Gandi Bar - Tag - Virtualization

Gandi rolls out new cloud billing platform

Thomas — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 15:36:00 -0700

It has been a few weeks since we first started talking about a new way to bill for cloud computing services, and our technical teams have been hard at work to make the changes needed to give our customers a smoother, more flexible way to pay for compute power online. Not to mention less expensive: the vast majority of our customers will pay less under the new scheme, since instead of reserving shares ahead of time, you reconfigure whenever and pay by the hour for what you actually use. It has been a few weeks since we first started talking about a new way to bill for cloud computing services, and our technical teams have been hard at work to make the changes needed to give our customers a smoother, more flexible way to pay for compute power online. Not to mention less expensive: the vast majority of our customers will pay less under the new scheme, since instead of reserving shares ahead of time, you reconfigure whenever and pay by the hour for what you actually use.

It is shaping up well, and thanks to our incredibly loyal best testers (give yourselves a hand!), it includes a lot of things we never thought of, (like putting monthly consumption numbers in the control panel, for instance).

Tired of reading already? Maybe just watch a quick video to see what's going on:

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Still reading? Well then, here's a quick summary of the stuff we changed:

Gandi credit system with up to 30% discount for advance purchases
Way more flexibility in server resource settings
Stopping servers stops charges for server resources (disk resources and interfaces still cost something while stopped)
API enhancements to make it easy to manipulate credits with API calls
Cool new user interface for control of your IaaS servers

What else? Well, you know us, we are up front with everything, and we can't tell you about all this stuff without being honest about where we are charging more. In this case, this change will introduce new charges for bandwidth, which we never had before. That's the bad news.
The good news is that we don't charge for the first 500 gigabytes in a given month. That means that over 95% of our users will still pay nothing at all for bandwidth. We even have a monitoring feature, too, so if you get close, you can start limiting bandwidth on your interfaces before you run into chargeable territory.

Are you not a Gandi customer yet? Maybe you are a customer, but just never tried our cloud hosting services? We really want you to, so that's why we are willing to give you free (as in beer) 30,000 Gandi credits, just for asking. That's enough to run a small server for several days, or fire up a huge platform server with a terabyte of storage for a few hours. You will find a button to request your free credits up on our hosting page. Give it a try and see why we are so excited about the flexibility and power we are unleashing.

What's next? We are adding a new front end to Gandiflex, to make it super easy to set up scheduled resource level changes on your running servers. In a couple of weeks, we will be adding a calendar interface to let you pick when to beef up your servers to handle traffic.

We have a lot going on, and it keeps getting better here at Gandi.

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

Who is Gandi and why should I care about them?

Wendy — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:32:00 +0100

Ah a good question. Who is this strange and wonderful French domain registrar and hosting provider, and why should I believe they are wonderful? What does it mean to believe in domain name ethics? Well to understand Gandi you have to go back to the very beginning...

You see Gandi was founded out of the desire to create free and fair access to homes on the internet; your address, your domain name. Back in the murky days of 1999 the AFNIC (controllers of the .fr domain) had restrictions on selling .fr's, so that only companies and trademark holders could own them. This meant the average French individual could not buy one, so instead they bought the GTLDs, e.g. .com or .net.

But in those days the GTLDs were sold by an exclusive group of mainly US registrars, at reasonably punchy prices (some still sell for $35+ per year) and with some unsavoury terms (more about that later). The original founders of Gandi set about creating a registrar that was for everyone, that encouraged domain ownership, made it affordable and accessible.

Gandi became one of the first ICANN accredited domain registrar when it was opened up to new companies in 1999, and helped pioneer the domain market we have today.

Gandi slashed the price of domain names, selling at a fixed €12 price (only a small mark-up on the registry cost, and not a lot in 1999 when the Euro was worth less than a Dollar), so that it was more accessible to a wider audience.

And more importantly Gandi setup its terms and conditions so that the domain buyer was made the 'owner' of the domain, and not the registrar. This may sound very obvious (why wouldn't the person paying be the owner?) but was actually unusual back then. Instead domain registrars would often take your money, put the domain name in their own name, and then lease it to you. So you might find out a few years later when you wanted to leave that you didn't actually own the domain name at all, despite paying for it. Very dodgy.

But not Gandi. With Gandi you were always the owner of your domain, and this was a very important reason why Gandi developed a strong following in Europe and the US. For those that read the legal agreements and were passionate about how it 'should be', they found Gandi and stayed with us.

Nearly 10 years later, this hasn't changed. Gandi was bought in 2005, by an experienced team of internet entrepreneurs, Stephan Ramoin, CEO, Joe White, CFO/COO and Eirik Pettersen, CTO who had always believed in fairness, transparency and innovative, products and services on the internet. Gandi continues to push for a fairer approach to domain buying and selling, and customer led products and services. We take a stand against spammers, domain squatters, and dodgy practices in the industry. We build great products for you to buy or not as you choose. We don't spend money on advertising, instead we prefer that our customers are our advocates. If you don't believe in our services, we shouldn't be selling them!

We believe your domain is more than just a name but your online presence on the internet whether it’s a home for your business, project or profile. And as such should be supported and protected. We intend to provide an alternative set of products which support you to do this. As many of you know we released our revolutionary virtualised hosting product recently for our tech savvy customers and we will be launching tools for customers who want build well designed, hosted websites easily and quickly very soon.

So there you have it. Gandi was founded on the principle of providing services 'as they should be', honest, fair, reasonably priced and with your interests at heart. We welcome you to join us and make your home with us online. Viva l'internet!

(For those of you interested in a bit of net history, click here, an article written in 2000 looking at domain providers legal contracts. Network solutions was given a 1 out of 5 rating for the fairness of its contract, while Gandi was given 5 stars - "Three registrars currently enjoy a perfect five-star legal rating. Contracts with these companies tend to favor consumers. For example, a Paris-based registrar named Gandi.net states clearly in its agreement: "The client owns the registered domain name." Also, the firm can't change its contracts at will, except for fee changes.")

Gandi UK Team

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.