Gandi IWI Blog - Hosting

New kernel available for hosting servers.

aegiap — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 12:29:00 +0100

A new version of the 2.6.18-xenU Linux kernel is available for hosting servers. This version contains fixes for 4 security flaws (CVE-2009-3002, CVE-2009-2848, CVE-2009-1895, CVE-2009-1337) and enable the CONFIG_IP_ROUTE_FWMARK option.

A quick changelog is available.

As a new kernel version imply new modules, you can use this process to update your kernel modules on your server if you have the root access.

In order to make use of this new version, you will need to restart your server, which you can do simply with the linux command "reboot" if you have root access to your server. In case of GandiAI, the web interface allow you to restart your server. We will thus allow you to make arrangements to effect this reboot according to your own scheduling requirements.

The technical team.

Hosting: Launch of multiple IP addresses for your servers

Ryan — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:33:00 +0100

Hello,

Today we have launched the functions allowing you to manage your own interfaces. You may configure up to 4 interfaces per server.

To add an additional interface, you will need to add additional IP address quota via the resource management interface.

Each additional IP address costs €1 excl. VAT per month (if paid monthly), or €10 (ex VAT) per year if paid annually, e.g. 2 months free!

This new function lays the foundations for us to provide you with some really cool features in the future such as an IP failover system, the utilization of IPv6 addresses or even creating a private networks between your servers.

As this has been at the top of your Wishlist for several months, we sincerely hope that this new feature will make you smile!

You can find documentation on this in our wiki here.

If you would like to comment on this entry please visit the GandiBar.

Your server on IPv6?

Leland Vandervort — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:42:00 +0100

Today we are opening the beta-test phase for the implementation of IPv6 on our hosting platform.

As a reminder, IPv6 is the successor to the current IPv4 upon which the internet is based, and given the generous attribution of the early IP addresses, the IPv4 address space is rapidly running out of available adresses.

Its replacement is gently making its appearance across the internet. An IPv6 address is made up of 128bits as opposed to 32bits for an IPv4 address. We are moving from 2^32 available addresses to 2^128 (excluding reserved allocations, of course) which gives us a few decades.. erm.. centuries to breathe!

If you wish to participate in the beta test phase, you must:

- Have some basic knowledge of IPv6
- Have a Gandi server in expert mode (i.e. with root access)
- Send us a request to participate to ipv6beta@gandi.net and include your gandi handle/user-id. (You will receive an email by return with the procedure to follow).

Initially, we will limit the beta test to approximately 50 servers, so don't wait to send in your request!

As usual, you can comment on this post here...

Backup, increase in disk size and lower rates!

Ryan — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:58:00 +0200

Since our hosting service has been released, you have been requesting it, and here it is!

For starters, we have built a dedicated backup infrastructure that runs separately from our servers and other data disks. This has led to a new type of data disk: the backup disk. Ok, so we probably could have found a more flashy name for it, but at least it's clear

The amount of disk space included in every share has risen from 5GB to 8GB
This is the first bit of good news: to help you create your backup disk, we have increased the disk quota that is included in each server share from 5GB to 8GB! This does not change much for customers that only have one share (as we give you an extra 3GB for the operating system), but beginning with the second share, you now have an additional 3GB of disk to take advantage of. This means that for a customer with 16 shares on his or her server, the hosting account will be credited with (15x3) 45GB of additional disk quota! Of course you still have the ability to purchase additional disk quota, though now I am getting ahead of myself with the second bit of good news

Lower rates for additional disk space
To make things simple and to avoid over-complicating your quota management with yet another quota to monitor, the quota used for backup disks is the same quota as what is used for other disks.

Therefore, we have decided to lower the price of disk quota, in order to establish a nice balance. The new rates are therefore €0.18/$0.25/£0.16 excl. VAT/month/ under A rates, down from €0.20/$0.28/£0.18 excluding VAT/GB per month: this is a 10% reduction in price. You also have the option of purchasing annual disk quota at an even lower price: €0.15/$0.21/£0.14 excl. VAT/GB/month versus €0.20 excluding VAT/GB per month: this is a 25% reduction!!

