Gandi IWI Blog

Explanation of the outage that lasted 4 hours

Nicolas — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:12:00 +0200

Dear Customers,

As some of you may have noticed, we experienced a power outage from 11:30 AM to 3:30 PM (CET) today. We apologise for the inconvenience caused.

The company which manages the datacenter, that houses one of our server rooms performed maintenance this morning on some of their electrical equipment. Unfortunately, a human error by the provider undertaking the maintenance led to a total blackout of the datacenter for several minutes. The outage impacted many major companies on the internet (Dailymotion, Skyblog, Pixmania, etc.), as well as a portion of our customers.

Our system automatically transfers data to another server room in the event of a problem and it was working normally until the threshold was reached too quickly. There are several reasons for this: a massive outage on a scale seldom seen, combined with our choice to build-up the other server locations gradually rather than all at once, a server rebooting process that still requires perfecting and the success of our free server operation...in short, a chain of events caused this outage for some of you.

It goes without saying that we will examine what we could have been done at our end to prevent this, for example, a quicker building up of the other server locations (the hosting operation helps this enormously), and the continued optimization of the rebooting script (in the event that the electricity gods or the datacenter's subcontractor are still out to get us).

Additionally, we will ensure we refund you for today, and are at your disposal for any additional requests you may have. We will be adding one day to the expiration date for all of the affected hosting resources throughout the day.

Please accept our sincere apologies for this inconvenience. We are working to ensure that our infrastructure is built-up in a way which assures good performance and excellent management, so that ALL of you can benefit from our technology.

Technical note: In the event of a Gandi AI server, if your server responds but one of your services (web, ftp, etc.) is not working correctly, you can fix this by simply stopping and starting your server from Gandi's website. In the event that you have an expert server, we recommend that you activate your account's emergency console and execute a fsck command on your disks.

click here to comment this news

Your server for free this summer!

Ryan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:27:00 +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

Sale on .EU domains

Ryan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:21:00 +0200

Following a promotion at the registry. We will be offering .EU domain creations for €4 excl. VAT instead of €12 excl. VAT. This sale will last until August 31st and does not concern renewals or transfers.

Sale on .US domains

Ryan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:20:00 +0200

Following a promotion at the registry. We will be offering .US domain creations for €4 excl. VAT instead of €12 excl. VAT. This sale will last until July 31st and does not concern renewals or transfers.

Liberalisation of the Internet - Special Report

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

In 2010, the geography of the Internet is set to expand significantly, as ICANN will liberalise the market for domain name extensions. Gandi have commissioned a report from The FutureLab to see how consumers and businesses view this change.
More about the liberalisation process

Is this a squatting opportunity or a branding opportunity?

2/3 of businesses don't realise domain extensions are being liberalised next year. But those businesses that do know about this (like Deloitte) are excited about the opportunities in the areas of global branding. However corporates are also concerned that brand protection mechanisms need to be in place at the new registries, a view that has been raised by Microsoft.
More about the impact on businesses. Inc video interview with COO Gandi.net

Will the net become full of pointless domains?

Many consumers are confused about what liberalisation means and are concerned by the rise of squatting, phishing and advertising clogging up the domain space. However they do feel a real connection with localised domain names, e.g. .london, .paris. nyc, etc., and communities they are interested in, e.g. .music, .movie, .sport. There is also a growing Generation Y group interested in self publishing and being associated with certain brand names like .facebook, .myspace, .moonfruit.
More about the impact on consumers. Inc video interview with Marketing Director Gandi.net

Will this mean the end of 'Dot Com'?

Will 'Dot Com' decline with the advent of new geographical, brand and interest group based extensions. Or will this give Dot Com a chance to clean up its act and reclaim its prime real estate from pay per click ads, squatters and unresolved web addresses.
More about the evolving landscape

The evolving landscape of the internet following liberalisation

Why did Gandi commission this independent report

At Gandi we feel strongly about the future of the internet. We commissioned this report because we want to keep the domain space free for consumer and commercial use. We think this is an important enough issue that people need to understand the impact on them as consumers and businesses. How do you want these new domain territories to be governed? and are there lessons to be learned from how we've used our existing domain space? More about the report

Download the report in full

To comment on this come to our special report pages

Launching of .JP domains

Ryan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:14:00 +0200

Hello,

As a somewhat different choice, we have gone outside Europe and chosen to launch an Asian extension. You can now register and manage .JP domain names (the official ccTLD of Japan) at Gandi.

