Gandi Bar - Tag - Virtualisation - Comments

How to turn your website into a "Web Infrastructure" - Spi007

Spi007 — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 02:37:33 +0200

LAMP stands for Linux+Apache+Mysql+Php

Hosting - server performance statistics - Angel Wilson

Angel Wilson — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:13:09 +0100

Wow Genius efforts and i like the server statistics which you have given in the post

Hosting - server performance statistics - Alex Scheman

Alex Scheman — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:20:03 +0100

Useful tool for checking Server Traffic and all

Hosting - server performance statistics - James Ferguson

James Ferguson — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 06:21:50 +0100

Hi,

Excellent tool to check hosting server activity. Thanks for sharing.

How to turn your website into a "Web Infrastructure" - Movie

Movie — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 09:45:23 +0100

What is "LAMP"?

Virtualisation - and why it is the future of web hosting - pester

pester — Wed, 20 May 2009 10:59:21 +0200

Read more info about webhosting here - http://www.frogmix.com/search/webho...

Hosting - server performance statistics - bonee

bonee — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:50:27 +0200

you should make more details

Hosting - server performance statistics - William

William — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 13:29:29 +0200

Thank you to the team for this excellent work. The graphs are great and we can now have a good idea of the real work of the system. It is very useful because our statistics are made from the JAVA application itself and can not give a complete set of data.
These graphs are a key for choosing your virtualization offer.

Hosting - server performance statistics - Shahar Or

Shahar Or — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:05:59 +0200

Dear Gandi staff,

Thank you. This is much appreciated.

Many blessings.

Hosting - server performance statistics - Wendy (Gandi)

Wendy (Gandi) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:41:20 +0200

Thanks, Daniel glad it's of use.

Hosting - server performance statistics - Daniel de Kok

Daniel de Kok — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:44:36 +0200

I'd just like to thank the Gandi staff for this excellent new feature! It makes it much easier to see what sites need to be spread out to separate servers.

Hosting improvements - more, more, more - pascal

pascal — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:52:41 +0100

Hi,

Yes, driver domain has guaranteed ressources for virtual I/Os.

Today xen is configured with strict (credit) partitionning, equally important domains.
You get a fixed amount of credit with each share.

However, we do not want the share to appear excellent at the beginning (because you're alone on a node, you get full idle cpu for yourself) and degrade over time with no user idea of when it will stabilize. As people can try our servers "for a few minutes", that would be kind of lying. We want the user to experience an expected, stable performance level.

So we slightly overcommit on the credit, and as we'll get better at migrating vms accross nodes to achieve a little balance, we'll probably overcommit a little more.

Hosting improvements - more, more, more - Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 20:32:59 +0100

Your data about CPU utilization reminds me of a couple of questions I have about Gandi's hosting service.

Do you have Xen configured to strictly partition CPU resources and not allow domains to exceed them, or can one domain take more CPU if another domain falls idle? The latter seems like a better way to ensure that CPUs stay near 100% utilization at all times.

Also, given how Xen does virtual I/O through domain 0, you should have Xen configured so that domain 0's VCPUs get dedicated physical CPUs which nothing else can run on. This will significantly improve I/O performance.

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:39:08 +0100

Following up for the benefit of anyone else who finds comments 22 and 23: I did in fact contact direction@, and Gandi offered me an excellent Open Source developer discount. I won't give the specific pricing details here in case Gandi doesn't want them shared publicly, but Gandi's offer definitely represents the best Open Source discount I've ever seen. I can highly recommend Gandi's hosting to any Open Source developer who wants to host a project or a personal site.

Who is Gandi and why should I care about them? - Zhangjia

Zhangjia — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 01:10:37 +0200

Thank you for the information.
It give me clear view about who you are and what you have done.
Great jobs!

Cloud Infrastructure is finally concrete! - Julian

Julian — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 16:12:09 +0200

Hi. I saw this WHT post and I'm curious if this is true, that we can't install CPanel on our share, because of the way you handle disk space...

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showt...

"[...]because the disk space is mounted to a single mount, but cpanel needs certain mount points to have certain space available [...]"

This could ruin it for many people...

Cloud Infrastructure is finally concrete! - Nicolas (Gandi)

Nicolas (Gandi) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:11:26 +0200

a/ the speed limit is the speed of 1/64 of a quadri quad core AMD
b/ We don't sell extra IPs for the moment as the RIPE is more restrictive for 'new' hosting company, but it will come.

