... And why it is necessary to open a ticket to help us to process your request.

From January 1 through March 31 at 3:59 PM PST, we have a deal that's all about the power of social media.

Social media helps propagate news. Okay some of it is fake, but still, Pew research recently showed that 62 percent of US adults get their news from social media. And this winter .news domains will be just $14.44 for the first year*.

Social media also helps consumers exchange product information. Feedback takes the form of publicly-viewable reviews whether you're looking for a highly-rated Bluetooth speaker, a ride-share driver you can trust, or you just want a comment-field shaped hole to spew your undying hatred for lemon wedges in glasses of water, reviews are now an integral part of the service industry thanks to social media. And .reviews domains are on sale for $12.22 for the first year, too*.

And finally, what would social media be if it didn't make us more social? Feel the warmth and kindness (and envy) of all your friends with a .social domain, just $16.25 for the first year*.

All of these deals are only available January 1 through March 31 at 3:59 PM PST, so get one and get on social media and tell your friends.

Register a domain under one of these TLDs?:

*Prices in USD. See .news, .reviews and .social pages for local prices.

Because a jack of all trades is a master of none and because amateur hour is fun but some things are best left to the pros, from January 1, 2017 through February 28, 2017 at 3:59 PM PST, .pro domains are on sale for just $3.00 a year*.

A .pro domain is a great way to show that you mean business and with .pro usually running $20.00 a pop, this is a sale that's also not fooling around. If you're serious about your work and serious about your online presence, get a .pro domain for $3.00 this winter*.

Go .pro?

*Prices in USD. See .pro page for local prices. 

There's no better way to get back into tip top shape than a tip .top domain for the down low price of just $1.50 per year*. And all 2017 — from January 1 through December 31 — .top domains are on sale. It's a year to go to the .top.

Spin up a new .top?

*Prices in USD. See .top page for local pricing. 

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.

Gandi Flex, launched in 2013 and developed by Gandi, enables our clients to update their servers according to a schedule that they make themselves, to add or remove CPU cores and RAM on the fly. Contrary to our initial expectations, only a minority of our users adopted it, and we have therefore decided to shut it down as part of our ongoing hosting projects for 2017.

In fact, since the creation of Gandi Flex almost 5 years ago, vertical scaling has given away to horizontal scaling as the preferred method to live scale most applications. Users prefer to add or remove servers from their infrastructure to cope with demand fluctuation, instead of adding or removing power to a single server. Going forward, it therefore makes more sense to focus our efforts on the Web Accelerator, a load-balancing and caching service that we built in-house and that is better adapted to these workflows.

Combined with the other features of our platform, it is very easy to clone or delete existing servers and add or remove them to Web Accelerators to scale an infrastructure up and down. They can even be securily connected to the same databases over a virtual private network, all while sustaining no downtime.

In addition, a number of open source and proprietary tools have taken shape that offer the same functionnality as Gandi Flex. It is fairly easy to use our API and CLI, or libraries such as libCloud in combination with these tools, to scale an infrastructure vertically and/or horizontally according to a predetermined schedule or in response to load events.

We will therefore be focusing our efforts on improving other aspects of our platform in 2017 and Gandi Flex won't be available as they are launched. On the one hand, it won't be available for servers running in the new datacenters and, on the other hand, it won't be available on our new website, currently in beta. Then, beginning on April 1st, 2017, our current users won't be able to create new probes in Gandi Flex anymore and the service will be definitively stopped on September 1st, 2017, at which time all scheduled tasks will be deleted. This time frame will leave ample time for current users to find an alternative solution.

We will regularly email all our customers currently using the service to remind them of these dates. Please don't hesitate to contact our Customer Care team should you have any questions about the end of life of Gandi Flex.

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 [email protected].

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More news about #gandiV5 news here

Beta release of the first viable version of our new platform.

We are pleased to announce that we will not stop and start your servers this Wednesday, December 21st, between 6:00 AM and 9:00 AM UTC (i.e. 10:00 PM PST on Tuesday December 20, 2016, and 1:00 AM PST on Wednesday December 21, 2016).

Our maintenance operation was designed to address a vulnerability in the Xen virtualization software. To respond, we decided to upgrade the Xen software and take advantage of the features of the new version, to allow you to gain performance and avoid these types of maintenance operations in the future.

However, many of you have contacted us to ask us to change our approach. We started by adjusting the schedule, but it was not enough for many of you.

As a result, we have investigated alternative solutions and we will not stop and start your servers.

We've contacted all affected customers via email. Thank you very much for your feedback on this matter.

As we round the corner into the last couple weeks of 2016, it's a time to think about endings and new beginnings. And what better way to do both than a new start on a new domain with the last three letters in the alphabet, .xyz.

From December 20 through January 5, 2017, .xyz domains are on sale for $0.50*. So you can make it a little bit more than a Merry X-mas: make it a Merry .XYZ-mas. And Happy New Year.

 End 2016 with a .xyz?

*Prices in USD. See .xyz price page for local pricing.