Gandi IWI Blog

In 2010, the geography of the Internet is set to expand significantly, as ICANN will liberalise the market for domain name extensions. Gandi have commissioned a report from The FutureLab to see how consumers and businesses view this change.
More about the liberalisation process

Is this a squatting opportunity or a branding opportunity?

2/3 of businesses don't realise domain extensions are being liberalised next year. But those businesses that do know about this (like Deloitte) are excited about the opportunities in the areas of global branding. However corporates are also concerned that brand protection mechanisms need to be in place at the new registries, a view that has been raised by Microsoft.
More about the impact on businesses. Inc video interview with COO Gandi.net

Will the net become full of pointless domains?

Many consumers are confused about what liberalisation means and are concerned by the rise of squatting, phishing and advertising clogging up the domain space. However they do feel a real connection with localised domain names, e.g. .london, .paris. nyc, etc., and communities they are interested in, e.g. .music, .movie, .sport. There is also a growing Generation Y group interested in self publishing and being associated with certain brand names like .facebook, .myspace, .moonfruit.
More about the impact on consumers. Inc video interview with Marketing Director Gandi.net

Will this mean the end of 'Dot Com'?

Will 'Dot Com' decline with the advent of new geographical, brand and interest group based extensions. Or will this give Dot Com a chance to clean up its act and reclaim its prime real estate from pay per click ads, squatters and unresolved web addresses.
More about the evolving landscape

The evolving landscape of the internet following liberalisation

Why did Gandi commission this independent report

At Gandi we feel strongly about the future of the internet. We commissioned this report because we want to keep the domain space free for consumer and commercial use. We think this is an important enough issue that people need to understand the impact on them as consumers and businesses. How do you want these new domain territories to be governed? and are there lessons to be learned from how we've used our existing domain space? More about the report

Download the report in full

To comment on this come to our special report pages

No, we're not referring to healing the blind, although with our new online website creation tool, Gandi SiteMaker, you are indeed able to work with accessibility features to help the visually impaired...

It has been some time since we have last brought you up to speed with all the latest developments here at Gandi, and if this is the case, it is because we have been hard at work for you! New hosting features, payment options, mail upgrades, blog improvements, we have a list of new services that will, I hope, have made the wait worthwhile!

It has been a while since our last "What's up" post, which we normally use to let you know about the ongoing projects. So it is time to cath up.

Our technical teams are still working hard on our hosting system in order to be ready with the final version for September.
So here is the list of functions that have been added during the last few weeks:

New TLDs ...
After the .CN (China), .TW (Taïwan) and .CZ (Czech Republic) in June, this month we have added the .PL (Poland), .LU (Luxembourg) and we have participated in the launch of the .ME (Montenegro) and of the .PRO early this week. There will probably be fewer releases of new TLDs during the month of August. The next ones to come are the .IN (India), .IM (Isle of Man) and of course the highly anticipated .ES.
Another good thing : starting today, we are lowering the price of .CH/.LI domain names.

Increased protection of your personal information
We now offer you the ability to completely hide your address and all other personal information for .COM, .NET, .ORG, .INFO, .BIZ, .NAME, .TV and .CC TLDs from the whois database. We remind you that if you are an individual, you just need to access your personal information management interface to activate this protection for free.
To see how this will affect your Whois records, you can check the product page : http://www.gandi.net/domain/whois

Gandi Hosting
Our System, Network and RandD teams are busy putting in place the new storage (disk) structure for Gandi Hosting. We will tell you more soon, but can already say that the new improved preformance will not be disapointing.

-Gandi AI V1.0: Our server auto-install system has finally been upgraded to the V1.0 version. This version will help us release the numerous modules coming from the wishlist. A V1.1 version is scheduled for August with the release of the Subversion, Dotclear, Drupal, Teamspeak modules as well as some others.

-Choice of the file system: You now have the ability to chose the format of the filesystem during the creation of a new data disk.

-5Mbits per share: We have raised the limit of the authorized outgoing bandwidth to 5Mbits per share. For those of you who are not clear about the implications, this allows you to transfer about 649kb each second, i.e more than 1.5Tb per month.

-Ongoing works: Quite a few technical projects are currently in development. With no particular order : the ability to change the size of a data disk, the ability to duplicate a server or a disk, the ability to start your server from an image, the ability to create backups, the ability to get stats on the load of your server,...

Gandi Mail
Even though we no longer have any performance issues since our last update to the Gandi Mail platform last May, we are working on the next stage in its development : offering a superior level of service and adding new functions for 2008 (last quarter).

Gandi Blog
Big updates have been made to reinforce the stability and the performance of the Gandi Blog platform. For instance, the performance improvement of last Thursday (thank you iphon.fr) was done without any noticable issues. The new functions will be available with the release of Dotclear V2.0, which, according to a reliable source who had a cup of coffee with Olivier, should come out early August (yes, this August).

The goal is to achieve the maximum level of quality possible on all of our individual services. Speaking about quality of service, a new form is now available for you to give your feedback and comments on our service and product quality. We hope that this feedback channel will allow us to keep getting a healthy pressure from you, our customers, to help us maintain our standards.

Click here to comment.

We wish to express our sincerest apologies for the quality of our Gandi Mail service yesterday, Monday 3 March 2008. Some of you unfortunately received mail with more than 3 hours' delay, which is simply unacceptable.

The problem is mainly due to an abnormally significant load on our mail servers. On 'normal' days, we already manage more than 10 million e-mails (80% or 90% being spam). Delivering top-quality service is an every day struggle which should be made transparent to you. Yesterday was clearly a failure. We could have silenced it and looked the other way, but that doesn't correspond to our aims and to who we are. As always, we prefer to be totally transparent, to confirm that the problem has been identified and that we are working on it fully.

Our platform will therefore be modified in upcoming weeks to give you more comfort in your mail management. Until then - and starting from now - we are going to add machines and change some settings so as to ensure less delays when we experience spamming of several hundreds of thousands of e-mails.

Finally, just a word of advice for those of you who are still on the old mail platform and the old DNS (full1.gandi.net or ns7.gandi.net): I strongly recommend that you migrate to the new DNS and to Gandi Mail, which globally works better. To do so, all you need to do is click the 'Manage' link in the mail section of your domain management interface and follow the procedure.

As explained, maintaining an excellent quality of products and services is a priority, and this is adequately reflected in our timetable.

You can discuss this with us at the Gandi Bar.

After a brief product stabilization period, and to celebrate our new Gandi news system, we are restarting our "What's up" blog entry series to give you a view of the new services available at Gandi as we roll them out.