The extension is usually reserved for the Japanese, though we can provide you with a local contact for free that will let you register it, even if you are not in Japan.

.JP domains may be registered for €72 excl. VAT under A rates. Please note that we do not yet manage the transfer of .JP domains automatically.

You may see the .JP information page here: https://www.gandi.net/domain/jp/info
The complete .JP price list can be found at: https://www.gandi.net/domaine/prix/detail/jp/

The .ME.UK is available

Ryan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:12:00 +0200

Hello,

Today we have added the possibility of registering domain names in .me.uk, which is the UK extension that is designed for individuals. The extension nonetheless remains open to all. It may be registered for a minimum of 2 years at a rate of €6 under A rates.

You may see the .ME.UK information page here: https://www.gandi.net/domain/me.uk/info

The complete .ME.UK price list can be found at: https://www.gandi.net/domaine/prix/detail/nl/

Gandi SiteMaker Incident (fixed)

Ryan — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:52:00 +0200

An incident has occurred with on Gandi SiteMaker platform which has rendered your websites offline. We will keep you informed of the situation as soon as the problem has been identified. Please accept our apologies for any problem this may have caused. 10:38 => incident fixed.
11:00 => Following the network outage and subsequent impact on the SiteMaker service, we need to perform some emergency maintenance to bring the file system back up. It should take about an hour, in the meantime, there will be a maintenance page showing.
13:00 => Maintenance done

IPv6 for Gandi (coming soon!)

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

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

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

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

What is the current deployment status?

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

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

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

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

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

What about glue records for IPv6?

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

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

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

What exactly is IPv6 and why is it important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Launching of .NL

Ryan — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:17:00 +0200

Today, we are pleased to announce that we will be releasing .NL domain names. The official extension of the Netherlands is the 3^rd largest country-specific extension in Europe (after .de and .co.uk), and the 4^th largest in the world (with .cn in first place, with over 3 million active domain names).
It is available for registration to everyone at Gandi, because if you do not have a local contact for the administrative contact of the domain, we will automatically provide you with one for free.
See the .NL information page: https://www.gandi.net/domaine/nl/info

The extension is sold at €6 excl. vat for E rates, €12 excl. vat for A rates.
See the price list: https://www.gandi.net/domaine/prix/detail/nl/

Note that for .nl transfers, you need to accompany your order with the faxing of a signed document to the registry.

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

Joe — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:16:00 +0100

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

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

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

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

As usual, click here to comment

How the domain name industry works - polluting the name space

Joe — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:19:00 +0100

Would you trust a 'for profit' company to represent your best interests? Perhaps. But when your interests diverge, will they represent you or themselves?

Following the overwhelming success of our first article on the domain name industry (1 comment ;-), we naturally thought you were begging for more! I know, I know registrars and registries can be a bit dull, but it is important. Believe me when something goes wrong with your domain name, understanding this can be quite important. So if we look at how and where issues can be dealt with, and who has influence in the industry it sheds a bit more light on the subject.

So now we know who's who in the tree (ICANN, Registries, Registrars, Resellers and You) we can see how the influence the landscape and who has control of what. In a nutshell:

So you as a customer will rely on your Registrar (or Reseller) to represent your needs and solve your problems for you, though they may have to do this at the Registry or ICANN level.

The crazy thing about this is that the Registrars (or Resellers) which are purely commercial entities have voting rights at the registries and ICANN to influence overall policy in the domain space. In some registries (e.g. Nominet for UK), they have voting rights based on the number of domains they manage. So the bigger the commercial entity, the more influence on policy. Hmm. Would you trust a for profit company to represent your best interests? Perhaps. But when your interests diverge, will they represent you or themselves?

Imagine this problem - the domain name space is being filled with squatters, domain speculators, parked/advertised domain names, etc. Now as 'you' the consumer of domain names or visitor to sites online, this is probably not a good thing. You can't get the addresses you want because they are taken, and when you do browse the net you often come across pointless, cluttered sites that offer nothing but invitations to buy them and ad links to other services.

So what would 'you' like. Probably to get rid of all this junk domain space to free it up for use by people who want to publish actual sites or services online, not just profit from the namespace.

But what about the Registries, Resellers, Regsitrars and even ICANN? Well unfortunately they get paid for every domain name sold. If you were to cut all these domains out each of these bodies would see a substantial drop in revenue. For ICANN or the Registries, this might result is less resources to support or manage the name space. For Registrars and Resellers (and some private sector Registries), this would lead to lower sales and profits and 'shareholder value'.

