Gandi IWI Blog - Gandi

Gandi Customer Service during the Holidays

Lyn — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:49:00 +0100

We would like to bring to your attention that two holiday celebrations fall on Fridays this year (December 25th and January 1st ) which means our support team will also be deservedly celebrating these events.

Our team will none-the-less be present, although reduced in numbers, the following Saturdays – (December 26th and January 2nd ) to assure our continued customer service.

In the case of a serious problem with one of your servers during this period, please indicate in your request that your server is *blocked*, so that the engineers on standby can quickly take action.

If you have a renewal, or some other delicate operation to make, we would especially advise you to avoid doing it during these days, and send in advance your request (= now would be best).

Our customer service department wishes you and yours all the best for the holiday season.

Liberalisation of the Internet - Special Report

Wendy — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:01:00 +0100

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

IPv6 for Gandi (coming soon!)

Leland Vandervort — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:04:00 +0200

As a long-time registrar, we are aware of the importance of keeping up with the internet, as well as trying to be at the forefront of changing technologies as we have done for the past four years. Now it's time to do the same with IPv6!

As a result of this and requests from our customers coupled with the ominous depletion of IPv4 address space, I am pleased to announce that we will be offering IPv6 connectivity for our customers. Given that IPv6 is the future of the Internet, it is perfectly logical that it is something of particular interest to us.

This is, of course, not an overnight affair, and will take some time to be able to fully offer the service for all customers, and at the moment we expect to pass through several stages of testing before general deployment. In any case, we hope to have IPv6 fully available for our customers before the end of the year.

What is the current deployment status?

We have already deployed IPv6 across the core of our network, and a few hosting servers that our technical teams are using for alpha testing. In general, so far, the tests are working quite well, but there is still a lot of work to do.

The next stage, will be a beta testing stage involving a small number of our hosting customers. We will nevertheless want to keep the number limited, and we will expect those customers participating in the beta test to assist us by providing feedback on the service in terms of performance, security, connectivity, and also any suggestions that you may have. We expect this beta phase to be implemented before the end of September 2009.

Finally, we hope to have full general deployment and availability of IPv6 for all our hosting customers, as well as DNS services by the end of the year. Other Gandi services (blogs, mail, and our own web presence) are likely to follow suit in early 2010.

I would like to participate in the beta test! How do I sign up?

When we are ready to propose the beta test, we will open a link on our website to allow those hosting customers interested in participating in the beta test to apply. Numbers will be limited though, as this is only a beta test stage, and we will be working closely with the customers participating in this trial throughout the testing phase so as to provide the best possible service to all of our customers. Therefore, we obviously cannot accommodate everyone at this stage! We will provide further updates through our blog and our website as we progress.

What about glue records for IPv6?

Our DNS system already supports IPv6 AAAA glue records for DNS servers, and you can create these via the management interface for your domain just as you would for an IPv4 glue record. The only limitation at this time is that it currently must be a unique glue record. In other words, you cannot create a glue record for a DNS server whose name already exists and has an IPv4 glue record associated with it. This also assumes that the IPv6 DNS server is external to Gandi, and that the DNS zone is managed on your own server and not through our system (in other words, the domain is registered with us, but using your own DNS servers). This limitation will be removed in due course, however.

What does this mean for those who don't use IPv6?

There will be no change for existing users at all. The deployment of IPv6 capability is supplemental and transparent to the existing services, so you will not be impacted at all. You will, of course, have the ability to include IPv6 capability at any time you wish after the general deployment later in the year.

What exactly is IPv6 and why is it important?

IPv6, or "Internet Protocol, version 6" is the next-generation internet protocol to replace the current IP version 4. Most of the internet today uses IPv4 which was created over twenty years ago. Unfortunately, with the growth of the internet, the 32-bit addressing handled by IPv4 has inherent limitations to the number of unique IP addresses available, and there is now a shortage of availabiity meaning that it is becoming more and more difficult to obtain new allocations to meet the needs of further expansion.

IPv6, with it's 128-bit addressing, resolves this problem while at the same time adding significant improvements to network infrastructures in terms of routing and network autoconfiguration. It is expected that IPv6 will ultimately replace IPv4 entirely, with a period of coexistance during the transition period which will last several years.

Out of curiosity, what does an IPv6 address look like?

