General Newsletter April 2012

Get ready for spring! April is the month to think about a change of wardrobe, and, depending on where you live, to start wearing some new duds. Gandi is helping you out this year with another chance to get some cool Gandi t-shirts.

Another .UK contest is also going on (read on for details), and we will summarize our current promotions and some useful information on .PRO. Also, you may not have noticed, but we added a very useful feature on Simple Hosting.

# Free Gandi duds!
We are giving away 500 Gandi “Twitter Special Edition” free t-shirts! Winners of the simple (you guessed it) Twitter-based game this week will be eligible to get one of 100 shirts a day, starting today, and ending Saturday April 14th.
For game rules, please see

http://www.gandibar.net/post/2012/04/10/Gandi-Spring-Fashion-:-500-Free-t-shirts-via-Twitter

# Nominet wants to give you gear…
Speaking of competitions, the .UK registry (Nominet) is running a promotion, giving out 1 free New iPad a day. While an iPad is arguably more useful than a Gandi t-shirt, it’s obviously not nearly as cool. We can understand why you might want both, though, so check out the Nominet giveaway rules here: https://www.gandi.net/news/en/2012-03-27/611-win_an_ipad_with_.uk/

# More .UK News
We have more good news from Nominet. It used to be your only option
for registering a .uk domain was to do so for a minimum of two years.
Luckily for us, .UK domains will soon be available for just one year at a time! The rules change May 1, so get ready for more flexibility in your .UK domain management.

# The .PRO dance
If you’ve always wanted a .PRO, you probably already know the rules have changed, making it easier than ever to register your own domain with the extension exclusively for professionals and their companies. There is also a 75% discount in effect right now, and this unique opportunity runs out this month (it ends May 1).  After that, the price goes up 36% for registrars like Gandi, to cover the registry’s cost of checking the validity of the owners. This increase uncharacteristically applies to renewals as well as new registrations, and will apply to .PRO domains you transfer to Gandi.
So you don’t get caught off guard by this increase,
we are offering you a promo code good for a 2.00€ reduction off the VAT tax on your renewal. This will soften the blow for those who have to pay VAT on top of the increased price, and we will honor it on renewals from 2 up to 9 years (VAT applies to customers in the European Union).
See the post about this here: https://www.gandi.net/news/en/2012-03-27/614-.pro_price_increase/

# From Russia with .РФ
With the release of the new IDN TLD extension (see the full article
here: http://www.gandibar.net/post/2012/03/19/), Russia leads the way on new extensions. We are highlighting
this with a promotion: Until the politically-appropriate date of May
1st, your cost for the creation of a .РФ (.RF for Russian Federation in
Cyrillic) will be 14.00€ + VAT with A rates, (down from 28.00€ +
VAT). See: https://www.gandi.net/news/en/2012-03-30/617-promo_on_russian_extensions/

# The other domain name promotions we have running are:
.ME is half-price until July, for A rates. See: https://www.gandi.net/news/en/2011-10-01/457-50_off_.me/
.INFO is 50% off for all rate levels until June. See:
.ASIA is 5.00 € a year for all new registrations until the end of April (act fast for .ASIA!) https://www.gandi.net/news/en/2012-01-01/535-.asia_creation_promo/
.CO is also half-price for new registrations, now till the end of April. See: https://www.gandi.net/news/en/2012-01-01/529-big_promo_on_.co/

# A simple Simple Hosting improvement
Some of you have managed to crash your Apache processes running on the Simple Hosting platform. It’s not as hard to do this as it should be: putting a foot wrong the PHP code is the most common method we see people inadvertently use.
It’s not that big a deal, usually, since restarting Apache fixes the problem, at least temporarily. The issue was that with Simple Hosting, you actually needed to contact our support line to do this. No more!  We have added restart to the list of actions you can take on your instance. Look for a little blue arrow on your list of pending operations:
(https://www.gandi.net/admin/hosting/paas/management) or the “Restart” link in the instance management page.

# Coming Soon to Gandi
In the next few weeks, we will proudly debut another choice for WYSIWYG web site editors. “Basekit” is getting added to Gandi! Unlike SiteMaker, which uses Flash, Basekit will create your website in HTML and CSS (perfect for display on the New iPad you can win from Nominet). It’s going to be offered by Gandi with a free beginner site, of course, and some nice, reasonably priced extension packages.
What else is new? Well, of course we are adding new extensions, some for regular customers, and some reserved for Corporate clients, since they are complicated to manage due to registry rules and restrictions, and mainly of interest only for brand protection purposes. We have also added little enhancements here and there, and fixed minor problems some you have reported (thank you!).  

Parting Thoughts:
As usual, don’t hesitate to send us your suggestions for how we can improve our services, your enhancement requests, ideas for news features, or your questions queries and complaints. Feel free to send us your best pictures, your recipes for Easter treats or shish-kebabs.  Our newsletter address is newsletter-en@gandi.net

Sincerely,

Thomas Stocking
COO, Gandi US
http://www.gandi.net