Cloud Infrastructure is finally concrete! - Emmanuel

Emmanuel — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:32:04 +0200

LOL, I meant speed, not transfer!

Cloud Infrastructure is finally concrete! - Emmanuel

Emmanuel — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:31:03 +0200

Hi and congatulations. Two small questions... a) do you have a speed limit per share (speed, not bandwidth) and b) what is the pricing for extra IPs? Thanks!

Cloud Infrastructure is finally concrete! - joe (gandi)

joe (gandi) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:39:59 +0200

Hi Nick, no not at the moment. We're looking at options to get something into the US, but it won't be until next year at the earliest. However our Paris data centres are very well connected, so server performance should be comparable to an East coast data centre. Thanks, Joe

Cloud Infrastructure is finally concrete! - Nick S.

Nick S. — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:03:40 +0200

Do you have any servers located in the U.S.? If so, where?

Cloud Infrastructure is finally concrete! - Wendy(Gandi)

Wendy(Gandi) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:02:27 +0200

Thanks Ciprian, we're all very excited, if you use the service let us know how it goes.

Cloud Infrastructure is finally concrete! - ciprian

ciprian — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:32:48 +0200

Congratulation on the launch, i'm sure that all will work super.

Cheers

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Nicolas (Gandi)

Nicolas (Gandi) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:55:47 +0200

Anonymous => of course you can contact us at the email address direction@

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:29:59 +0200

Would you consider offering discounts to the Open Source Software developers who write the software that powers your hosting solution? If so I can contact you privately with further details, but I wanted to find out if you had any inclination towards the idea.

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Nvi

Nvi — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:58:51 +0200

Thank you for the detailed answers.

I read about the Flex system and the auto-Flex possibility in the future, although I'm a bit worried about "spikes" that could occur, ranging from a few minutes to a few hours. How would a share react? One could never know when the ability to scale is needed and, provided that there are free resources in the server, this could be a solution. If my share would run at 50% at a given moment, I wouldn't mind to loan the rest of it when another customer needs it for a couple of hours.

About the digg-proof question, let's say about a post in a standard Wordpress blog, with a few (not power-hungry) add-ons.

Finally, I forgot to ask about backups. Do you offer them as a standard or as an add-on?

For us VAT-affected Europeans, your service and price is roughly similar to Slicehost and Linode (although Linode offer 40% more RAM), about $20 per share. I'm positive that all of you offer a respectable service, but the devil is in the details and each customer should choose according to his top priorities. For example, I'm sceptical about the 5 Mbps cap. I won't use 1.5 Tb per month (more like a third of this), but even if my server is responsive and configured properly, the line cap could present a downside for visitors. A 10Mbps line with a 500 Gb limit would be preferable.

P.S.: OK, one more point for Gandi. Someone actually is a Monty Python fan!

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - joe (gandi)

joe (gandi) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:51:52 +0200

Hi Nvi, wow, what a lot of questions! But fortuneately we have the answers

i) What is the CPU power of each share, in MHz?

Well, roughly speaking in each machine we have 4 x 4 physical processors each of which is about 2Ghz, so 16x2Gz, meaning each share gets roughly 500Mz each. It's not always quite that straighforward to divide it, so we have a benchmark page which shows you the equivalent power here:
https://www.gandi.net/hosting/propo...

ii) Can a share go over its CPU and RAM limit for a limited period, if there are free resources in the server?

No, but that's partly the point of the Xen system. It means that the resources are truely yours and cannot be used by anyone else even if you are not using. Which means the reverse is true too, you cannot get access to other shares, even if they are unused.

However we do have Flex, which is a system where you can increase the amount of shares you use for small periods only. So if you know you need more, you can book it in advance and get it.

iii) Is a single share digg-proof (I have this single-slice example in mind => http://forum.slicehost.com/comments...)?

This is almost impossible to answer as it really depends on what you're running on your share and how your site is written. If you just had static files on your site, it would be cached and served out even at high volume with minimumal problems. If you had a complex database, so each query kicked off a script, then a high volume could cause problems. So really it depends on what you've got on your share, and you'll have to adjust things as you go depending on your needs. We try to give you some guidance here:
https://www.gandi.net/hosting/propo...

iv) Will you run your servers to a fixed limit (e.g. 90%) or each one will be filled 100% with 62 (+2 for management) slices?