How to create a backup disk
Simply log into your disk creation interface and choose the type, "backup". Once the disk has been created, go to your server's information page and specifically the "backup" section, in order to attach it to your server.

How to activate and configure your Gandi backup robot?
We'll start by addressing Gandi AI customers.

Once your backup server has been created and attached to your server, go to the "backup" section at the bottom of your server management page, and then click on "Create a backup disk" to access the page where you can enter the name of the backup, the path to the directories where you want to store your backups, and indicate a directory on your backup disk (ex. /mybackup01). All that remains is to submit this page to start the process.

For users of our expert servers, following the creation and attaching of your disk, you must the install the 'gsync' package, which is available in the Gandi 'repositories' (apt-get install gsync with Debian/Ubuntu for example). Once this has been installed, you can either take care of the configuration yourself, or use our little configuration tool, which you can find on the bottom of you server management page, in the backup section.

How does our backup robot work?
'GSync' is a light agent that constantly monitors changed to the directories that you want to archive. You will therefore have a continually updated backup on an external disk. Then, depending on your configuration, it will keep a copy of past versions. By default, it keeps a recent copy in the current directory, and a number of versions that are three hours old, one day old, and one month old.

Using our robot is not mandatory: you can choose to use another one if you want. The robot's code is published under GPL license, and so you can also decide to improve it and submit your changes to our technical team.

But enough talk! I will let you play with your new toy!

Please feel free to get back to us with your questions and comments, which I am sure will be quick to come :D

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

Gandi AI 1.2 - update available

Ryan — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:48:00 +0200

A new version of Gandi AI, labeled 1.2, is currently available via the server module management page of your account. This version corrects many bugs and imperfections that were present in version 1.1. It also significantly improves the performance of Apache due to the replacement of the mpm-itk module by a per-user module.

We are also going to take advantage of this upgrade to implement two additional modules:

PunBB, an efficient open-source forum that is solid, light, and written in PHP
Magento, a (the?) open-source platform that allows you to create an online store. Many add-ons are available on the MagentoConnect platform, such as the possibility of customizing the design of your store, changing the language of your interface, or to activate the payment platform of your preference. Also note that Magento needs 2 to 3 shares to run correctly.

Set up your server at http://www.gandi.net/hosting

Your first share 100% refundable!

Ryan — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:17:00 +0200

To help you test our hosting service without any risk, your first hosting share is 100% refundable!
No, there is no fine print that says something like the offer is only available for the next two days, 4 hours and 24 seconds, and if you have an IP address that ends in 256 and only if you have Hungarian nationality on your mothers' side and Finnish on your fathers...

No, you will be quite simply fully refunded for your first hosting share when you test our hosting service.
Yes, yes, whether you are SATISFIED OR NOT!

So, beginning today, you now benefit from a classic satisfied or money back guarantee if you release your share before its first payment due date. But as we are Gandi, and since we like to do what is right for our customers, we will also add a satisfied AND money back guarantee!

This means that if/when you keep your shares and renew them, the first share will cost you €0.00 incl. VAT

Ah! This offer is of course only valid once per customer (same name, same address)

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

New Kernel Version for Gandi Hosting

Leland Vandervort — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:07:00 +0200

Following the discovery of a critical security flaw in the Linux kernel applicable to all kernel version, we have made a patched version available of the 2.6.18-xenU kernel used by the virtual machines on our hosting platform. In order to make use of this new version, you will need to restart your server, which you can do simply with the linux command "reboot". We will thus allow you to make arrangements to effect this reboot according to your own scheduling requirements.

{1} : http://blog.cr0.org/2009/08/linux-null-pointer-dereference-due-to.html

Launch of the server monitoring service!

Nicolas — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:34:00 +0200

This afternoon, we are proud to announce the release of our new server monitoring service! As always, we have created a service that goes one step beyond simple expectations. Not only are you now able to have a complete monitoring of your server's resources, but you can even program actions to be taken automatically if, for example, there is an unanticipated spike in your server's traffic for example.

