Gandi IWI Blog - Hosting - Beta

Gandi Hosting is now on beta testing by invitation

Ryan — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:29:00 +0200

Though our hosting service has been in the beta testing phase since the beginning of the year, this has not kept it from being a huge success: we currently count 7,000 servers that have been created by our customers!

This phase of our beta testing period helped us identify problems that arise during the use of several thousand servers on our architecture, something that could not be done in a test environment.

We would like to thank all of you that have given us your trust and who contributed to this important validation of technology that has been clearly identified by all (customers, experts, sector specialists) as being the future of web hosting for the "general public", private individuals, and companies alike.

We now have a sufficient number of customers that are experimenting with the service, so that we can finalize our service. Now it is time for us to proceed with the last batch of tests and developments so that we can do some fine tuning before the final release.

This is therefore a new step for Gandi Hosting.

The objective of a Beta version is to identify the most significant problems and to fix them while at the same time maintaining operational goals (excellent level of service and product performance, while remaining profitable).

The next step, which is right before the final release, will allow our engineers to concentrate on a phase of stabilization and optimization, without having to juggle the frequent maintenance operations which is the normal consequence of having several thousand customers, even in beta testing. Because, as you know, we believe so much at Gandi in going a good job that we make it a point of honor to not hide behind this reality, which is beta testing.

This is therefore the reason why we have put on hold the creation of new hosting accounts automatically. They can be created by invitation only until tomorrow.

As a note to reassure our existing customers: we are not going to delete any account, nor cut any existing service, we are just going to concentrate our efforts on creating an irreproachable service that will be ready in its final version in the Fall.

For those of you that would like to know the details: we are currently working on improving overall performance, stability, disk access redundancy, network stability, and improvements to the Gandi interface. Current performance is good, but can be better, and so we will be focused on that this summer.

It will be hot this summer, and it will be beautiful - but fall will be even more so :D

P.S. We will give out invitations depending on the nature of the requests sent to the usual e-mail address of Gandi management. Please note that they are very limited in number.

Disk problems for some servers

Kalou — Thu, 29 May 2008 01:25:00 +0200

At 00:30 CEST, one filer crashed for a few servers. We are currently investigating the situation on location and will update you as soon as possible on this topic.

edit 03:00 CEST: we replaced a broken raid controller, checked data integrity and put the service back online. Disks are available now with temporary latencies.

GandiFlex will revolutionize web host purchasing

Ryan — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:15:00 +0200

Gandi Flex is an exclusive service that we have developed that will revolutionize web host purchasing (and yes, that's the idea!).

We have been alluding to this option since the beginning of our hosting service, and we are particularly proud of it quite simply because it is a tool that we would like to have seen at one of our competitors...

To make a metaphor (I like metaphors), imagine that you drive to work every day, say, 50 miles round-trip each day, from Monday to Friday. You have a small, fuel-efficient, 2-door car, with a small trunk that is just enough for your daily needs. The problem is that on the weekends with the wife and kids, it is just too small for a comfortable family trip... Your only real choice is therefore to purchase a bigger car : a 4-door gas-guzzler with a huge trunk and one that is therefore more expensive. Or even, in the worst-case scenario, you would need to purchase two new cars...

Well, at Gandi, we just invented modular back-seats and an optional additional trunk! Ah...no, wait. Actually, as we do not yet manufacture cars, we have applied this excellent idea to servers. And we must say that this is far easier than with cars

Therefore, concretely, this means that with GandiFlex, you may schedule in advance at what time during the day, the week, the month, or even the year, when you will need more power, more RAM, more of everything. Since our hosting system is based on server-shares, we provide you with the possibility of adding from 1 to 7 to your server depending on the program of your choice. You will notice that we have initially limited the Gandi Flex service to 8 shares. This is because we so not yet know how such as service will be used by you, though mainly because for now, the number of servers with more than 8 shares totals only 0.1% of our supply. Here are a few examples that do not allude to cars that will help you see how it works (note: all prices below are excl. VAT):

You manage a news website, and you have a daily newsletter that you send out at around 4 PM. Set up a repeating weekly GandiFlex program from 4 PM to 5 PM from Monday through Friday to increase your server's power during that period and forget about it. Your mails will be sent faster, without disrupting access to your website. How much will this cost you? 1 Flex-share costs €0.07 per hour. In the case of this example, you will only pay an additional €1.40 per month

Another example, demanding more power: you created a guild of online gamers, and your team holds training matches every Friday and Saturday on your virtual dedicated server. You therefore need more resources to use your gaming server, in addition to your website, your forum, and TeamSpeak... You decide to program a schedule that will add 2 Flex-shares every Friday and Saturday from 9 PM to midnight: 2 Flex-shares (€0.14) X 3 hours X 2 days = €0.84 per week, or €3.36 per month!

