We have decided to extend the Beta testing phase for our new datacenter in Paris, FR-SD3, to further test the networking infrastructure ahead of the official opening, first planned for March 20th, 2017.

Resource usage will remain free during the extended Beta phase. Be aware that only our Gandi Cloud hosting platform is currently available, which includes: Servers, Volumes, IPs, and Private VLANs. No date is currently set for the launch of Simple Hosting and Web Accelerators on FR-SD3. These are currently only available on our other datacenters in Paris and Luxembourg (FR-SD2 and LU-BI1, respectively).

We will announce the official opening date, at which point resource usage will be charged as per our standard rates, at least 15 days in advance. Until then, you'll continue to see the cost of your resource usage on FR-SD3 on all our pages.

Feel free to contact our Hosting Support team for any and all questions, comments, impressions, or thoughts. Or, alternatively, share them with us by emailing feedback@gandi.net.

Following the recent announcement of free snapshots, we are happy to announce that all Simple Hosting instances now have 20GB of free storage included, instead of 10GB as was previously the case.

Instances created starting today will have 20GB by default, and existing instances will see the addition of 10GB added for free.

The addition of additional storage space is of course still possible, and is billed per gigabyte at the usual rate.

Please don't hesitate to contact our customer support team for any question you may have.

After a little more than a month of Alpha testing, which has been well received, our new data center in Paris is now entering Beta testing, with a tentative production date of March 20, 2017.

Be aware that only our Gandi Cloud hosting platform is currently available, which includes: Servers, Volumes, IPs, and Private Networks. No date is currently set for the launch of Simple Hosting and Web Accelerators on FR-SD3. These are currently only available on our primary Paris data center and our Luxembourg one (FR-SD2 and LU-BI1, respectively).

We would like to thank all of you who have helped test this new infrastructure so far during the Alpha phase and we would encourage all customers to continue testing it for free during Beta testing as well, all the way up until the release date of March 20.

Once that date arrives, we will no longer be able to continue offering free hosting on FR-SD3. The pricing scale in place on our other data centers will be implemented for FR-SD3 as well.

Of course feel free to contact our Hosting Support team for any and all questions, comments, impressions, or thoughts. Or, alternatively, share them with us by emailing feedback@gandi.net.

We are very excited to announce that from now on, Snapshots are free on our Simple Hosting platform!

Snapshots allow you to schedule automatic, periodic copies of the files contained on your Simple Hosting instance. Until now, this service required an additional 30% disk space added to the total quota in order to use.

From today on, though, you can now activate snapshots without having to buy any additional disk space. The copies of your files will no longer count towards your total disk usage.

To activate snapshots, go to your Simple Hosting management page on our legacy site or on #gandiv5. If snapshots are already activated on your instances, the additional disk space will no longer be invoiced to you the next time your renew.

We would remind you that Snapshots are not a full backup as they do not include a backup of your databases. You can include your database in the snapshot by exporting your database into a file on your instance which will then be included in the next snapshot.

For more information on Snapshots, feel free to reference our wiki: https://wiki.gandi.net/simple/snapshot

Otherwise, you can of course contact our Hosting support team for any other questions.

As we anticipated in our first update about the new site, Simple Hosting is now available on #gandiv5.

We designed this new Simple Hosting interface with the intention to make it as easy to use for beginners as for expert users.

To that end, this new interface incorporates all the information required to manage an instance and bring sites online, whether you use sFTP, Git, our CLI, or the management interface itself.

We also completely redesigned our interface for managing services installed on instances in order to better align with how each technology is used: 

• Since for PHP instances, each vhost has its own codebase with its own directory and Git repository, these are now under the "Sites" tab ;
• Node.js, Python, and Ruby instances are all now available under the "Domains" tab, since a vhost with these instances allows you to direct requests to a single codebase

In addition, Simple Hosting instances no longer come with any commitment, which allows you greater flexibility to receive pro-rated refunds to your prepaid account should you decide to or need to delete an instance before it expires, regardless of whether you subscribed for one, three, six or twelve months.