This service will let you to monitor all of the statistics of your server that we already make available to you, and to automatically perform a certain action if you wish.

We have (for now) implemented 3 types of alerts that you can set up:

Exceeding a threshold
In this case, your alert will be activated and your action list will be executed when the parameter that you are monitoring exceeds a certain value (x) over a certain amount of time (t1). The alert will stop once it falls below the limit for another predefined time period (t2).

Dropping under a threshold
In this case, your alert will be activated and your action list will be executed when what you are monitoring falls under a certain value over a given amount of time. The alert will stop once it returns above the limit for another predefined time period.

Inactivity of one of your parameters
Finally, our alert will be activated and your action list will be executed when the parameter that you are monitoring seem to no longer be active. The alert will stop once the probe detects that there is a return to activity over a chosen time period.

When an alert has been given, you have the possibility of executing an action list such as:

- Emailing you a warning. You can choose the email address that you want to receive this alert, and when you want to be warned.

- Send you an alert by instant message. This way, you can be alerted by ICQ, AIM or even IRC (MSN will soon be available as well)

- automatically add a Flex Share to your server. This way, you can optimize the quality of your service by having your server's power increase automatically with the load. Imagine, for example, that you are enjoying a peaceful vacation, sunbathing on a nice beach somewhere and...(ok, I need a vacation haha...).

Simply imagine that you are unavailable, and do not have an internet connection right at hand, when a nice journalist publishes an article about your new website. Suddenly, the 2 shares that you estimated for your service are no longer enough to handle the load: our new system will now act on your behalf, and so you can now have the time to calmly analyze the situation in detail.

The interface is currently available for everyone to use. It may be found on your server's management page, right under the performance monitor graph. We will be adding additional actions to this list (such as the possibility of rebooting or stopping the server) in the near future.

Click here to add a comment

1,000 additional free servers

Nicolas — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:07:00 +0200

The success of the "Your server for free this summer!" operation is such that we have decided to have another promotion, which will be an extension of the previous one.

The first 1,000 free servers were given out in less than one week! Given the number of requests that we have received, we have even opened 102 accounts in addition to what was planned. Only here is the problem: there are many of you on the waiting list and at Gandi, and we want to be able to please as many as possible

The new promotion will therefore begin today. We are once more offering 1,000 free servers though this time, for only one month. The promotion remains, of course, without any purchase necessary, and you are free to keep your server by adding hosting resources to your account, or to let them expire.

The promotion that allows you to benefit from 2 free months by exchanging your monthly shares with fixed annual shares remains valid until August 31st 2009. For this, as a reminder, you just need to go to your "resource management" page, choose the number of annual shares that you want, and pay for your order. Once the shares have been added to your account, you can then remove the monthly shares that you no longer need. You will then be refunded for the time that remaining in the billing cycle for those shares.

click here to comment

Your server for free this summer!

Ryan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:27:00 +0200

Summer has come and this has put us in the mood to make you happy...

So in this summer spirit, here are some things that we have come up with to please you:

Have you not yet tried our cloud hosting service? If not to help you make your change, we are going to give you a free server this summer! Yes, from now until August 31st (and by request from this form) you can have a totally free server (equal to one free share). And like any Gandi hosting share, you can expand the power/performance instantly with no downtime by adding additional shares at your convenience
Are you already a Gandi Hosting customer? If you feel like it is terribly unfair that you cannot benefit from this promo and are already getting ready to write a nasty comment in reply to this article: there is no need, since the price of fixed annual shares has been lowered from €10 excl. VAT per month to €8.34 excl VAT per month, in other words, €100 euros for a year, instead of €120. This is the equivalent of 2 free months! This promotion will also only last until August 31st.

These rates last until August 31st

Gandibar

How to turn your website into a "Web Infrastructure"

Wendy — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:23:00 +0100

Many websites start with a single server solution, a box acting as a web server and database server all in one. Simply, easy, cheap. The problem comes when traffic gets too high (a victim of their own success!). Many customers want a bigger box, but the answer is actually changing your architecture from "web server" to "web infrastructure". You can duplicate web servers, use the DNS to load balance them and ramp up your capacity very fast and very far.