So if you were running a company would you push for something that was better for your customers, but resulted in a 25-50% fall in sales? Hmm. Perhaps not.

The fact that some Registrars like us (but not us, we don't do this!) are actually taking available domains out of circulation, so customers can't get them, and then advertising on them for profit is extraordinary. We're crapping in our own garden!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running http://domainnamewire.com/tag/domain-warehousing/

At Gandi we do believe that our industry needs to clean itself up and not accept this 'pollution' of our own domain name space. Gandi has always stood against these activities and will not engage in them. But as an industry we have to grow up and accept lower sales volume for the sake of maintaining a useable and available name space that is in the interest of all internet users, and not just the commercial companies that have privileged access to domain buying and domain information.

If we just go all out for profit, much like the current man made global pollution problem, we'll just trash our own domain name space.

So when you buy a domain name, you are in effect taking a vote for the company that you want to represent your interests in the definition of global domain policy. Think about it.

To comment on this article go to the 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.

.Biz price increase...

Ryan — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:42:00 +0200

Like the .COM, .ORG and .INFO price increases we saw at the end of last year (http://iwi.gandibar.net/post/2008/11/06/Promotion-on-INFO-domains-before-the-price-increase-on-January-1st-2009), it's now the turn of the .BIZ registry to raise rates by about 7%, as authorized by ICANN (http://iwi.gandibar.net/post/2008/09/02/Promotion-on-COM-and-ORG-renewals).

We have decided to reflect that rise by only 50%, only for creations and transfers and only for C,D and E rates. The increase will be 0.20 Euros (GBP 0.15, USD 0.30) per domain.

The rise will be effective at Gandi on the 1st of June 2009.

See the .BIZ price list.

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

Launching of .CAT

Ryan — Mon, 04 May 2009 18:42:00 +0200

We are launching the .CAT extension this month. This is the official extension for Catalonia. .CAT procedures and our sales contract can be seen at https://www.gandi.net/domaine/cat/info

Rates vary from 21€ to 28€ excl. VAT per year, for creations and renewals, depending on your rate scale.

To purchase a .CAT domain name, you only need to enter the name that you would like on Gandi's home page, or go to https://www.gandi.net/domain/buy/search/ where you may enter your domain name and select .CAT from the list of available extensions.

How the domain name industry works - part 1

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

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

Who's who in the domain name world?

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

ICANN - The Top Dog

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

Registries - They're Wholesalers Only

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

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

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

Registrars - They Sell Domains to You Direct

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

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

Resellers - They Sell on Registrars Domains

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

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

You

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

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

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

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

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

Gandi SiteMaker competition - Spring 2009

Joe — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:20:00 +0100

Spring is here! Spirits are lifted and it is time to enjoy fun in the sun, and share colorful postcards all over the web! This is why we have launched our second Gandi SiteMaker competition with the theme: Vacation getaways!

Is there a special place where you dream of spending your vacation more than anywhere else in the world? Do you want to share it with everyone so that they too can have a wonderful time?

Create a website about this dream location using Gandi SiteMaker and you might win a EPC Inspiron Mini9 offered by our partner, Dell, as well as a free year's subscription to Gandi SiteMaker Pro.

To enter you simply need to create a Free Gandi SiteMaker site. We will only accept sites made using the free version of Gandi SiteMaker, so that everyone has the same chances of winning. If you would like a quick example of one, here is one that I made in under 2 hours (I am slow), only using elements available in the Free pack, as well as some personal photos.

Your websites will be judged on the following criteria:

General ergonomics, the graphic cohesion of the site, originality, clarity of information, final touches, and finally, the warmth that it gives off! We want you to make us long to go there and to dream of a vacation at that spot.

As we all enjoy visiting your websites at Gandi, our entire staff will be voting on the websites. For once, it will be us that judges your work...

Ah, there's one more thing! The goal of this competition is to make the internet more colorful, and so let your imagination run free! We are not limiting the number of websites allowed and you can even make your website on one page if you want. And as always, we are keeping the competition fun and laid-back. There are no rules, no lawyers, etc. We are just doing this out of pleasure and among friends; Fewer rules means more fun

The competition has already begun, and it will end on May 31st. Please send your website address to us at whoisdabest@gandi.net.

As for us, we will be putting on our sunglasses!