There is no fixed limit on our machines, though we do need to always run with spare capacity, as customers can upgrade/downgrade at any time, or book flex resources. So in practice there will always be free room in the system, though how this is spread between individual machines will not always be the same. Though once again, the physical resources of each share are fixed and guaranteed.

v) Will you offer SMS support for outages and other similar problems?

Our network ops team get alerted by SMS (and other methods) in event of a failure, but this is not something that we offer as standard direct to our customers (though we could do it in the future). It would be possible for you to setup monitoring services on your shares which alerted you by SMS, though you would have to configure this yourself.

vi) Are there any real-world examples of sites with a decent amount of traffic/visitors, running on 1-2 slices?

We have many thousands of servers running now, each with different amounts of shares. I believe this one, www.webeden.co.uk has 2 shares running.

vii) In general, why do you think your service (leaving support aside) is better than them?

Well, looking at the slicehost.com offer it is a Xen based system, but there are many reasons why our offer is superior. Which are;

* Price - Ours is $16 per share, there's is $20
* Flexibility - Our contract is by the hour, there's is by the month (though if you signup with them, I was surprised to see a minimum of 3 months)
* Scale - We have 750,000 domain names and manage many thousands of customers each day. We have built our hosting over 2 years to make sure it is robust for the scale we need. In a few months from the beta launch we had 7000 servers created to test our systems, and following that we refined the offer to tighten it up. We expect to deal with many tens of thousands of servers in a very short time, and are confident we will be robust.
* Transparency - We tell you exactly what is going on and what our servers and disks are made of. We promise to always keep you informed even if we suffer problems.
* Disks - We are running RAID 60 with SAS disks, which is the best solution on the newest disk technology.

viii) What is the speed of an african swallow?

The average flight speed of a European swallow is about 11 metres per second. http://www.style.org/unladenswallow... However the African swallow is generally of similar size and weight. So if I had to guess, I would also say 11 metres per second

I hope that helps,

Joe

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Nvi

Nvi — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:16:01 +0200

I have some questions, since your service (pricing, specifications) competes with Slicehost, more or less (they offer more storage, you offer way more bandwidth but with a capped line etc.). The choice is not easy, since they also run a respectable service.

The machine is a Dell PowerEdge R905. From dell.com I see that this uses 4 Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processors from the 8300 series. The 8300 series has processors from 1900 to 2500 MHz, therefor I'm unable to determine the real CPU power of a slice.

i) What is the CPU power of each share, in MHz?

ii) Can a share go over its CPU and RAM limit for a limited period, if there are free resources in the server?

iii) Is a single share digg-proof (I have this single-slice example in mind => http://forum.slicehost.com/comments...)?

iv) Will you run your servers to a fixed limit (e.g. 90%) or each one will be filled 100% with 62 (+2 for management) slices?

v) Will you offer SMS support for outages and other similar problems?

vi) Are there any real-world examples of sites with a decent amount of traffic/visitors, running on 1-2 slices?

vii) In general, why do you think your service (leaving support aside) is better than them?

viii) What is the speed of an african swallow?

I don't mean to sound (read) rude, but there are many recent fiascoes in the "cluster" sector of the hosting industry and the sceptics among us, need more info to process. I know I can try before buying, but time is precious.

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Surfa

Surfa — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:37:50 +0200

Hi there..

I've been one of the betatesters for a while now and improvement of the service is significant. In the beginning I was experiencing all kinds of problems with the virtualization itself, but for month or two the service has been almost perfect.

Also I have to mention that the price of 12eur is very competent compared to local service providers here. Thank you for that.

I hope that the quality of the service remains at the level as it has been lately. In that case I'm more than happy being a client also in the future.

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - joe (gandi)

joe (gandi) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:14:06 +0200

Hi guys, I'm glad to hear that you're happy with the offer. It should be available to everyone by the end of next week, so not long to wait now.

@ Chris - yes the issues that would cause servers to become unavailable are solved. We have network ops staff available 24/7 so any issues will be dealt with promply.

@ Jonas - the VAT rate is the French rate, which is 19.6%. If you are a European company you can provide a European VAT number and will not be charged this amount. Also if you are outside of Europe you will not be charged either.