For simplicity's sake, let's take a real example. As some of you already know, we support the Millenium association in their promotion of online video games.

The increasing success of the website, millenium.org, made us re-design the architecture of the website so that it could handle the numerous videos shown on the website to its 17,000 unique visitors per day far more easily and efficiently.

Following a major update of one of the games served by Millenium (WOW patch 3.1), we increased the server power to 16 shares in anticipation of an increase in load. Our expectations were quickly exceeded with over 50,000 unique visitors the first day, and just as many over the following days.

The website received between 500 and 1,000 simultaneous visitors and a large number of videos, which is not viable for a single LAMP server. We immediately changed the infrastructure, by moving from a unique-server model (which is often the starting choice) to an infrastructure-based model. We went from a vertical system (more power) to a horizontal system (more servers):

As you can see in the diagram, we moved the database to a separate server and duplicated the web server to two machines. The load was therefore split by the domain's DNS (using a simple DNS round robin technique). We could also move to dedicating a 1-share server to load distribution, though such a solution would take a bit longer to implement. In our case it took 2 minutes to add the shares to the account, 6 minutes to create the 2 servers, 10 minutes to transfer the data, and 2 hours to configure the services.

Today, the platform easily handles 1 million unique visitors per month, for over 3 million pages viewed - a good thing! Best of all the platform is now capable of evolving. If the database suffers, all we need to do is to add more shares to the database server. If the web front starts to become saturated, we just need to add another.

Because our infrastructure allows you to create as many servers as you want from the hosting resources in your account, you can always add more, and always change your web architecture without replacing physical servers. The virtual hosting system is flexible and allows you to increase from a 1-share server (1/64 of a machine + 1/64 as reserve, 256MB of Ram) to a 16-share server (1/4 of a machine + 1/4 as a reserve, 4GB de Ram) at any time and as often as you want.

If you find yourself confronted by this type of problem, please feel free to contact us, as we would be more than happy to help you.

Gandi Hosting Team
Click to comment on this story.

Debian 5 Lenny and Ubuntu 9.04

Ryan — Thu, 07 May 2009 11:47:00 +0200

Ubuntu 9.04, which was released at the end of April, and Debian 5 (Lenny), have just been added to the list of new Linux distributions that you can use when you create your Gandi server. We have taken this time to deactivate the creation of new servers under Ubuntu 7.10, a distribution that is no longer officially supported by its developers.

As a reminder, here is the list of available distributions at present:

Ubuntu 8.04
Ubuntu 9.04
Debian 4
Debian 5
OpenSuse 10.3
Fedora Core 8
Mandriva 2008.0
Mandriva 2008.1
CentOS 5

Give your data room to grow!

Nicolas — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 09:38:00 +0200

We are pleased to announce the release of a new feature that you've been eagerly anticipating for some time now : the ability to increase the size of your disks!

You will need to perform two steps to do this:

Change the volume of your disk,
Run the necessary update on the file system itself.

This operation is totally automated for servers running under Gandi AI, though it's only possible to do this on data disks for the moment.

For expert servers, only the volume change phase of the operation is done via our website. You will need to manually run the file system update on your own.

Please remember that you will need to have enough quota available in your account to expand your disk to the desired size.

You can view our prices at the following page: http://www.gandi.net/hosting/proposal/price/

For step-by-step instructions to guide you along the disk-resizing procedure, please visit our wiki at: http://wiki.gandi.net/en/hosting/manage-disk/resize-disk

We are continuing to work on adding additional key features to our hosting service, such as the ability to perform backups, snapshots or copies of your data, and even the sale of additional IP addresses. And of course, many other surprises as well...

If you want to comment this news, follow me.

Server performance statistics!

Ryan — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:04:00 +0100

The best way to see if your server is doing well and check that you have optimized its power it so have server statistics!