It is a 128-bit hexadecimal address with octet-pairs separated by a colon (":") and often includes a prefix-length identifier to represent the equivalent of a netmask. An example of such an address is: 2001:4b98:1:3e:17:3ca:8:44/120. There can be short-cuts in the address if there are octet-pairs which are all zero. Example: 2001:4b98:1::fa:121/48.

It's an acquired taste, but believe me, it's actually quite logical once you get used to it!

As usual, feel free to comment on this news on the gandibar!

Spring makeover: Gandi is changing its colors! (or colours!)

Joe — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:16:00 +0100

It is true that the summer vacation - lounging about, and getting a nice tan - is on its way, though we have chosen to do the opposite! By staying in doors and slapping on the sun cream we will be making our website lighter and brighter!

3 years after the big makeover (Gandi V1 to Gandi V2), we felt that it was time to brighten up our website. So that's what we did!

This version is not yet Gandi V3, it is more of a transitional stage, which has incorporated only subtle changes here and there - lightening up the graphics and making everything easier to read. Let’s call it Gandi V2.5!

As always, we welcome your comments, criticisms, reactions, large random shipments of candy…

As usual, click here to comment

How the domain name industry works - part 1

Wendy — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:40:00 +0100

Registry, Registrar, Registrant, (Registratum, Registrata, Registrunt). Ok, so the last 3 are made up words, and the domain name industry wasn't really founded in ancient Rome nor part of your everyday Latin dialect, but what do the first three words actually mean and how does the domain name industry work? We've been working in the industry for years, so we have a pretty good idea. But we can also understand why all this really can just sound like ancient Greek to many people and not mean a thing. So in the spirit of lifting the lid and keeping things honest (as Gandi likes to do), we thought we'd give you a quick overview of what it all means.

Who's who in the domain name world?

Which one are you? Well you're the registrant, the purchaser of domain names and the last link in the chain that runs from ICANN at the top to you at the bottom. But there are several layers it passes through to get to you. Let's take a look.

ICANN - The Top Dog

Let's start with the big dog itself ICANN. ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a body in charge of managing the domain name space. In its own words "ICANN was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers." It loosely the gTLD registries (see below), and sets policy around new domain extensions. Generally its a good guy, and the last word on domain disputes, though it is sometimes lofty, intellectual and bureaucratic (not that those are all bad things, an organisation like that needs to be careful).

Registries - They're Wholesalers Only

The registries are the managers of the TLDs (Top level domains), either gTLDs (generic, like .com), or ccTLD (country code, e.g. .uk, or .fr). When you buy a domain.com it is recorded in the registry's database and that is the ultimate record of your ownership of the domain.

The TLDs are created by ICANN and the rights to manage them are tendered to commercial companies in the case of gTLDs (e.g. .com is managed by Verisign), or for ccTLDs given to the national governments who in turn assign/tender their management to other organisations (e.g. Nominet in the UK for .uk, or Afnic in France for .fr).

But the registries generally don't sell direct to customers (or can't in some cases), so instead they sell domains wholesale to the registrars.

Registrars - They Sell Domains to You Direct

Here's Gandi. Hurray! The Registrars are the commercial companies that sell one or more domain name extensions direct to you and me (or through resellers - see below). The top tier of these are ICANN accredited which is a greater 'seal of approval', but nowadays there are so many this doesn't necessarily mean much. (Gandi was one of the first to be accredited in 1999).

Registrars interface directly with one or more registries, they manage your details and billing relationship. They represent your interest at the registry and will usually be the first port of call for domain disputes. So they are important to you, particularly their service and policy towards disputes. Know your registry!! Which brings us to Resellers.

Resellers - They Sell on Registrars Domains

Resellers look like registrars, but they aren't. They are commercial companies selling domain names, but they don't have direct relationships with the registries, but instead use the technology of another registrar to manage the domain names. This means if your domain provider is a reseller, it is using another registrar, and you may not know who that is. Many domain companies are registrars for some domains, and resellers for others. Interestingly in the UK, most of the big domain companies are not registrars for the gTLDs, e.g. .com, .net, etc., instead they use the technology of other companies. This can be problem when it comes to registrar behaviour or disputes (more next time).

Gandi is a registrar for all its domains, and there are some reseller companies that use Gandi as their registrar.

