Gandi IWI Blog

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!

GandiMail Problems

Ryan — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:26:00 +0200

The GandiMail architecture currently functions via fluctuations between the recovery of messages in your mailbox via POP/IMAP or Gandi webmail. Our administrators are in the process of stabilizing the service as rapidly as possible. The final phase of the stabilization that we have previously mentioned on the subject should be brought online in the coming days and will eliminate the problems that we are currently experiencing.

17:00 GMT The maintenance scheduled for next week is being done right now in order to facilitate an early and permanent fix of the problem on our GandiMail service. We estimate this maintenance to be completed within two hours. We are aware of the inconvenience caused by this issue, we apologize once again.
19:15 GMT: The maintenance is taking a bit longer than planned. Everything is going along nicely, and the service will soon return to normal.

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.

.DE and .AT transfers now possible

Ryan — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:49:00 +0200

We have just activated the possibility of transferring .DE and .AT domain names. As a reminder, for .DE domain names we do not yet provide a contact person in Germany for the administrative contact. In order for the transfer to be accepted, the owner contact and/or administrative contact must have a German street address.

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.

Special rebate: .AT domain names for $17

Elliott — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:25:00 +0200

Because of a slightly strange calculation on the cost of .AT domain names at the registry (from 1 to 6 times its price), we are offering the next 80 .AT domain names for $17 excl. VAT instead of $25 excl. VAT.

The .AT TLD is open to all without any restriction.

.AT and .DE launch

Elliott — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:30:00 +0200

We continue to march on in our project to propose all of the European TLDs: we're adding the official German (DE) and Austrian (AT) TLDs today. The .DE is the most used national TLD in the world, and the .AT comes twenty first in such a ranking.

The .DE TLD is only open to German citizens and companies, or to people that can justify an administrative contact in Germany. Please note that the DNS need to be properly installed (Zonecheck verification) for the domain to be active.

Details about the .DE TLD are available at this address:
http://www.gandi.net/domaine/de/info
The .DE is available for $15 excl. VAT at an A rate. The complete grid is available at this address:
http://www.gandi.net/domain/price/detail/de/

The .AT TLD, on the other hand, is open to all. Its details are available at this address:
http://www.gandi.net/domain/at/info
The .AT is available for $25 excl. VAT at an A rate. The complete grid is available at this address:
http://www.gandi.net/domain/price/detail/at/

Transfer procedures for these 2 TLDs aren't active yet. They will be in the next couple of days.

Network modifications

Elliott — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:22:00 +0200

We will be making changes on our network between midnight and 1am, in order to upgrade our connection to 2gbps. This interruption will cut/slow down/disturb access to Gandi sites and services for only some of you (23% of you, to be precise).

This modification is part of the tests begun last week to increase the bandwidth per hosting share.

We apologize for the disturbance.

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!

Commenting is now possible!

Ryan — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:31:00 +0200

Many Gandi resellers have been requesting the possibility of adding notes to their customer's domains, and this is now possible!
You can now add a note to:

domains in your portfolio
one of your contacts
one of your servers

Note that the notes that you add are strictly confidential and can only be seen by the reseller.

Gandi Webmail improvements

Elliott — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:10:00 +0200

At around 9pm tonight, Gandi's webmail will be unavailable for one hour maximum - for a good cause:

As you know, Gandi's webmail is @Mail-based. Though we've already improved on it in many ways, this update constitutes a big step forward, with the integration of several edits published by @Mail, but also and mostly thanks to a significant amount of internal work:

Sorting rules (based on topic or e-mail)

E-mails sent in html also come in text version

Contact group management

Corrected problems with draft editing

Corrected editing problems during html <=> text shifts

Display number of unread e-mails in the list of folders

Page management in the Xul interface

Name + e-mail displayed (instead of e-mail only) when an e-mail is sent from the address book

Corrected problems when an action is performed on a selection of several e-mails

Corrections on the search page when it gives no result

"Enter" key can be used in the search form

Translated HTML editor

Added 'mark as Spam' entry in the Ajax interface's contextual menu

Multiple identities also available in the simple interface

We have also made a large amount of small graphic corrections and the like, which would take too long to list here but will have significant impact on Webmail use.

