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gandi.net and their new hosting service -- first impressions
Posted by alpinegizmo Thu, 10 Jan 2008 11:08:00 GMT
For many years now I’ve been a fan and small-time user of gandi.net’s domain registry services. Initially drawn in by their attractive pricing and non-evil policies (in contrast to some of their larger competitors), I’ve been mildly disappointed that their pricing has remained constant (in euros, thus rising considerably in dollars), but have stuck around because they seem committed to competence and ethical behavior. Over the past year I’ve watched with interest as they’ve added new (free) services – IMAP mailboxes, blogs, etc. Over the past couple of days I’ve begun to experiment with their latest, more ambitious offering: virtualized hosting.
Gandi describes their current offering as a beta, acknowledging that it will become more polished, more complete, and more expensive. Servers are sold by the slice, currently priced at 6€ (or $7.50) for 1/64th of a quad dual-core machine’s capacity, which comes to a minimum of 256M, with about 500GB/month (a slice of 2x1Gbps), and 5G of RAID 6 storage. More capacity can be added whenever you like, dynamically – “Do you need more power between 5:00 PM and 8:00 PM on Friday?”
Setting up a single instance of Typo for three sites proved quite messy, but that’s a subject for another posting.
Evaluation:
documentation: There isn’t much, but it hasn’t been a problem. At various times I had questions to which couldn’t find answers (e.g. will I get a static IP address for my server), but I trusted that things would work out, and so far they have. In some places there are frenchisms (Gandi is a French company) leaking through into English (e.g. “domaine” in the place of “domain”), but these are the sort of minor issues one can expect from a service that’s barely been released as a beta.
performance: I’m currently using one slice to host 3 Typo-powered blog sites, and some static HTML. The architecture is nginx in front of 3 mongrel clusters, with sqlite databases. Performance is what I’d expect from such a configuration. If all the mongrels are busy then the situation is pretty unworkable, but given these are low-volume sites, it seems fine for now. So far I’ve made almost no effort to do any tuning. If I run into trouble, then I can either work on optimizations, or pay for another slice. It’s nice to have the option.
setup experience: I chose to pay in dollars, using a US credit card, which led to some confusing displays. Each page of the setup process has a depiction of the shopping cart, and as I progressed through the experience the amount I would eventually have to pay kept changing in interesting ways. Here’s an example:
International customers will also have to deal with one other issue – the contract you have to agree to is in French, and it’s 12 pages long. Other than these relatively minor issues, setup was easy. Within half an hour of paying my $7.50, my server was up and ready for me to login.usage experience: I asked for my slice to have Ubuntu 7.10 installed. I’m familiar with this OS, and I’ve had no problems at all. Getting everything in place to host Rails apps has been easy. I can’t tell that this isn’t a normal, rather wimpy dedicated server (as opposed to a virtualized slice of a much bigger machine).
Overall I’m quite happy so far. The only reason I would hesitate to recommend Gandi’s hosting service is their statement that after the beta, the price will go up. Right now the pricing is quite attractive. I don’t know of anywhere else where one can host Rails applications more easily or less expensively. The price could go up some and I’d still be happy. But I’m not happy with the uncertainty. I was willing to risk wasting my time on giving this a try, but I’m not sure I can recommend anyone else do so until Gandi makes the future a bit clearer.
Update: reading through Gandi’s forums more thoroughly, I’ve found postings from Gandi concerning their likely future pricing. It needs to be understood that Gandi is not trying to compete solely on price — but go to their site if you want to absorb their ethic and approach. In any event, they are saying that the final pricing won’t exceed twice the beta pricing, and will probably include volume discounts. That’s actually right in line with my expectations, though I was (and am) hoping for something a bit less expensive. My basic points of reference are the dedicated servers at 20€, 36€, and 69€ (all HT) from OVH, which are very roughly comparable to buying 1, 2 or 4 slices from Gandi.
