Baltimore Datacenter closure December 1, 2016

For several years now we have been proud to maintain a datacenter on the East Coast of the United States for Cloud hosting and other hosting services.

So it’s with a heavy heart that we must inform you of our decision to close the US datacenter located in Baltimore (US-BA1) on December 1, 2016.

The decision was not taken lightly but as we looked into how to move forward with the next generation of our hosting services, we found that our current space in Baltimore was just not compatible with the quality we want to offer.

In Paris and Luxembourg, where we’ve been able to run the latest versions of our infrastructure. And partly because the amount of space we have in Baltimore is too big for the kind of streamlined services we run in Europe and that we want to run in North America, those upgrades have not been made in Baltimore, nor would they be feasible.

We’re already testing a new hosting platform in Europe and the plan has always been to introduce this new platform in North America in a new hosting space. We obviously would have preferred to introduce this new option before closing the Baltimore datacenter, but commitment timelines on the space in Baltimore didn’t sync up with our timeline for introducing the new option.

We’ve already emailed those of you with Simple Hosting instances or IaaS resources (servers, disks, snapshots, web accelerators, VPNs, IPs, etc.) in Baltimore and invited you to migrate either to LU-BI1 in Bissen, Luxembourg or FR-SD2, in Paris.

We wanted to give everyone early enough warning to be able to migrate out of the Baltimore datacenter before the cutoff date, so we’re telling you now and recommending that you migrate as soon as possible.

If you’re migrating to one of our European datacenters, we recommend reading through our wiki articles on migrating here:

 

• Simple Hosting: https://wiki.gandi.net/en/simple/migrate
• IaaS (“Gandi Cloud”): https://wiki.gandi.net/en/iaas/tutorials/datacenter-migration

 

 In particular, we want to remind everyone that you will need to update your DNS zone file during this process.

 

• If you use Gandi’s DNS for your domain name, you can do that automatically from either your Simple Hosting or IaaS interface.
• If you’re using another DNS provider, you can get the correct DNS records from the management pages corresponding to the hosting service you’re using

 

Of course if you have any further questions or run into any difficulties, please feel free to contact our Customer care hosting team:

 

• by email using the web form: https://www.gandi.net/support/contact/mail/
• using our LiveChat: https://www.gandi.net/support/livechat
• in IRC in the #gandi channel on Freenode (irc.freenode.net)

 

If you’re a current Gandi hosting customer with services hosted in Baltimore, we hope this isn’t the first you’ve heard of this closure. It certainly won’t be the last. We’ll be continuing to remind you over the next several months, up until December 1.

We also realize that this change may be inconvenient, to put it lightly, for many of our hosting customers and we are cognizant that it may cause some hassle for some of you. We aware that we are not pulling hosting out of North America forever, just until we can implement the new infrastructure, which we assure you will be better than anything we’ve previously been able to offer in the US.

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