Obviously, the addition or the removal of a share will not require a reboot of your server. In the two previous examples, in order to assure an optimal rendering, you would have needed to purchase more shares all the time, or in the case of a dedicated server, have a machine configured from the start for peak consumption. It would not be very environmentally friendly, like using a huge SUV to drive to work by yourself everyday.

Here is another illustration of use, depending on the peaks encountered in the load on your server. This one is running on 2 server-shares, though has a clearly identified need from 6 PM to 8 PM daily. This need may be estimated at 4 shares for two hours. Starting from the final price of a share at Gandi (10 euros) this user would need (without GandiFlex) to pay €60 per month to assure an optimal service for his or her server (6 shares X €10). With Gandi Flex, it is a simple matter to only use the strict minimum daily need, 2 server-shares (eg. €30 per month) for two hours - in other words €0.56 per day, or an additional €16.80 per month. This translated to a total of €36.80 per month! A monthly savings of €23.20 by just using what is needed is nothing to sniff at eh?

All of this is now available at Gandi! You just need to log into your account, and go to your server's control panel, and from there, by clicking on "Change" after "Flex operations active".

And tomorrow? Imagine that you are driving along the highway and come across 3 hitchhiking friends that you pick up. How are you going to pick up the 4 Norwegians sticking out their thumbs 2 miles further up the road? We have a solution to this, and will soon tell you all about it

Come chat with the team here.

What's up - Week 7

Ryan — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:42:00 +0100

Our fingers have been going clickity-clickity-click during this end of the Beta phase - so even if you have not seen many changes, things are advancing quite nicely!

Resellers

A new contact management interface is available through the "Contacts" tab that you will now see when you log into your reseller handle. Feedback is welcome! The interface will be improved even further with more options for the contacts, and the possibility of merging contacts that are doubles.
The Gandi Mail API XML will be available next week in the the OT and E test environment. We are currently writing the documentation.

Gandi Domain Names

Tests and modifications of the interfaces for .IT domains is almost over, the ccTLD will be available next week.

Gandi Mail

A section of the Gandi Mail backend has been updated in order to correct bugs that were encountered with the management of quota.

Gandi Hosting

The kernel of Gandi Hosting servers was modified Monday morning to correct fot the Linux security flaw that was uncovered this weekend. (Note: you need to reboot your server to implement the correction).
The Gandi AI agent was updated on your machines in order to disassociate the the disks from the agent itself and to allow for the upcoming addition of new functions.
The backend is also being improved in order to correct bugs that were noticed by our beta testers and to speed up operations on your servers
The wishlist for Gandi AI packages is an endless source of pleasure for our developers. We have an impressive list of packages to choose from and we would like to go faster, but we also have much stabilization to do, so that the Gandi machine is running as smoothly as possible. The BSD based systems are not progressing very rapidly, as certain project managers of those projects do not believe in virtualization. We are beginning to see the implementation of OpenSolaris however...we'll give you an update on this again soon.
Otherwise, to come back to the wishlist, I have a question to ask of of those of you that voted for SVN/CVS...Far from belittling these version tracking systems, we use SVN here at Gandi as a development tool, but I don't quite understand the large number of votes for this as a Gandi Auto-Install package...can you please explain?

Gandi Blog

We'll tell you here, before it comes out in the international press, but it is not excluded that we will consider the hypothetical possibility of significantly updating the Gandi Blog service in the beginning of next week, but hey...who knows!

If you would like to discuss this article, join us at the Gandi Bar!

Gandi Hosting in public beta is open!

Arti — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:29:00 +0100

Here we are: the moment that many of you have been waiting for, for days, weeks, or even months. Personally, I have been looking for to this for several years now, but then again I'm an incurable dreamer :D

You will discover a new navigation tab on our website that has been discretely highlighted (don't laugh...it's our version of publicity) so that you will not overlook it: Gandi hosting has been launched in public beta testing, we trust, to provide you with an even higher level of service.

The fact of calling this launching "beta testing" does not refer to the intellectual capacity of your servants (at least, we hope not!). No. Simply, it is because we are careful people, and we want to underline the fact that we want to gradually increase the load of the truly new product that has been the result of the hard work and talents of all involved.

As with every project of this type, which does not involve reselling solutions that already exist and have been tested (or 90% of the market), we are going to go through difficult periods. We will come out for the better because we will be - as we have always been - reactive and passionate about what we do. We will also need your patience and indulgence: We would like to thank you and your teams in advance, who will help make this possible.

