizing the resources available in your account, and the equivalent credits you will be given to replace them in the new model. Your servers, of course, will continue to run without any changes to the originally-contracted expiration dates. Unused resources in your account will be automatically removed, and converted to equivalent credits, which you can then use to run the servers you have, or for more resources or servers. Credits awarded in this way also come with a discount, based on the current commitment. Credits will not be refundable. They will be like a server is now with an annual commitment.

We are sure that you have a lot of questions about the details, specific operations, etc., so we have created this little FAQ in our wiki on these new features. If you do not find an answer for your question there, you can leave us a comment here, or email us directly at feedback@gandi.net . Please use email if you have a question that is specific to your account.

We are absolutely sure that this new model will simplify your life, by making your servers more flexible and easier to manage.

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

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!!!