For resellers, we have also produced a "de-branded" version of the Webmail, that is to say without the Gandi logo.
To display this version, nothing simpler: you just need to access the Webmail WITHOUT going through the mail.gandi.net url, but rather using the one you defined in your zone, or webmail.yourdomain.tld if your zone is Gandi's default zone.
Following the same idea, you can now change your password in the webmail directly, without having to go through the Gandi interface.

We continue to work to improve Gandi Mail in general (including modifications to the technical architecture), and namely on our antispam/antivirus solution, so as to lighten the current load on our servers.

.ASIA Launch

Elliott — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 11:05:00 +0100

The .ASIA TLD will be launched today at 1pm, French time. Gandi, who did not participate in the Sunrise phases for reasons explained in this post, has been .ASIA-accredited since the end of last year.

The .ASIA for all!
The TLD is normally reserved for individuals and corporate bodies who can justify a contact in the Asia geographic zone (from Turkey to the Pacific). This contact (CED) can be one of the 4 contacts linked to your domain (Owner, Admin, Billing or Technical), and you will then need to provide identification information for this person (passport number) or body (company number). Important point: if you cannot justify a CED contact yourself, Gandi, who possesses an Australian subsidiary, will be able to assume a technical contact position with the Registry for no extra charge.

Now accepting orders
As always, we do not like pre-booking systems by which companies promise that you will definitely get the domain you want by paying more money, and therefore we did not participate in the auctioning system or in any anticipated booking.
You can start placing your orders right away, bearing in mind you will need to manually check whether the domain was reserved during the Sunrise period. If your order fails, we will of course reimburse you fully.

The TLDs specificities are available here:
http://www.gandi.net/domaine/asia/info

The TLD is sold for $25.00 excl VAT as an A rate. The full grid is available here:
http://www.gandi.net/domaine/prix/detail/asia/

You can discuss this with us at the Gandi Bar.

Lower rates for .MOBI domains

Ryan — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:36:00 +0100

The registry that manages .MOBI domains has decided to lower the creation price on the TLD. Gandi is therefore acting on this and dropping the price from $24 to $18 for A rates.

The complete price rates for .MOBI is available at the following address: http://www.gandi.net/domaine/prix/detail/mobi/?lang=en

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!

.info domains for 1€ excl. VAT

Ryan — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 14:31:00 +0100

As a result of a new Afilias promotion, we are able to offer you (within a limit of 10,000 domain names and until March 31st) .info domain names for only 1€ excl. VAT ($1.50 or £0.7) for the first year of registration. This is therefore a good opportunity to:

open a Gandi Blog
switch your mail to Gandi mail
protect your brand or the name of your organization in .info
allow our resellers to give a present to their customers
buy a silly domain name just for fun...

.IT Launch

Arti — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 13:51:00 +0100

It has been 3 months since we last rolled out a new domain name extension.

While waiting for .asia to be made available on March 20th, we have decided to jump back in to the action by launching .IT domains, the official ccTLD of Italy.

The .IT extension may be registered to EU nationals and companies, and can be registered for one year (renewable). The details are available at this address: http://www.gandi.net/domain/it/info

Please note that each operation (purchase, transfer, change of ownership or deletion) can only be completed via a special signed document, fax or mail, sent directly to the Italian registry. An e-mail with the necessary instructions will be sent to you once your order has been placed via our website.

.IT domain names are sold at 12€ ($16.00, or 8.30£) excl. tax in the A price bracket. The full price list is available at this address: http://www.gandi.net/domain/price/detail/it/

Operation delays [terminated]

Arti — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 11:20:00 +0100

Due to a technical problem declared last night at around 5.30pm, all Hosting operations are taking much too long. We therefore recommend you avoid operations which halt your server, such as "Stop" or "Reboot".

Service should be back to normal in the next 2 hours, that is to say around 1.30pm Paris time.

We apologise for the disturbance.

EDIT 4:45pm :Older operations are going through but a few others are being added to the load. Which doesn't help, to be honest. The incident is therefore still ongoing. We will keep you informed.

EDIT 5:45pm :Incident over, thank you for your patience.

Technical maintenance on our Customer Support Software

Francoise — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:58:00 +0100

Hello,

We would like to inform you that, due to technical maintenance on our Customer Support Software, the response delay may be longer than usual (about half a day more) for questions sent to us as of 5PM today. We will do our best to get back to our usual response time as soon as possible.

Best regards,

-Gandi's Support Team-

GandiBlog Update: The Return

Ryan — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 08:59:00 +0100

You may have noticed your GandiBlog running faster this afternoon.