Since this is a beta version, be aware that not all functionalities are currently available, but within the next couple of weeks we expect to roll out a few new key features. One is that you will soon be able to take advantage of our "Snapshots" archive tool, which will now be included free of charge. The standard disk size will also double from 10 Gb to 20 Gb. All existing instances will be upgraded to this new baseline, even if they weren't initially created on #gandiv5.

In the next few weeks, we'll be bringing other new functionalities on line as well, bit by bit, including statistics, event management, language version updates, disk space increases, and instance size upgrades.

If you'd like to test Simple Hosting on #gandiv5, just go to https://beta.gandi.net and log in with your Gandi handle.

If you haven't migrated your account to the new site yet, you'll need to complete that process in order to get your new username.

Of course, feel free to contact us if you run into any difficulties or have any thoughts or reactions. You can reach us at feedback@gandi.net

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And don't forget to follow news related to #gandiV5 by clicking here.

We're very pleased to announce the opening of FR-SD3, a new datacenter in Paris, in Alpha test phase. This new data center is part of a whole new points-of-presence architecture completely designed by our team on brand new hardware which is set to become the basis of our future of our hosting infrastructure. So far, our performance tests have come out much to our satisfaction: we're seeing a 30% performance improvement on CPUs, a huge improvement in terms of latency when accessing disks (nearly two times as fast) and 30% more rapid memory access as well.

The following Gandi Cloud services are available on the new datacenter: Servers, System Disks, IP addresses, and Virtual Private Networks (VLANs). The only service not available for now on FR-SD3 are Web Accelerators, which we expect to introduce on the new datacenter at a later stage.

And while this datacenter is currently in Alpha, if you decide to try it out, you'll be in good company. We are already using it to host some of our own infrastructure (though our resources are obviously isolated from our customers') including our new web site as well as a few of the services associated with it. That's why, having field-tested it ourselves, we can say with confidence that you're going to like this new datacenter.

But don't just take our word for it. If we've managed to catch your attention, you can already start using this new infrastructure. We would ask that you do keep in mind, though, that it is still in Alpha testing, so we don't recommend running production systems on it yet. To take it for a spin, though, you just need to choose "FR-SD3" from the list of data center options when you create your next server using either our site, the API, or Gandi CLI.

And if you're still not convinced, we're only charging Gandi server credits (or your prepaid account) for bandwidth consumed. The consumption rates for services created in "FR-SD3" will still be displayed on the website but nothing be deduced from your resources.

We'll be running Alpha and later Beta tests at least until the end of February 2017. While we tentatively hope to go live with this new infrastructure by March 1, we will let you know 15 days in advance so that you can plan for the return to our normal hosting rates based on resources consumed.

We hope as many of you as possible get a chance to try out the new archiecture and, obviously, provide us with your feedback, which is always immensely valuable to us. Any questions or comments can be directed to us on Twitter or by email at feedback@gandi.net or of course by contacting our Customer care team directly.

Gandi's hosting service saw a number of important decisions in 2016 that will have an impact the future of our offering, namely its modernisation, simplification, and stabilisation, as we prepare for the launch of our new platform, #gandiV5. The decisions make way for a more powerful hosting service, starting in 2017. Put simply, we're making it easier for you to host your projects on a better platform.

Since 2007, we have offered flexible virtual machines that are easy to create, update, and coupled with modular services to create your own cloud infrastructure. In 2012, we launched a container-based solution to host web projects that is just as easy to use as shared hosting services, but more a lot more powerful and secure.

The hosting market has been rapidly evolving over the past few years, confirming our vision of what good hosting should look like. However, as we developed our solutions in-house with our own means, we gave more importance to maintaining our solution's stability than to keeping up with novelties.

To refresh our offering and adapt it to the new tools and workflows that have emerged in the market, we have started ambitious projects to adopt new technologies. We have launched new instances with PHP 7 and fully customisable Node.js and npm runtimes, coupled with MySQL 5.6 and PostgreSQL 9.4 on Simple Hosting, as well as the 1-click installation of WordPress. We also launched the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64 bits (HVM) image on our Cloud offering that, for the first time, used the distribution's own kernel by default.