We finally have some nice graphs that let you see your server's CPU usage, network traffic, and your disk's read-write usage. These graphs will give you precious information on how your server is used, and when various usage peaks or low-points occur, so that you can optimize your services.

Below is an example of a server that is rather "active". You can see that the processor is only using on average 16% to 18% of its power (over a 24-hour period), with a peak at 40%. The server is running on 2 shares, and is therefore clearly too powerful for its current needs.

The following example shows the contrary. This server is in serious need of additional shares:

In the image below, you can see that the data disk /xvdb/ performs far more writing (light orange) than reading (dark orange):

Finally, the Network usage graph shows that there is more outgoing traffic than incoming. The server is using about 0.5Mbits, and so here too, you can see that it is too powerful for its real needs:

As a conclusion, your server statistics give you:

help in establishing the right size server for your needs. Imagine, that you run a website on a server with two shares, observing your statistics over a week, you see that your CPU usage is 20% to 25%, and that you are using less than 1Mbits. You may then remove a share and monitor your statistics for the next few days. Your service will remain online and undisturbed and you will simultaneously save money and make an eco-friendly gesture by not wasting resources.
the ability to create a real "Flex" strategy. If your statistics show a steady wave, or if your peaks occur at distinct times, you can schedule your Flex shares to be added to your server for these periods - at only 3 cents (Euros) per hour, you will often come out a winner!

Hosting improvements - more, more, more

Arti — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:00:00 +0100

So here we are, proud parents of the Gandi hosting infrastructure. Our little baby has now been live (or alive) for 4 months now since the full launch on 1st Oct. Like any new parent everything is possible for our baby, and the future is really exciting. But also like any new parent, there is lots to learn and always things to be done.

The reaction to the product has been great, and the industry is becoming more and more agreed that hosting products based on cloud infrastructures will be the future. In fact Gandi was recognised in the Tier1Research Industry report on Hosting as a company and service to watch:

"Gandi has all the hallmarks of a true cloud infrastructure service, with scalability, redundancy against single points of failure, and flexible, pay-as-you-go billing schemes." - Tier1Research Winter 2008.

But we are not going to rest on our laurels. In fact since we launched the full service we've been monitoring performance, taking feedback and putting in place additional tweaks and fixes to optimise our infrastructure. And today we are pushing out the first set of improvements!

Based on the analysis of existing customers (over 5,000), their usage patterns, needs and performance, we have been able to double (yes double) the CPU limits available to each and every share on our system. This means that you will be getting more bang for your buck, with no compromise in performance. It will also continue to ensure that the more shares you buy the more CPU you get, as performance has been doubled at every level.

And you can feel good about it too! Too many servers run at only 10-12% utilisation (based on recent data published by Dell), which means the hosting industry produces a lot of waste! This has always been one of the benefits of virtualisation: use servers more efficiently, cut waste, be more green. So a feel good side-effect of this improvement is that the servers will be better utilised, so you benefit and so does good old mother nature.

But that's not all. We've also made a dramatic improvement to the IO wait for filer access with a few well targeted fixes in the device drivers. So again you'll notice the extra zip in your share.

We've also seen more people using Gandi Flex (our flexible share booking system to allow you to scale your resources on schedule), so we wanted to say thanks by lowering the price per Flex share from €0.07 ($0.10/£0.06) per hour to €0.03 ($0.05, £0.04) per hour. So this is yet another way to up and down scale your needs.

And finally, if you're not convinced, we're giving new customers the opportunity to test drive the Gandi system. So if you have any doubts, go to our hosting page https://www.gandi.net/hosting/trial/ and submit a request for a test drive and we'll give you some shares to have a go.

We hope you enjoy the improvements, and you can be sure that we are working on more. Now back to work

Addition of system disks

Ryan — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:26:00 +0100

In addition to the 5 GB of data disk quota that is included with each share, you also have a free 3 GB system disk with each server that you create. These system disks are now displayed on your server management page.

This will soon allow you to manipulate them separately (such as changing their size)

Cloud Infrastructure is finally concrete!

Ryan — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:56:00 +0200

We've made it!

