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.

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.

Simplify the management of your products and accounts with a single username and product management by organization.

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.

After months of hard work ; an initial round of internal tests, feedback, and improvements, we are ready to unveil our new platform, #gandiV5.

There is still quite a long way to go, and this is just the first step in the transformation of our service, but as the saying goes, the first step is the hardest.

So why the difficulty? What was initially thought of as a simple revamping of our interfaces and platform ended up becoming a total transformation of our company, not just in terms of "decoration", or even our technical infrastructure, but rather a transformation at a more profound level.

Over the past two years, we have doubled the number of employees at Gandi to develop this new platform and the infrastructure necessary to its implementation, all the while assuring the management of 600 new extensions introduced by ICANN, and by establishing three new branch offices to better our presence in Europe, the United States, and Asia. All of this didn't go as smoothly as expected, and we were surely a bit too ambitious in thinking that we could take on all of these challenges within their deadlines and all the while preserving our company's organizational culture, which is a priority for us. It is this optimism, some would say lack of realism, that cost us several months of delays in the launch of #gandiV5. However, we've done it: our new platform is starting to see the light of day.

We are sharing the beta release of the site with you, as-is, and with it's still-limited features. You can see detailed information about this in this news article. We hope that you enjoy it.

We will be regularly releasing new features to add to the ones that you already know, and we will keep you informed of the more significant changes on a regular basis.

This project, which we have baptized as '#gandiV5' from the start, is much more than a new version of our website. It is a new version of our company as a whole, a new way to see our profession, one that is more inline with recent changes in technology and how it's used. By increasing our staff, we have also increased our range of expertise, methods, and efficiency. All of this while keeping focused on our main objective: bring our profession as a domain name registrar up-to-date, no more, no less.

The fundamental idea is clear: make purchasing a domain name simple and universal, with interfaces and features that meet everyone's needs, all the time, and everywhere.

Our new interface is therefore designed to follow you over all your electronic devices (desktop computer, laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc.), and reflects this desire to make it easier for you to register and manage your domain names and how you make use of them across all the services that they can be attached to.

We already provide you with an API and the possibility of managing your domains through a command line interface, and we will of course continue to develop advanced products and features for our expert customers, as well as new tools dedicated to our resellers and corporate customers.

But we are also making it possible for those of you without any specialized technical experience, so you can link your domain names to the services that you use every day in a quick and easy way.

We have already integrated a good deal of intelligence in our tools, notably with our domain name search engine, which suggests extensions that are the most pertinent to you depending on the terms you searched for. We are continuing along these lines, by adapting ever more powerful tools to give you an interface that is simple and flexible, as well as features that adapt to your specific needs.

We are very far from the final version of what we want to be: simply, the best possible service in terms of domain name registration. However this beta release is the first step in the right direction to achieve this.

We hope that that you like what you see with the work in progress that we are now sharing with you, and we look forward to hearing any feedback that you might have for us at feedback@gandi.net.

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More news about #gandiV5 news here

Beta release of the first viable version of our new platform.

Gandi has long enjoyed the support of a diverse, varied, and global crowd. However, one obstacle our fans have long faced outside of the countries in which we’ve opened offices is the necessity to convert to one of the five currencies we have offered up until now.

Those currencies have historically been:

• CNY (¥)
• EUR (€)
• GBP (£)
• USD ($)
• TWD (NT$)
• CHF

Today, we have some good news: we’re expanding that number to sixteen with the addition of ten new currencies:

• AUD (AU$) Australia
• CAD (CAN) Canada
• HKD (HK$) Hong Kong
• INR (रुपया) India
• JPY (¥) Japan
• NOK (Kr) Norway
• NZD (NZ$) New Zealand
• SEK (Kr) Sweden
• SGD (S$) Singapore
• TRY (TL) Turkey

For those tempted to check prices by converting the prices visible on our site for a particular currency (USD for example) into another, you should be aware that our pricing will not be adjusted for these currencies in real time based on minute-to-minute fluctuations but will be periodically readjusted over time, so your calculations may from time to time vary somewhat from our actual pricing.

We hope with these changes to save some Gandiens out there the trouble of converting their currencies and to be able to bring more into the fold.

Several phishing scams are currently in progress. They are targeting thousands of domain name owners who have registered domains through registrars around the world (including GANDI).

These emails claim that your domain name has been suspended, and asks you to click on a link to download a copy of the complaints.

DO NOT CLICK on the the link or download the document: it contains a virus!

It seems that those responsible for sending these emails use the information obtained from the public WHOIS domain name database, where they recover the name, email address, and name of the registrar associated with the domain.

The fraudulent emails can even appear to come directly from GANDI. Here is one example:

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Subject: Domain Name exemple.com have been suspended

From:      GANDI SAS

Message: Dear First Lastname,

The Domain Name example.com have been suspended for violation of the
GANDI SAS Abuse Policy.

Multiple warnings were sent by GANDI SAS Spam and Abuse Department to give
you an opportunity to address the complaints we have received.

We did not receive a reply from you to these email warnings so we then
attempted to contact you via telephone.

We had no choice but to suspend your domain name when you did not respond to
our attempts to contact you.

Click here and
download a copy of complaints we have received.

Please contact us for additional information regarding this notification.

Sincerely,

GANDI SAS

Spam and Abuse Department

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You should ignore this email. It is not necessary to send it to us: we have recieved dozens over the past few days and our teams are already on it.

Thank you for your attention.

If you use Gandi day-to-day, you're probably familiar by now with status.gandi.net, or you've at least seen the little green (okay sometimes red or orange) light next to your login.

Being committed to using Open Source solutions whenever possible, when we couldn't find an Open Source option that had all the features we were looking for, we developed one in-house, that we dubbed "baobab."

With a backend and API based on the Django framework and a public site written in Angular.js, the tool lets you:

• Publish items in a chronological order such as incidents and scheduled maintenances
• Share messages on Twitter or IRC (with the option to add other social networks)
• Translate messages for multi-language sites
• Subscribe to an RSS feed

We invite anyone interested to have a look in our project repository and use it or adapt it to your needs. Of course, don't hesitate to send feedback via GitHub Issues or even to propose your own improvements or new features. We welcome any and all input.