No, we haven't added 50 new machines, we've just updated GandiBlog. In fact, we've doubly updated it.

Your blogs definitely respond faster. We've set up a very efficient cache system on your blogs' public section, therefore avoiding avid RSS-feed-upaters penalizing everyone else. If you happen to witness any cache-related problem (pages that no longer updates, for instance), please let us know.

That's for the performance side of things.

And because good news always comes in twos, the curious among you will have noticed a new theme in the last of GandiBlog's available themes: "Blowup". Note that the screenshot in the list of themes is only one possibility.

Activate the theme and then click its configuration link. Would you like to change the background color? the title font? change the banner's position? All of those are possible with this theme.

You'll even be able to place an image in JPG or PNG format (800 pixels wide, imperatively) so as to completely personalize the top banner of your blog.

And if you lack inspiration, you'll be able to chose from a list pre-defined styles and ready-made images. There are only few for the time time being, but we're going to add some more and are also relying on your help. That will be the topic of the next post.

Recently, a reader wrote: "...you need to be a real expert in CSS and the like... Isn't there something between the 2? It would be really great to be able to choose a basic theme and simply change the photo...". I think that the Blowup theme will satisfy this need.

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

Incident underway [terminated]

Ryan — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:51:00 +0100

We are currently experiencing a problem that is affecting operations on Gandi Hosting and Gandi Mail.

Our teams are working to re-establish service as quickly as possible.

Thank you for your understanding.

Note: Return to normal at 15:45 GMT

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!

Linux security alert

Ryan — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:56:00 +0100

Following a global security alert for the Linux kernel published this weekend, we have updated our platform to patch the vulnerability, which allows a user on your machine to switch to root.

We have been closely following the situation and implemented the necessary fix yesterday. For those of you that would like to apply it, all you just need to restart your server via ssh with the reboot command.

The Gandi Technical Team

Friendly reminder on how to renew your hosting account

Ryan — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:32:00 +0100

Precisely one month after the launching of our Beta trial version, some of you may be wondering just how the renewal process works...

Our service is without a minimum contractual period. You can cancel your service whenever you want. We will refund your prepaid account for the amount of time that you did not use your service. The renewal only consists of extending your account's expiration date by one month.

There are two ways to renew your account:

"manually", via our website by clicking on the renew button.
"automatically", by activating the auto-renewal system (also available for domain names).

In both events, it is necessary for your prepaid account to have sufficient funds for the operation. But there is nothing to worry about: you will be sent reminders alerting you that your account is approaching its renewal date. You can also see the renewal date of your account in your Server Overview page.

If you would like to cancel your account, simply delete all your servers and disks, and remove the shares associated with your account.

If ever, despite our renewal reminders, you forget to renew the account that you use for your servers, it will be put on "redemption" period for 7 days. Your servers will no longer be accessible, though you will have 7 days in which you can still renew your account if you wish.
After this period, the servers and disks will be permanently and definitively deleted.

Renewal during the Beta period comes to 6 euros excl. VAT per share. We will alert you to the end of this period when the date has been fixed, thus allowing you to renew your account at the Beta rate one last time. Finally, for those that have missed the announcement, the price for the final release version has been set at 10 euros excl. VAT per share, and we have increased the dedicated bandwidth from 1.5 to 5 Mbits per share.

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

WARNING! "Domain Registry of America" (DROA) - "Domain Registry Services"

Francoise — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 16:46:00 +0100

We have already spoken of this, though it is still happenning with DROA, and others are joining in as well. Just like "Domain Registry Services", which is in no way affiliated with Gandi.net.

If you receive a mail claiming to be a renewal form from Domain Registry of America do not act on it!. We are not in any way affiliated with these companies. Your domain cannot be registered with them as they are not a ICANN-accredited registrars, nor Gandi resellers.

If you have not transferred it already, your domain name is safely at Gandi. You may verify this by looking it up in our whois search engine. Look at the "Registrar" and "Expires" lines.

All that concerns renewal and/or contact information updates will be conducted exclusively by Gandi.

If you have received such a letter, and would like for us to archive it, and so that we can add it to a possible future action against the practices of these companies, please feel free to fax us a copy of it at +33.1.43.73.18.51.

Please note that permanent security of your general top level domain is available by locking it against transfers, and that our customer service department is available to help you if you have the slightest question.