You

It's you! Hurray!! You may be a company, an individual, an organisation, a ghost (well maybe not a ghost), but you are the purchaser of the domain name. You buy it from either a registrar (like Gandi) or a reseller. You should be the ultimate owner of the domain (you are with Gandi), though you should check the policies of your domain company to make sure they are not taking the ownership themselves and leasing it to you. You manage your domain via your registrar/reseller and they manage the records of your domain in the registry or registries (if you have lots).

So there you have it! Now you can entertain all your friends at dinner parties with your extensive knowledge of how the domain name industry works. Or hope that you get onto "Who wants to be a millionaire" and the last question is:

"In the domain name industry, the manager of the .com domain extension is know as":

a) Registrant
b) Registrar
c) Registry
d) Regicide....

(the answer is (c), (d) is about killing kings or something). Good luck! Click here to comment.

Get your site at Gandi!

Ryan — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:49:00 +0100

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...

Gandi SiteMaker is a product that has been developed by our English subsidiary, Moonfruit, since 2005. It is certainly the most impressive web 2.0 application that I have ever used, and this in an atmosphere where everything these days is being called web 2.0. It is really for this very reason that we asked them to join us at the time.

I can hear you saying right now, "...there’s already a boatload of WYSIWYG website creation applications out there”! And you could not be more right. Except that is has now been 9 years since they began the project, which has not stopped improving since then… And yet, I am not one who is really destined to appreciate this type of simple tool! I'm “Old School”, an old HTML tagger that still tries to optimize my gifs to be just the right hues… But to help Gandi, I have gone with Gandi SiteMaker, in order to see what it can do and experience its strengths and weaknesses.

What we are offering today, is an application with a extremely wide range of possibilities that will let you create a website of amazing quality in the blink of en eye! Dozens of templates are available to you as a basis for your site and for inspiration, while those of you who are graphic designers will find themselves a type of QuarkXPress of the web (yes – I did mention that I was old school…).

Now just hold on there (because I can hear the skeptics snickering in the background, thinking that I am going to launch into a sales pitch). I am not selling anything here! It’s free! Yes, that’s right: for those of you that have a domain name at Gandi, you can now create a website without any technical experience necessary. There are so many features that we had to create a lengthy FAQ just to cover all the questions of the product.

Features? Excluding the possibility of creating a website from an existing template (or a blank page for those of you that prefer it, of course), you may choose pre-established structure to help you along, and finally, with one click, you will find your website ready to be published or modified!

I recommend that you have a quick look at this video, which is no longer than 3 minutes long, and will show you just how easy it all is:

Now it’s your turn!

Wouldn’t it be nice to make a website for your parents of photos of your newborn? With one click on “insert”, then on “object”, I select “Pop-up Gallery”, and voilà! I now have a photo gallery, for which the most difficult part was to choose the order of my photos.

Have you been wanting to create a website for your local sailing club? Nothing could be more simple: a video player to show clips of the year’s bloopers, a web page where you can add a forum in just a single click, and a subscription form where you can manage the rights of members of your forum.

Aspiring artist, are you tired of non-lucrative expositions, and do you dream of having your own website with a gallery, an order form and an online payment system, so that you can sell your works all around the world? Once again, only a few clicks are needed to build your own website, and you do not need to know any computer language!

Hey! Let’s add a guestbook, ah…now that really is nice for visitors. Perfect!

Do you have a domain name at Gandi? Congratulations! You also have a Gandi SiteMaker Free Pack that you can already activate in your account, and begin to see this wonderful tool for your self – a tool that will truly let you create your online presence in no time at all!

Professional and customized

We have limited the Free pack to 2 pages, because we feel that this is enough to make a presentation page (a welcome page and a personal résumé for example) and in order to let you try out SiteMaker whenever you want. This is not a limited-time offer, it is a given for you.

Our two fee-based backs are for those of you that are more convinced that this is the tool for you, and who greater needs – still within an affordable price range. See for yourself: our Starter Pack, at €4 euros (excl. VAT) per month, allows you to create 50 pages, and to store up to 500 MB of files, and to benefit from all the advanced modules (with the exception of e-commerce). This latter feature is available with the Professional Pack, which costs €8 (excl. VAT) per month, with an unlimited number of pages and having 2GB of disk space. You can refer to our pack comparison page for more details.

Many of you have been requesting a service between free hosting and our Gandi AI virtual dedicated servers. With Gandi SiteMaker, we now hope to meet this demand, since the hosting of your websites is included in all the packs!