We have also made decisions that impacted a number of existing clients, as we had to shut down our datacenter in Baltimore where our infrastructure couldn't handle our planned updates, and discontinued certain services, such as Gandi AI and Gandi Flex that no longer fit with the usage landscape.

These decisions allow us to focus our efforts on a modern platform, aligned with our customers' current and future workflows.

Therefore, in 2017, you'll be able to manage your servers and your instances from your computer, mobile phone, or tablet thanks to our new website, currently in Beta testing. We'll also announce a new datacenter featuring brand new hardware, an upgrade to our virtualisation platform and a new way to build Simple Hosting images that, combined, form the base of our new infrastructure and the new features that will follow.

The new year hasn't started yet but we sure have started to tackle it!

Follow us on Twitter or keep tabs on our news site to learn all about the upcoming news.

Gandi Flex, launched in 2013 and developed by Gandi, enables our clients to update their servers according to a schedule that they make themselves, to add or remove CPU cores and RAM on the fly. Contrary to our initial expectations, only a minority of our users adopted it, and we have therefore decided to shut it down as part of our ongoing hosting projects for 2017.

In fact, since the creation of Gandi Flex almost 5 years ago, vertical scaling has given away to horizontal scaling as the preferred method to live scale most applications. Users prefer to add or remove servers from their infrastructure to cope with demand fluctuation, instead of adding or removing power to a single server. Going forward, it therefore makes more sense to focus our efforts on the Web Accelerator, a load-balancing and caching service that we built in-house and that is better adapted to these workflows.

Combined with the other features of our platform, it is very easy to clone or delete existing servers and add or remove them to Web Accelerators to scale an infrastructure up and down. They can even be securily connected to the same databases over a virtual private network, all while sustaining no downtime.

In addition, a number of open source and proprietary tools have taken shape that offer the same functionnality as Gandi Flex. It is fairly easy to use our API and CLI, or libraries such as libCloud in combination with these tools, to scale an infrastructure vertically and/or horizontally according to a predetermined schedule or in response to load events.

We will therefore be focusing our efforts on improving other aspects of our platform in 2017 and Gandi Flex won't be available as they are launched. On the one hand, it won't be available for servers running in the new datacenters and, on the other hand, it won't be available on our new website, currently in beta. Then, beginning on April 1st, 2017, our current users won't be able to create new probes in Gandi Flex anymore and the service will be definitively stopped on September 1st, 2017, at which time all scheduled tasks will be deleted. This time frame will leave ample time for current users to find an alternative solution.

We will regularly email all our customers currently using the service to remind them of these dates. Please don't hesitate to contact our Customer Care team should you have any questions about the end of life of Gandi Flex.

We are pleased to announce that we will not stop and start your servers this Wednesday, December 21st, between 6:00 AM and 9:00 AM UTC (i.e. 10:00 PM PST on Tuesday December 20, 2016, and 1:00 AM PST on Wednesday December 21, 2016).

Our maintenance operation was designed to address a vulnerability in the Xen virtualization software. To respond, we decided to upgrade the Xen software and take advantage of the features of the new version, to allow you to gain performance and avoid these types of maintenance operations in the future.

However, many of you have contacted us to ask us to change our approach. We started by adjusting the schedule, but it was not enough for many of you.

As a result, we have investigated alternative solutions and we will not stop and start your servers.

We've contacted all affected customers via email. Thank you very much for your feedback on this matter.

A critical security issue in the Xen virtualization software will become public on Tuesday, November 22nd 2016. The Xen team has already informed Gandi of the necessary patches.

Following this announcement, we have pre-emptively deployed the patches required to correct the issue. We have been monitoring the particular security flaw, and have determined that we will need to stop/start certain Xen VMs in order to assure that no further attack vector remains.

Warning: a simple "reboot" of the concerned servers is not enough. They must be stopped and started in order to apply the security measures.

As always, if you have any questions or need of assistance, please do not hesitate to contact our Customer care team.