I hope that helps, Joe

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Jonas

Jonas — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:00:31 +0200

For us European users, could you please give us the prices including VAT? Or at least tell us what the applicable VAT percentage is.

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Chris

Chris — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:28:18 +0200

Good to hear that things are moving out of beta.

One remark however. Since you will now be hosting servers that are LIVE instead of some sandboxing servers, I do hope that the doubling of the price includes a support staff that is on call 24 hours a day.

You can't run a hosting company with customers having to wait 24+ hours to get their server back online if there is a problem. I do trust that you have that solved and simply forgot to mention it, because otherwise I would still consider the hosting platform 'beta'.

I do hope to hear some good news on this regard so we can make the decision whether we will go ahead and migrate all our servers to your company.

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Abhishek

Abhishek — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:16:54 +0200

thats very Good news .. but when gandi will open for every one .. means i want to by a server please let me know...

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Barry

Barry — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:58:39 +0200

Thank you guys!

Even with the price increase, your service still offers more benefits compared to similarly priced offerings from other providers.

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Daniel de Kok

Daniel de Kok — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:29:24 +0200

That's a good price for the service that's offered. Most Xen-ish competition is more expensive, and not as flexible as Gandi. As with domain names, I'd rather pay a bit more for a good quality service, and it sounds like all preparations have been made to make it solid.

And thanks for giving us beta testers a few more months at the old price ;)!

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Wendy (Gandi)

Wendy (Gandi) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:49:15 +0200

Hi guys glad to see you're so keen to get your hands on hosting! Word on the street is .... the Beta will reopen to everyone in the next few days and the service will go live by the end of next week. Look forward to seeing what you're all going to do

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Eugene

Eugene — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:41:22 +0200

Wow. To many letters on screen. WHEN, GUYS, WHEN???
You have a testers, you have your fanky service for slected, but what about others?

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Delfi_r

Delfi_r — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:09:20 +0200

The day is now! great announcement!

Now er'll try to rise the service to the maximum. We are at 38 shares now, and growing. ¿There will be bulk rates?

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Alex

Alex — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 05:49:21 +0200

Any word on when we will be able to order a server? (It's still showing the beta invitation message)

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Donald

Donald — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:13:24 +0200

The beta price was always a bit too good to last. But even USD16 for what you're offering (Xen/256MB/5GB/5Mbit) is pretty competitive.

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - PJ

PJ — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:12:30 +0200

Glad to hear it's coming... but could you announce again once i can actually orde some hosting ?

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Ryan (Gandi)

Ryan (Gandi) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:15:56 +0200

@Jake: Thanks for your compliment!

We too were unsure as to what the final cost per share would be (within a certain ballpark of course). In the end, we needed to set the price where we did because we chose to go with better hardware and performance.

Between the ramifications of offering cheap equipment and low prices, or those of top notch equipment and a somewhat higher prices there is really only one possibility that would hold true to Gandi's reputation and engagement to you.

So yes, the rates are perhaps a bit higher than anticipated, but the performance will leave nothing to be desired

However, you must not forget the very uniqueness of Gandi's offer: absolute flexibility. By being able to add and remove shares depending on your needs in real-time, both manually and using our automatic GandiFlex service, you can actually greatly reduce your cost, as you only use pay for what you actually consume. So not only are you gaining in performance, but in the long term you are gaining in savings!

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Jake

Jake — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:58:29 +0200

Ryan, that was a long-winded way to say you are doubling your prices.

Three months at the same price is at least some advance notice, but a 100% price rise is a lot to stomach, whether it was a Beta service or not. I didn't get the impression prices would rise like this when we signed up.

That said, the service is great so we will stick with it.

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - Anurag

Anurag — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:07:07 +0200

Ryan, at $14 prices are still extremely cheap, thanks for keeping it low.

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - joe (gandi)

joe (gandi) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:32:35 +0200

Hi Goranche, just a little bit longer yet, then you'll get your annual shares. We'll be sure to tell you when it's ready, but it has to bake just a little bit more...thanks for waiting! Joe

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta... - goranche

goranche — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:48:54 +0200

Yeah, great, congrats and all that :D

if however, I go clicking to order my anual share and find I can't yet, I'll... I'll... I'll...
well, I guess I'll wait a bit longer...

and also, I'm glad I'm not the only one who actually cares about the color of the diodes :D