If you would like to comment on this, please visit the GandiBar!

Security Alert: New registrar phishing schemes

Ryan — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:04:00 +0100

Gandi has uncovered a new phishing scam that could lead to someone gaining control over your domain name without your knowledge. you.

To protect your domain name and online presence, please read this security alert carefully as it contains important information.

What is phishing ?

As with any phishing scheme, the principle is to trick you into logging into a website that you think is secure. What really happens, however, is that the victim logs into a counterfeit website (a copy of the real one). When the victim enters his or her username and password into the login form on the counterfeit website, this information is sent to the thief. Depending on the sophistication of the phishing website, you may then be forwarded to the real website, and as such you may not even be made aware that your information was stolen.

Many people tend to use the same password for various websites, and consequently when the thieves are sent your password, they can then try to log in as you on other websites. This is why Gandi encourages you to use different secure passwords for each website for which you need to log in.

Until now, phishing schemes have largely been limited to banks and social networking websites.

The new danger:

We are now seeing the introduction of registrar phishing schemes on the internet. What is now occurring is that thieves are trying to obtain your registrar login account information in order to steal your domain names from you.

How to identify the scam:

We have identified a couple of registrar phishing scams. These scams appear to come from a registrar, and appear to be legitimate e-mails either requesting that you correct your whois information or log into your account for some reason.

Some subject lines are:

Inaccurate whois information. [IncidentID:79480]
Maintenance at eNom.com

There may be others, however, as phishing scams evolve over time.

How to protect yourself:

Be cautious. When in doubt, do not hesitate in contacting our customer support team.
Mail from Gandi will include your handle, personal information
If there is a link in the mail, be sure that it comes from the right source. You need to check that the domain name corresponds to your service provider.

For example: the following is a real login address for Gandi:

https://www.gandi.net/login

In this case, you can see that the domain is gandi.net (shown in bold), and therefore you are sure that it is our website. (Users of Firefox 3 will see this automatically in the URL bar, as the browser detects the real domain and shows it to you.)

A fake login address (for a registrar we'll call example.net) may therefore look like:

http//www.example.net.s3cure12afa.biz or http//www.example.net.token1232gh5.securelogin4.s3cure12afa.biz

In the case of the above, you see that the real domain name is s3cure12afa.biz (which I have put in bold to show you) and not example.net! Though the website may appear to be legitimate (remember, the thief made a copy of the real one to trick you), you would actually be providing your username and password to the owners of s3cure12afa.biz.

For more on how to identify domain names, and how they work, please refer to our wiki page here.

Conclusion:

Be suspicious of mails you get that ask you to log into your account.

Your registrar is Gandi, and so you will only log into GANDI.NET's website. Be careful that the URL (the website's address) is on the domain name gandi.net and nothing else.

If you think that you may have already been a victim of this, or if you are unsure, please do not hesitate in contacting Gandi's customer care team.

Sincerely,
The Gandi Team

What's up, week 44

Ryan — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 20:15:00 +0100

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!

We are pleased to announce that the hosting API XML is ready, and freely available for resellers, or for other account types upon invitation (yes, we really like invitations). We are keeping things limited at the start so that we can analyze the behavior of the API, as well as to be sure that we have thought of everything, mainly any possible abuse of the system. You will also notice that certain options are missing for now (including GandiFlex, Gandi AI, etc.). This will be implemented shortly. You may find all the necessary documentation here!

Continuing along the lines of hosting innovation, we now give you the possibility of starting from a disk image! You will therefore be able to create your disk image, and then create servers from that image

Here is how it works:

start by creating a data disk of a maximum of 3GB (a temporary limitation),
attach the disk to an existing server,
make an image of the system disk that you want to copy via the UNIX command, "dd" or upload your own image to the disk,
once the image is ready, you will remove the disk from your server
change the type of the disk to the "Image" mode from the disk's description page,
go to create a new server. You will now be offered the possibility of using the disk image you have made!

We are currently working on Gandi disk images (game servers for example) that we will soon offer as well as a capacity of more than 3GB for the system disk.

And since we are talking about the size of the disk, we have been receiving many emails from you requesting the option of increasing the size of your disk. We have listened to you and are pleased to confirm that this option, a "resizeFS upwards" will be in production in a couple of weeks. The "resizeFS downwards" will take some more time to complete, but we are working on it.

