Gandi Bar - hosting

(4/6) Our hosting will be innovative

Ryan — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:00:00 +0100

When setting out to create a hosting service in the Gandi spirit, we made a point of doing something innovative.

Having come from our previous experience in the area (we just popularized shared hosting via Multimania roughly 7 years ago), we wanted to build a product that would bring something truly new to the market. To do this, our way of proceeding was to ask ourselves, "what would I like to be able to do with this solution (and adding, 'that I cannot do elsewhere')"?...

Each person has a different conception of the word "hosting", as well as different needs. This makes it easy for us to make a list of key points and possible innovations that would be able to drive this service in the right direction: yours.

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

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

Gandi AutoInstall

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

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

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

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

Gandi Hosting: Modularity of resources

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

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

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

Quick power adjustment for a very short time:

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

Increased data security

Guaranteed reliability that is not found in similar offers:

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

Gandi Wi

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

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

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

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

Gandi Flex (AutoFlex) * under development, available in early 2008

The idea was to offer you a scheduled and/or automated update of the number of shares of your Gandi hosting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(3/6) Our hosting will be for everyone

Ryan — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 16:23:00 +0100

You only need to glance at our list of customers' domain names to see that Gandi's community is made up of far more than just a group of enlightened technicians.

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

We wanted the same thing to hold true for our web hosting service: to allow everyone to step foot on our boat and to take control of it in a way that best suits them.

You are an expert: climb up the main mast, raise the sails, and choose your heading: you are the only master aboard.
You are an amateur: choose your heading - we will help you stay on course, and give you your Captain bars.
You are a total beginner: take your place on the bridge - we will clear off for you and steer the boat to where you want it to go.
You are a major merchant and dream of having your own fleet: thanks to our web hosting API, you can wear your Admiral hat.

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

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

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

web hosts that want to focus on their level of service,
experts that want to get their hands dirty in order to meet all their needs,
professionals that want a highly stable solution,
amateurs and beginners, so that we can help them,
those that don't have any experience at all, but want to learn more.

In short: our hosting will be for everyone.

(2/6) Our hosting will be flexible

Ryan — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 11:28:00 +0100

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1/6) Launching of Gandi Hosting

Ryan — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 12:24:00 +0100

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

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

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

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

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

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