Gandi IWI Blog - Gandi

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.