About hosting at Gandi in 2017

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!