Simple Hosting, Gandi’s web hosting service—recent developments and more to come!

These past few weeks have seen a flourishing of new updates to Simple Hosting, so it’s about time we let you in on what we’ve been up to with our web hosting platform.

Simple Hosting refresher: what is the made-by-Gandi web platform?

At Gandi, our web hosting platform is named Simple Hosting. We conceived of this web hosting solution a bit differently from some of the existing “mutualized web hosting” options out there by focusing on delivering the maximum reliability and flexibility.

As such, our Simple Hosting platform is based on container technology, which lets us isolate resources made available to each hosting “instance.” That’s why we offer different instance sizes (from S to XXL), which each come with a different configuration of RAM and CPU in order to offer hosting that’s adaptable according to the type of site to be hosted (whether a static site or a CMS with a multitude of plug-ins or extensions), and according to the traffic of the site.

Each plan has its own unique characteristics

From the beginning and through to today, our goal with Simple Hosting has always been to provide the maximum degree of flexibility. You can permanently or temporarily increase the size of your instance to flex to cover an increase in your need.

This specific architecture lets us offer you the possibility to enlarge the field of possible options to web developers:

Hosting applications/sites written in PHP, Python, Node.js, or Ruby
Access to an “Emergency SSH console”
Deployment of sites via Git

Moving to Gandi v5

As with all of Gandi’s products, we worked hard these past few years on migrating to Gandi’s new v5 interface. We completed this on Simple Hosting in September 2019. V5 is now the only interface on which you can administer your instances.

Fueled by your input as users, we used the opportunity to completely rethink the Simple Hosting interface and how you use it to create sites.

The Simple Hosting administration interface

Although easy to use, today, we still need to migrate certain services to the new v5 architecture in order to give you a the most comfortable user experience possible. We’ll be working on that task through the end of this year.

Applications pre-installed in “one click”

In order to make the most used tools on Simple Hosting even easier to use, we’ve implemented a “one click” pre-installation feature (really, it usually takes a couple of clicks).

You can use this feature on an existing Simple Hosting instance but also at the point of creation of your instance. In this case, the entire site creation process is automated, from linking to your domain name, right up to the creation of an SSL/TLS certificate. In five minutes top, you can have your site online!

This is currently possible for two applications:

WordPress, the CMS used today to create more than half of all websites. See our Simple Hosting WordPress page
Nextcloud, the free cloud hosting and collaborative work tool. See our Simple Hosting Nextcloud page

Prestashop is now available for automatic pre-installation!

Finally, as of a few days ago, it’s now possible to install (on an existing Simple Hosting instance) the e-commerce CMS Prestashop!

Today, Prestashop is one of the most used CMSes in the world when it comes to creating online stores. It meets the needs of both small e-boutiques and large, professional vendors thanks to its large catalogue of add-ons. What’s more, it’s free software, so you maintain control over your own site, your own data, and your own customers.

The Prestashop interface lets you configure your entire online shop

To use Prestashop in “one click,” you need to already have a size M Simple Hosting instance (with PHP 7.2+ and MySQL 5.7+).

Click “Install” and follow the steps to configure Prestashop

More than 50 GB storage on new instances

In other news, new Simple Hosting instances can now have up to 50 GB of storage by default (instead of the 20 GB maximum we previously offered). And if that’s still not enough, it’s nonetheless possible to add additional storage to your existing Simple Hosting instance up to 1 TB.

See Gandi Simple hosting options

V5 public API, the first pieces

These days, we’ve also published the first pieces of the new Simple Hosting public API to help those who want to integrate their Simple Hosting instance management into their own environments. The first features of the Simple Hosting public API are no available here.

You can now access detailed information about your instances using the public API. Of course, this is only the beginning and we’ll be making more API functions available in the weeks to come.

What’s next?

Our main work around Simple Hosting for the coming months will focus on:

A greater polyvalence of applications offered “in one click.” We already have some ideas in mind but please let us know if there’s anything you’d like to see!
Adding features to help you automate the deployment of your websites (public API, web hooks, etc.)
Support for websockets, to help support dynamic sites and applications, is also in the works, but won’t be ready before 2021. This will require a pretty significant rework that will need more than a few weeks to complete

Those are the main lines of development to come, but once again, we’d love to have your input as well, so don’t hesitate to let us know what you need by email, Twitter, or even snail mail, or on our hosting discussion forum at https://talk.gandi.cloud.

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