Try our new mobile-friendly webmail service, with an integrated calendar and task-list, now in beta

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.