For some it has been a four year labour of love, for others, less. In any case, an important step has just been taken by the team, of whom I am ever more proud: our Cloud Infrastructure is now operational. Yes, we are pleased to announce the grand opening of our Gandi Hosting service!

This wild dream is fuelled behind the scenes by the desire of a team to create something truly different, that will provide a unique combination of flexibility and transparency - two crucial elements often missing in the market. The desire to see people only consume what they really need, to provide them with the ability to migrate their resources from one location to another when needed, to move about freely...in short, everything that we dreamt about as customers ourselves.

The entire industry, all the players in this market, know very well that this technology will replace shared hosting, and possibly even dedicated hosting. The advantages for customers are too great to be ignored, which is why the traditional players, having down played this new type of hosting, are using buzzwords around virtualization in order to continue to sell to customers who are insufficiently informed.

It is our mission: to explain, again and again, why everyone needs flexible and dedicated resources, and those that accept this are turning to these solutions. Today we are talking about web hosting, but the infrastructure is really based on and can be used for "Cloud Computing". In other words, the rental of 'super computer' processing power which can be accessed from anywhere in the world for needs as diverse as 3D rendering, gigantic databases, etc...

To get back to hosting, our choice has been to offer a product with the following components:

- a technology that allows a degree of flexibility and security that is unrivalled among current web hosts/discounters,

- a price that is within reach of the largest number of people, maintaining one of the the core values of Gandi,

- a service that is worthy of being called such, or even more! Our mission is to serve you individually as best we possibly can, not to create an enormous mass of faceless customers.

I sincerely believe that, every day that has gone by and is yet to come, every effort is being made to meet our objectives, whether they are technical or personal.

Of course, the miracle solution, the one with the biggest pipes, the most massive machines etc.. that many players in the market are bragging about, does not exist. No technology will ever be flawless and we would not be providing you with an honest service if we made that claim.

But we do believe that:

Our role as a partner in your online presence (which is far more than simply hosting of your website), includes knowing that we need to help you see that you must use common sense in all situations, for example, the prominent mention in our hosting contract of the necessity to perform regular backups of your data.

We have months, or even years ahead of us to adapt our service to meet your needs, to perfect it so that it increasingly becomes one that cannot be ignored.

We are asking for the thing that is most important in our eyes, your confidence, to show you the way to go, not to hide from you all that we are doing, and to ensure that the service is as good as it can be. In our mind, this is achieved by proving the quality of our products to you.

When you entrust your online presence with us, we must be responsive if things go wrong (and this, even if I obviously do not want it to occur, does happen), be transparent with regards to what is taking place, and to do everything in our power to fix it, and of course to back this up with a commercial gesture.

All of this is clearly mentioned in our contract with you.

I do not know what you, our customers, will do with this service. Judging from the thousands of you that have joined us, even before the grand opening, it has already been a huge success, and one that all of us here wish to continue!

Despite the length of this entry, please allow me to warmly thank all the beta testers that have been with us these last nine months, without whom we would not have been able to make the right choices. I hope that by keeping the current rates for a few more months, and that the various rate schemes will encourage you to stay with us. As a side note, our American customers find that our offer is quite inexpensive for this type of service, compared to other offers of the same type.

As a conclusion, I just wanted, before totally delivering this service, to say to my team that they did a simply fabulous job, and that this can never be taken away from them. Simply put, we have suffered, but this is one of those things that can be remembered for ever with pride.Thanks to all that have contributed to this project!.

If I have been smiling in recent weeks - while I should have been more "stressed" due to the accumulated "delays" - it has been for this very reason: we are doing something long-term, and I am very proud of this, given all that we have achieved.

PS: The hardest part is just beginning, hang in there!

Stephan

If you would like to comment on this, please visit us at the bar!

Gandi hosting, no longer quite so beta...

Ryan — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:29:00 +0200

We have grown, and we have burned
We have worked and we have learned
And now our new service is ready to
Present as a final gift to you!