As you have been able to see in the previous blog entries on our hosting service, we have tried to create the product that we would like to have as a customer, with the principal criteria being flexibility (at all levels) and quality. The product that you have under your eyes today is only the first version of an even larger project, and we will everything possible to assure that we can write the rest of the adventure with you.

Adventure? In my eyes, yes. To dare to create a product, in France, that is for customers around the world, at the cutting-edge of technology in the field, while nobody has been expecting this from us, all the while restructuring a company in difficulty and solidifying its core metier, was not without periods of concern during the past three years. But here we are, many of our customers have been asking us to move in this direction, and it was something of a wild dream; Or perhaps simply we had confidence in our vision, persisting until we have transformed it to something tangible.

It is therefore with immense pride that I would like to thank everyone at Gandi who has made this possible, I know - because I have shared this with you - all the effort that you have put into this project, for your company, and am confident in our ability to fulfil our promises.

I would also like to thank all of those in advance, and those - you, who are reading this - that will allow us to continue our journey in this new direction by buying hosting server shares, and in spreading the word to your friends and colleagues the same way to have a presence on the internet :D. One that will last!

I will let you discover this new service for yourself, and even if it is not the objective of this entry to explain how it works in detail, let me share with you a few useful links to:

The Wiki of the new Gandi community (Gandi Wi) http://wiki.gandi.net/ which will allow you to post all the problems that you might happen to come across, or even to start to contribute your own knowledge to enrich this community. You may connect to the Wiki via your usual Gandi handle and password.
The blog of the same community, which is a sort of copy of the Bar, but devoted entirely to hosting, and which is located at the following URL: http://hosting.gandibar.net/.
The IRC chat channel, where we will be happy to welcome you and try to be available to answer your questions. This may be found on the freenode network (irc.freenode.net) and in the channel #gandi-hosting.
The Gandi newsgroup/forum via your newsgroup reader on the server groups.gandi.net or on the web at http://groups.gandi.net. For information, a new version of the Gandi groups is being prepared and will be released next week at the latest.

The team at Gandi joins me in wishing you a happy new year 2008!!!

Platform update

Ryan — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:01:00 +0100

Hello, In order to prepare for the release in Beta testing of the platform at the end of the week, we have just passed an update with the following:

The correction of bugs and typos that have been brought to our attention,
An upgrade of the machines to 15GB of RAM, or 256MB per share instead of 128 MB
Activation of the parameters for the Beta launch (rates, limitations for a gradual increase in load),
Preparation for the addition of the following packages on Gandi AI: Postfix, Perl, Python, Ruby for Apache and frameworks for Django and Ruby on Rails (available by the end of the week)
Addition of the Tidy, pspell, and GD libraries in the default PGP build

Welcome courageous Beta testers!

Ryan — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:34:00 +0100

Yes, you must be courageous, to experience an avant-premier of our new service without all its guides to help you learn about the various procedures of our new range of services All the options that are planned for the "final" version are not yet available, but we're delivering you the Beta as it is, but with nonetheless a large number of stable features (we hope) and options.

The following may now be used:

Gandi Hosting in the "Manual Install" mode with:

Mandriva 2008.0
Ubuntu 7.10
CentOs 5
Fedora Core 7
Debian 4

Gandi Auto Install (custom mode) with:

Apache 2.0
MySQL 5.0
ProFTPd

Gandi Auto Install (easy mode) with:

LAMP Server

Disk management
Share management

What you cannot do yet:

Add server shares via the website
Add disk quota via the website
Use Open SUSE 10.3 in Gandi MI (Manual Install) mode

We have a long list of bugs in our internal reporting tool (Trac, in case you were wondering), but it would be difficult to transfer all of them to our Alpha-Beta Wiki page.

Also, it is possible that you might tell us bugs that we are already aware of: don't worry about that!
We will find some new ones in there

We will try to keep YOUR bug list updated with regards to OURS so that you can test it after we fix it. We will also keep you informed as to the version in question, so that everyone can be on the same page with regards to the big fixes and improvements.

At the time of the activation of your accounts as Beta testers, we are 4,580 strong.

Your Hosting account is already created: all that remains, is for you to do is to go to the Server Overview and attribute your two server shares to whatever you want. Each share also includes 5 GB of disk space, that you can distribute to as you wish to your server(s).

Note that in the case of Gandi Auto Install, you must have available quota, because the packages will be installed on them.

Those among you that would like to have more shares and/or disks can let us know by writing to us at beta.hosting@gandi.net. The only constraing is that this request be justified by a real testing need of course