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

Promotion on .MOBI domains

Ryan — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:08:00 +0200

The .MOBI registry is giving us a last-minute promotion on .MOBI domain name creations. This lets us provide you with the extension for $11.00 (£5.2 or 7.5€) excluding VAT for A through D rates, which represents a 33% reduction in price over the usual rates.

The promotion is valid until May 31st 2009 and only concerns creations.

See our .MOBI prices

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!

Launching of .TEL - Full opening Today at 4 PM (Paris time)

Ryan — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:24:00 +0100

After the Sunrise and Landrush phases (underway until March 23rd), .TEL domains will finally be available to everyone as of March 24th.

Online pre-reservation for this final phase is available at Gandi. Registration will be made on a first-come, first-served basis. Registration requests that failed will be fully refunded. The price for a .TEL domain has been set at 14 euros per year excl. VAT under A rates.

As a reminder, please do not forget that the .TEL extension is unlike other extensions! You will be unable to have a website with an address like example.tel. The purpose of the extension is to store and manage your personal contact information in a format that can be easily handled and accessed by everyone or specific persons via DNS records.

We invite you to discover all of the possibilities that are available to you on the registry's website at http://telnic.org/

In any case, I invite you to read our contract.

Please feel free to contact our customer service department if you have any questions concerning the registration process.

If you want to comment this news, follow me.

Click here to search for a .TEL

Gandi supports Demotix.com

Joe — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:24:00 +0000

As many of you may know Gandi likes to put its money where its mouth is (not literally, as most coins are actually quite unhygienic, but that's another story). But it does mean that we provide support to other companies that are doing exciting work to provide credible alternatives for customers often in industries with well established monopolies.

So we are very proud to be able to extend this support to Demotix.com who describe themselves as a citizen-journalism website and photo agency. Demotix takes user-generated content and photos from freelance journalists and amateurs and markets them to the mainstream media.

And why are they doing this? Mainly for us. The shocking reduction in generation of 'news' that is currently underway puts us, the readers, in a situation where we know less and less about what is really going on. Today there are only 4 US newspapers with a foreign desk. Even AP and Reuters fail to cover 40% of the world with a single staff member. Publishers are cutting journalism costs to fight the fall in ad revenue, and rely more on newswires for content. This means the available sources of news are being reduced, and ultimately it is us who will suffer.

Demotix believes it can change this. They believe that together we can build news communities and source stories and news from every corner of the globe. We can change the way news is gathered, and we can change what's on the front pages of every newspaper and broadcast worldwide.

The quality of the photos and honesty behind the stories is extraordinary. Have a look for yourself at www.demotix.com and learn a bit more about their vision and philosophy at www.demotix.com/page/about-us.

And if you want to know more about the Gandi Supports projects, then take a look at our site www.gandi.net/supports/ and see what else we're up to. Maybe we can help you too! (though do look at our 'search criteria' we're not a VC fund

If you want to comment on this story, visit our blog at gandibar.net.

One domain name, one certificate

Ryan — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:21:00 +0100

Since trust is the basis of all relationships, and since Gandi has been working each and every day for nearly ten years to earn yours, we have the pleasure of announcing a new and important step: as of today, Gandi is a Certification Authority.

The principle is simple: you visit a website, and in the address bar of your web browser, you see a little padlock or a green color that means, "go ahead, you are on a secure website".

Gandi, true to its core value of "Internet For All", wants to provide this technology to as many people as possible so that they can establish a real and secure online presence. As part of this mission, Gandi will now include a 1 year certificate for free, with each domain name that is registered, transferred or renewed at Gandi.

When you confide your company name, your trademark, your shop, your domain names to us to manage, trust is hugely important.

It is also important when you extend that trust to a company that hosts your resources, a company that allows you to be online and to own a little piece of the web.

Visitors to your site will have that same need for trust and security when they decide to visit your website, whether to order products, services, or just to contact you.

For these everyday choices internet certificates are there to reassure your customers, and to guide them towards those sites that have chosen to have a more "professional" presence.

Gandi, by the quality of its services and products, is a world-renowned domain name registrar and web host that benefits from a capital of confidence that many envy. It was therefore logical (and requested by many of our customers) that we provide these internet certificates.

For those that would like to go further, an entire range of services will be made available on our website www.Gandi.net, to meet the needs of our varying customers: individuals, SME, corporate customers, institutions, or resellers, everyone may find a plan that will meet their specific needs.

Have a look at our full offer at http://www.gandi.net/ssl

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

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