Otherwise, we are also preparing a new distribution between Gandi AI and Gandi MI (the expert server). This will be a version of Ubuntu with a management panel that will let you manage your server even if you are uncomfortable with using the SSH terminal.

Concerning the migration of SATAs to SAS, we about one third of the way to completing the task, which is currently underway.

With regards to payment, we now accept payment via PayPal (in Euros only), as well as "virements administratifs" for French public administrations.

We have also updated our hosting payment system, which some customers were unpleased with. Indeed, if you choosed to pay by check or bank transfer, our system was waiting for the reception of the payment before completing the order - even if you had credit on your prepaid account. We did this to avoid taking, for example, money that was destined to the renewal of a domain name. We now give you the possibility - from your orders in progress page - of forcing the debit from your prepaid account.

From the domain name side of things, we are currently in the testing phase of .ES (Spain) domains, which should become available next week. .CAT and .IM ccTLDs will follow shortly thereafter.

For GandiMail, we have updated the platform which greatly reduced the load on our servers, despite an initial slowing of the platform during the first hour of the maintenance. We therefore have a much more stable platform that will deliver mails on time. Our team also corrected many problems with the antispam system that has increased its performance, and even too much in some cases. We are therefore working on a faster, but even more precise solution. We are happy to finally be able to say that the "quota bug" is dead!

Finally, GandiBlog has been upgraded to version 2.02, as you may have read in our info blog, where we also mention that the cache system has been improved along with the import/export function.

If you would like to comment on this news, please visit the GandiBar!

Why domain name services are not all equal

Wendy — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:47:00 +0100

We believe in domain ethics – your domain is more than just a name, it’s your online presence, your company, profile or project. It should be protected and you should get what you want and what you expect with no tricks. But, you say, surely all domain names are the same? Why should it matter who you buy a domain from as they all come from the same place anyway, right? Well no, unfortunately that’s not true. There are many reasons why different domain providers offer better or worse deals, and it's not just price.

Not all domain offers are what they seem. Different domain name providers allow you to do different things with your domain. Some have service restrictions and sneaky pricing. It's not just the restrictions on the domain that can be limiting, it's the little surprises you might find out after you've paid. Sometimes you only find out about a bad deal once you've been caught by it, but we've put together a list of a few things to watch out for in the tricky domain market.

1. Sneaky pricing - Different pricing for register (buy now £0.99 per year!) and renewal (oops it costs more next year) - Different pricing for transfers out (oh, you want to leave, that'll be £xx) - The cost of a .co.uk at the registry is £2.50 per year. Companies selling below this have an ulterior motive!

2. Service restrictions - Can't get full DNS control - pay more for additional services

3. Front running - Using your domain search data to buy domains before you do, or selling your domain search data. More references.

4. Account lockins - Locking your account for a period following changes, prevents transfer outs. More by Slashdot.

5. Domain ownership - Not the owner of your domain, some companies buy it on your behalf and then rent it to you.

6. Privacy - Selling your whois data/customer data

Gandi offers full DNS control, no sneaky pricing, no front running and no account lock ins. Our prices are fair, but profitable, so we have no incentive to constantly upsell things you don't need and bombard you with marketing messages. As one of our customers Miconian writes, ‘I used to see gandi as a discount registrar, but I now see them as offering a premium service: the implicit agreement to leave me the hell alone and let me register my domains in peace.’ We make sure you own your domain, this was one of the early reasons for Gandi's success. We do not sell your data and offer protection from whois spam and the ability to hide personal details.

We talk about domain ethics but do we follow through? We think so but what do you think? Please comment here.

Gandi UK Team

Who is Gandi and why should I care about them?

Wendy — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:08:00 +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, 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.")

Click here to post your comments.

Gandi UK Team

American Express now accepted!

Ryan — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:48:00 +0200

Many customers (mainly those from North America) have been requesting this for some time now: payment by the American Express card. We are pleased to announce that it is now possible for you make payments on Gandi's website via American Express (in Dollars and Euros only).

Additional means of payment will also be added by the end of the year.

What's up, week 30

Sam — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:46:00 +0200

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.

700,000!

Ryan — Wed, 07 May 2008 07:28:00 +0200

700,000! As we have gotten into the habit of 'celebrating' the passing of each hundred thousand domain names, we're not going to make an exception to the rule!