Granted, I was not hired to be a poet. Still, my heart is lifted at the very thought of how much progress our superb team of developers has made!

And all this just to bring you up-to-date on the latest developments in our hosting offer!

We'll begin then, if you please, by discussing storage:

- our initial storage architecture was based on RAID 6 SATA hard disks. This has been upgraded to RAID 60 on SAS disks. Since everyone prefers hearing about performance rather than norms and acronyms, know that our disks' access time has been divided by 3! This in itself is wonderful, but in addition to this you will also experience a far better quality of service.

And the network?

- As we preferred the color of the diodes on the Cisco switches better, we replaced all of our old switches by those made by this well-known brand. Actually, it was not just for looks that we did this, and the experts among you will know the truth. Those would be some expensive diodes!
- We have also installed a second data center which is nearly finished, and which will really allow us to go crazy with redundancy, backups, fail-overs etc... more about this in due time.

All this is just wonderful: a hosting platform that has offered an excellent level of service for over 9 months now, including a massive upgrade three months ago (correct me if I am wrong, dear Beta-Testers). And all of this as part of the beta! (even though not all of our customers have migrated to the famous new storage architecture! This will be done in the coming weeks, when the new customers, the non-beta testers if you will, will be comfortably installed directly on the SAS disks).

Wait! Stop throwing the tomatoes at me! Let me finish! This is the part where I mention money

All the recent changes and improvements in our network have obviously been at a cost. And since you, dear customer, have stopped being naive a long time ago, believing that you can give away a domain name just for fun or sell high-quality hosting for a buck without any trouble in the world, you are quite naturally going to ask me how much a Gandi hosting share will be once we are in the final version of our hosting service. The truth is that service and reliability have a cost.

Don't worry - I'm not going to dwell on this topic. I know what it's like to skim over a text, looking for an answer among the many lines; your eyes involuntarily jump around the page, in the hope of catching a number somewhere, the one you are looking for...

Yes, I know that I am playing with you here. So I have written the magic number in letters, so that it discretely blends into the surrounding text, so that you have to read everything. Enough said - I hereby announce the price excluding VAT of sixteen dollars (twelve euros, or nine pounds fifty depending on your currency) per month. Well, there you have it! Sixteen dollars excluding VAT for a share as you have come to know and love it with all its flexible options, while simultaneously being beefed up by SAS and thus having all its resources improved overall.

And if I constantly stress the flexible aspect that you are already familiar with, it is because we have also created a special offer for a new type of share that is part of the same technology, but without the flexibility in both time and price: an "annual share". Annual shares are purchased for a contractual period of one year, but are only fourteen dollars (ten euros or eight pounds) excluding VAT per month. An annual share is therefore purchased for an entire year for fourteen dollars a month, or one hundred sixty-eight dollars per year. Think of this share as the first one that you purchase in order to keep your cost to a minimum, and play with adding more or less shares depending on your needs.

The cherry on top is for the beta testers. In order to thank you for your confidence, your trust, and also your patience at the beginning (here I am thinking about the famous filer 13 incident), we are going to keep giving you Beta rates until the end of the year. I nonetheless must mention that the annual share, (the one that is fixed for twelve months), is not covered by this reduction - there have to be some limits!

Of course there will be some that will be unhappy with the rates. Those that honestly thought that our rates could remain at six euros per share forever... Realistically however Gandi has had to make major investments to offer a level of service that is worthy of its name in both technology and level of service, and these investments have had a direct impact on the price of a share.

We honestly believe that we are providing a high-quality service at a price that is within the reach of the public. The future will show you that you made the right decision to give us your trust; we are sure of this. And are working hard to make it come true. We have also kept in mind those of you who do not necessarily need all the power of these resources to launch your project. But require just a little bit of power. We will soon start to talk about an offer that we have been working on that is specifically designed for those of you that fit this description: a way to create a professional-quality website in the blink of an eye.

Innovation, my friends, innovation

PS (Stephan): So that our enthusiasm is not seen as simple arrogance, I feel the need to stress that we are doing our utmost to deliver the best quality of service, but that nobody is perfect. We may have the best machines in the universe, white rooms with millions of square feet at our disposal, pipelines capable of absorbing everything that moves etc... but there is always room for improvement.

