Updates and releases

General Newsletter for October 2012

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SUMMARY: AT A GLANCE
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1. On trial: Site migration service
2. Hot expansion of your hard drives
3. New Linux distro available: OpenSUSE 12.1
4. Available at Gandi: .CO.ZA
5. French accent at Gandi? See .TEL
6. Promotions, promotions!
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Want to move a site from an old hosting provider to Gandi? Let us do it for you! Gandi is going to evaluate the option of offering a paid migration service. There ‘s a lot of variation in how sites are implemented, so in this first trial phase we are putting some limits on what can be migrated. Still, we think it’s a great value! What else is new in hosting, you ask? How about hot drive size expansion! That’s right, no restart to increase VPS drive size anymore. And speaking of hot, we are now serving up OpenSUSE 12.1 with 32 or 64 bits, so place your orders now! Want a side of domain names with that? We are offering .CO.ZA, and for a French twist, try an accentted .TEL domain! See our promotions this month, too. It’s going to be a hot October!

1. On trial: Site migration service
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Why don’t people move web hosts, even when they know that better performing and cheaper hosting (e.g. Gandi Simple Hosting) is available?Maybe it’s the fact that there is work involved, that downtime is likely, or maybe we just don’t want to bother with the DNS fiddling. In any case, many of us wait years to migrate.  

Some people do a lot of site migrations, and and completely comfortable with what’s involved. Some of us have other things to do, like running a business, keeping up with the industry news, rewriting content for SEO, or other technical stuff that has nothing to do with where the web site is hosted. The task of migrating the web site just never makes top priority. That’s when we could use a quick, efficiant service to move the site.  A service now offered by… Gandi!

In partnership with the unenigmatically named company, “Web Site Migration Service” Gandi can migrate your website for €50 ($65, or £45 excl. VAT). Gandi handles all the technical facilitation, billing, etc. You just give us access to your site, buy a Simple Hosting instance, and poof! Your site is moved for a fair price and no hassle.  
We are trying this out now, with some restrictions.

2. Hot expansion of your hard drives
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Gandi VPS Cloud Hosting servers have long allowed you to grow existing disk volumes. Now, we can do it with no restart! That’s right, you don’t have to lose even the short time it takes for a Gandi Cloud VPS to restart to add space to a disk. The procedure is the same as always… minus a step! 

3. New Linux distro available: OpenSUSE 12.1
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Holy chameleons, Batman! We’s got Open SUSE available for Gandi VPS Cloud servers. You can run OpenSUSE 12.1 servers in Europe or the USA, just by starting them up with the shares you buy. Choose your architecture (32 or 64 bit) and make some chameleons run!

4. Available at Gandi: .CO.ZA
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The official extension of South Africa, .CO.ZA is now available at Gandi to all, without restriction (except to minors!).  Create your .CO.ZA domain for 12.00€ ($15.00) / year, at A rates (6.00€ at E rates). If you want to know more about this extension, go here.

5. French accent at Gandi? See .TEL
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It’s true, we do speak with a French accent here at Gandi. Now the .TEL domain extension does too, with support for French-language accented characters!
More info on French accents in .TEL (in French, no less) is here.

6. Promotions, promotions!
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This month, .CA extensions are in prime position on Gandi’s menu! No wonder, when they are priced at 33% off for a year’s registration, or 9.20 €  ($10.60 excl. VAT) at A rates. If you always wanted to show your loyalty to Canada, you have until the end of October to do it for 33% off! 

Until the end of the year, you can transfer .COM and .NET domains to Gandi for less! 6.45€ ($8.50) will get your .COM domain to Gandi (isn’t that where it belongs, anyway?) and adds a year to it’s registration, too! More on this promo here.

And new this month, we are taking things to a new level. The second level… of domains! The good people at CentralNic have made it possible for us to offer .CN.COM, .GB.COM, .GB.NET, .GR.COM, .HU.COM, .QC.COM, .SE.COM, .SE.NET, and .ZA.COM all for just 5.00 € ($6.00 before VAT) for one-year, new registrations.  This promo will run till the end of the year!

Continuing Promotions…

The Colombian extension, .CO is still just 13.00 € ($16.50 before VAT) for one year creations at A rates. That’s half off! All rate levels are discounted until the end of October (more on this).

Going East? .ASIA is 5.00  ($5.00 before VAT), in all rates, for new one-year registrations, instead of 18.00 € ($25.00). This price is not valid for transfers and renewals, so get creative!

Finally, send us your complaints, gripes, compliments, stock tips, suggestions,  pics, (especially any photos you take of of the Gandi logo in the wild), to newsletter-en@gandi.net. We want to hear from you!

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Sincerely,
Nicolas Lhuillery
Head of Product
Gandi

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