Today, we give you the possibility of winning 100 Gandi T-shirts (1 per person) to the 100 orders around 700,000 (from 699,950 to 700,050)

Once the 700,000 benchmark as been passed, we will contact you to see what size you would like.

The offer is limited to residents in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Italy, and Spain.

If you would like to join the discussion on this topic, come and visit the bar!

What's up, week 16

Elliott — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:24:00 +0200

As we continue to hurtle towards Hosting's final release, here are Gandi's latest building blocks - courtesy of our dear developers.

To begin with, since I've already raised it, Hosting: servers can now have up to 16 shares as opposed to 8. This means more power at your disposal, and more flexible tools according to your needs.

We now also have a safety console, for the expert users among you who need to reboot a machine when SSH is broken: a simple request to Customer Care and they'll enable it for you. For others, Customer Care will be able to intervene directly thanks to this tool, reducing the time it takes to solve problems - good news for everyone in terms of quality of service.

Regarding Gandi AI: we're also coming close to V1.0, which is just as well: when I see the list of requested modules in the wishlist, I feel like crying ... and that doesn't even include the unmoderated list, which is about 3 times as big. Sure, the unmoderated list has lots of doubles and things we can't apply, but still. We have lots of work to do to meet your expectations, and we're grateful to you for this.

We've also put up a list of "refused" ideas to explain why a module won't be developed in the near future, or ever.

On the domains side of things, the keen among you will have noticed the newly arrived .DE and .AT TLDs, as well as the special rebate on the .AT which will still be valid for the next few domains. The transfer procedure for these two extensions requires a confirmation fax which we are in the process of finalising: transfers should therefore be possible within the next couple of days.

Since the 31/03 major update, the Webmail has been evolving some more, thanks to some requests from Bar users and Twidi's responsiveness, who spent a lot of time and energy applying the requested changes. In sum, this means corrections in the way that accents, group replies and some file attachments are now managed, as well as improved management of multiple identities.

Still thanks to our customers' good ideas, please note that the commentary system for resellers is now available in different colours, allowing for improved visual identification.

Finally, to those who misunderestimated (Bush Dictionary, 2003) our commitment to transparency, we have set up a rating system on our customer support pages so we can have your impressions on your exchanges with our agents. This allows us to have a better reading of your satisfaction and, since we don't have anything to hide, this rating will be available to everyone.

The risk with this kind of interface is people trying to spam it (go figure ^^), thus making it unreliable. In any case, we're going to try it out and have taken some precautions. Above all, we trust that our support will give you the service you deserve, since this is what will define our rating in the end.

Come chat with the team here.

What's up, week 14

Elliott — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:44:00 +0200

A head's up on the work in progress !!!

Our efforts to stabilize the hosting platform are going well. We think we've targeted the major bugs, and these are being resolved .

We've also put loads of effort into shortening the length of operations and they have been 42% quicker on average as a result! It's a nice stat, but it sounds even better in practice: a server update operation now takes 1 minute and 30 seconds, when it used to take 6 minutes. A Gandi AI server with all the modules will take 27 minutes to install, and a Gandi MI about 16 minutes.

With this in mind, we'd like to recommend our brand new distributions for starters: Open Suse and Fedora Core 8. Still for starters, please note that Gandi Flex has gone to Alpha test phase (internal + a few customers). Gandi Flex, let me remind you, allows you to plan the amount of shares you'll need at a specific time (date and hour), and for a given length of time. This service is designed to cater to your chronological hosting needs with extreme precision, giving you the flexibility you only ever dreamed of. We plan to release this key service as a Beta in upcoming days.

Let's move to the main course, shall we? The menu's pretty copious this week.

The dish of the week is, without a doubt, our Webmail update, thanks to Twidi's relentless work to make sure the latest version of Atmail be compatible with our greatly modified version of the original code. No more bugs linked to character encoding. What is more, you can also change your password in the Webmail interface directly, as well as use a de-branded (logo-less) version of the interface. All related info is in this post. Incidentally, this post's comments (in its French version) has been discussing the recent slowness of the e-mail platform... Yes, our e-mail infrastructure is overloaded at the moment, but be reassured: we ordered two new big Filers a couple weeks ago and they arrived yesterday, so we're setting them up. The e-mail infrastructure should be able to breathe a little. You as well, for that matter.