You can, however, be sure of two things:

- that our infrastructure and technology can respond to meet the varied hosting needs of the general public

- that we are and will be doing everything, no matter what the circumstances may be, to serve you as best we can.

If you would like to comment on this post, please visit us at the Gandi Bar!

Filer 13 : Epilogue

Ryan — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:42:00 +0200

Summary of events:

On Thursday, May 12th, we experienced the simultaneous failure of 2 disks on filer 13. That evening, right before we finished the RAID reconstruction, a third disk failed (on new 'quality' hardware). We therefore stopped the servers so as to avoid the corruption of the volume group and tried to recover the data throughout the night and on Friday.
Friday morning, we contacted customers on filer 13 and began the reconstruction of the servers. Given the large number of servers, the process was rather time consuming though should have been completed between Friday night and Saturday...except that the filer used began to experience the same symptoms as filer 13; as did the following ones. Depending on the attitude of the manufacturer involved in the coming days, we are not ruling anything out, given the prejudice caused by their defective hardware.
After several hours of setting up new filers from other manufacturer, the reconstruction process picked up again Sunday night, and by Tuesday morning 90% of the customers were ready to go. We then spent a day manually processing the remaining 10% and dealing with the side-affects, notably on GandiMail which suffered (though the situation has returned to normal). We are implementing massive resources to GandiMail, so as to be able to provide an excellent level of service.
Today, all the servers on filer 13 have been reconstructed, and all the customers that ordered a server since Thursday have been served.

Damage caused:

Customers impacted by filer 13 and the subsequent loss of all their data are in the process of being fully refunded for all of the amount paid fromt their prepaid accounts. We are in beta testing now, but we are intransigent.
We have extended the 5-day period of validity for the shared of everyone blocked between Thursday and Monday.

Actions being taken:

The changing of the architecture to provide the readily available hosting promises during the launching of the service was decided even before the crash of filer 13. Indeed, if a machine on which your server is hosted fails, the incident will be transparent to you; if a disk (or 2) stop working, the RAID 6 will assure that the incident also goes unnoticed for the customer. We wanted this to even be the case if an entire filer failed. The storage architecture is therefore being modified. The final version of the service will be announced once this takes affect.
A backup system is also being prepared that will assure you that all your data will not be stored in the same data center as your main disks. The centers are either completed or being fine-tuned.
We holding discussions with the supplier of the defective filers (and I strongly suggest that they recognize the gravity of the situation) and other manufactures in order to take all the necessary measures as required.

I would like to give my sincere thanks to all our customers that, despite the disturbances encountered on this advances technology in beta testing (this must always been kept in mind), continued to post their positive and indispensable support.

I also wish to say to my team that I am proud to work with them. What they have done is admirable, just as much so as what they continue to do. Thank you. (Stephan)

If you would like to discuss this with us, please feel free to visit the Gandi Bar.

Disk problems (being fixed)

Ryan — Sun, 18 May 2008 15:36:00 +0200

Things are progressing nicely, and the incident caused by the loss of filer 13 which impacted customers is now in the process of being fixed.

The servers have been re-created one at a time since 10:00 AM (GMT) this morning and this long process will be completed by tomorrow for the last affected customer. We therefore ask for just a bit more patience...

It is to be noted that new disk and server creations have been suspended until Monday in order to minimize the waiting time needed for customers who are still blocked.

As mentioned at the beginning of the incident, customers on filer 13 who were impacted will receive a full refund.

Also, we will keep you informed as to the RAID architecture changes that we are in the process of developing, and that will prevent this type of scenario from ever reoccurring.

Additionally, we are going to discuss all this with the manufacturers.

Console access will be granted to everyone tomorrow, which will allow those that were not on the Filer of Death though nonetheless affected by the side effects to regain access to their machines.

Once more, we apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused.

If you would like to discuss this with us, we invite you to visit the Gandi Bar.