As we're discussing big things, please note also that the Gandi Team have been working hard to conceive and redesign the Gandi AI engine. Some important changes have been made, namely in the way the user groups are managed, which was a blocking point for developing several plug-ins. Had you noticed we hadn't added new plug-ins since January? Boooo! It's just that we were all taking windsurfing lessons courtesy of ~~*Censored*~~ Ltd. OK, that was a lie. Though the weather has been lovely in Paris recently. Anyway, Gandi AI's update will open many new possibilities which didn't previously exist. When we saw the kind of things that were being asked in the Wishlist, we quickly realized things had to be done all over again. This has been dealt with, and so Gandi AI should soon be seeing new add-ons such as SVN, which was the most requested, as well as a guest star module you will be discovering shortly.

Cheese, salad? We have just been accredited for the .IN (India) TLD, and we are currently performing connexion tests with the .DE (Germany) and .AT (Austria) Registries, with whom we are already accredited. On the .IT side of things, some of our customers suffered from an interfacing bug with the Italian Registry. We're very sorry about that and are currently fixing the problem. We'll ask you to relaunch your orders at the beginning of next week (you will be contacted).

Some sweets to finish this copious post. We have set up a comments system for our resellers, allowing them to write notes regarding a domain, a contact or a server. This will be very useful if you work with a lot of domains/contacts/servers. This add-on will profit all our customers as well: thanks to this system, our support team will be able to leave you nice messages when they solve your problems pro-actively (detecting and fixing a problem before the customer does), or tell you what you need to do if the solution needs to come from your side.

Finally, the icing on the cake: all our server shares have been upgraded to 3mbps bandwidth instead of the 1.5 you had so far, in order to test our network performances as we prepare for the final version. To answer your next question on this point: yes, this means that if you had a server with 8 shares, your bandwidth is now 24 mbps instead of 12.

Bon appétit.

To discuss this with us and others, please visit the bar!

Time lags on Gandi Mail yesterday, explanations

Ryan — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:09:00 +0100

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.

What's up week 9

Ryan — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:33:00 +0100

We are now in the 8th week of Beta testing for Gandi hosting. We are confidently heading into the 3rd month now, with far fewer bugs throughout all the various services and a level of stability in the platform that is approaching our goal of achieving a flawless level of quality in our service.

For all that, we are not forgetting our work on domain names, and as the majority of you have seen recently, GandiBlogs have not been sitting still either. Here is what we have done this week:

Launching of .IT at Gandi
the .info for 1€ excl. VAT (see the related article)
The blog export works again \o/
Hosting: possibility of cancelling an operation in progress when it is taking an unusually long amount of time (and we are working on the rapidity of all operations)
Many more tools that the support team can use to process hosting issues
Gandi supports the FIDH (International Federation of Human Rights).

By supplying more monitoring tools to the support team, we are increasing their reactivity, and better yet, we are dedicating a part of our team to proactive problem resolution: solving problems before you are detecting them, that is the level of quality that we are going after.

Of course, this also allows us to have a more efficient management of minor but annoying bugs. The next versions should include notable improvements in Gandi AI, as well as new packages.

Finally, Gandi Webmail is in the process of getting a code update, the results of which will be visible in a few weeks.

To discuss this with us and others, please visit the bar!

What's up - Week 6

Ryan — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:23:00 +0100

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.

The first point is hard to miss. Gandi's website has gone widescreen! We were beginning to feel a bit squeezed in our website optimized for 800 x 600. There is therefore no longer the problem of the too-long domain name which is cut-off, the lack of information on certain tables due to lack of space...for those that don't know what I'm referring to, press Control+F5 to empty your web browser's cache.
The news system at Gandi has been transferred to the Gandi iwi blog, so we recommend that you update your RSS news reader with the new address. This is where we will be posting maintenance updates, upgrade information, improvements, and other news addressed to our customers.
On Gandi Hosting: the management of reverse DNS is finally available! You can activate it in your server administration area by clicking on the 'activate' link located to the right of your IP address.
If you are not a DNS zone expert, we now provide you with a new page on our website where you can simply attach your domain name to your Gandi server. This is in the lower-right hand part of the domain name control panel.
We are in the final phase of the test for the .IT ccTLD, which will be available for all residents of the European Union next week.
We are in final internal test phases for servers running on BSD and Solaris. We will be making them available to those of you that might be interested in testing the servers and providing us with feedback.

If you would like to discuss this article, visit here.