PARIS, October 8 /PRNewswire/ -- After 9 months of intensive beta testing using a pool of 9,000 servers created by over 4,000 individual customers, Gandi.net, the largest ICANN-accredited registrar in France, announces the grand opening of its unparalleled hosting service.

"We are extremely proud to announce the opening of Gandi's web hosting service, which has been developed entirely in-house over 2 years, and is built on a 'cloud infrastructure'. This means that your server runs on a grid of computers, guaranteeing your resources, while giving unparalleled resilience to failure, and the ability to expand or contract your resources as your needs change. The hosting industry is well aware that this is the next evolutionary step in technology and will replace shared hosting, and possibly even dedicated hosting. The advantages for customers are too great to be ignored, which is why the traditional players, having down played this, are now using buzzwords around virtualisation in order to continue to sell to the less informed." says Joe White, COO of Gandi.net.

"We have developed this technology in house with the support of our active community of beta testers. Their support has allowed us to stay in close contact with our customers during development and means that we can be very agile in response to their changing needs in the future. We would like to thank them for helping us deliver this revolutionary service."

The Gandi service is unparalleled because of its extreme flexibility. Imagine you are launching your new website, you are excited about your future growth, but you have no idea how successful your site will be. Gandi's hosting service makes this an easy problem to deal with:

Ultimate flexibility exclusively at Gandi - Your dedicated server can be up and running in 10 minutes, you can increase or reduce the power of your server instantly with no loss of service. This means you can tailor the service to your actual needs and evolve your server in line with your success. There is no minimum term to your contract.

An offer available to everyone - Experienced users can create their own dedicated server and configure it however they wish, while beginners can take advantage of Gandi AI (Auto-install) to setup preinstalled servers that are ready to use in one-click (web-servers, mail-servers, game servers).

"Made in Gandi": service first - Gandi is well known as a company that listens to its customer's needs, has a desire to keep innovating, and for the quality of its products and services. Because we develop our products in house we can be highly responsive to your feedback.

High network resilience - Gandi's infrastructure is based on high availability servers using SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) disks running RAID 60. Additionally, we have two separate locations on the same network loop that allows us to "move" a server from one location to another seamlessly without the slightest disruption in service.

A price that is more than competitive - To celebrate the launch, Gandi prices will start at GBP7/$14/EUR10 (excl. VAT) per 'share' per month (one 'share' being the smallest resource per server, the most powerful server may have up to 16 shares). This will last until December 31st 2008, and will then move to the standard price of GBP8.5/$16/EUR12 (excl. VAT).

"This is the beginning of a new chapter in Gandi's history", says Stephan Ramoin, CEO, "We have long been recognised as the registrar of choice for the tech community, and our revolutionary new hosting offer delivers the same level of quality, innovation, flexibility and price that our customers expect. And for those who don't need the power of a full server, Gandi will soon launch additional hosting services, at a far lower price. Watch this space."

About Gandi.net:

Created in 1999 and purchased in 2005 by an experienced executive team, Gandi manages more than 760,000 domain names for clients in 198 countries around the world, which places the company as a leading domain names registrar in France and sixth in Europe. Today, Gandi is a leader in the field of domain name registrars, always putting the customers needs first, with a commitment to high quality, innovative products. The company's goal is to create an alternative and independent line of Internet services based around domain names. Gandi is devoted to giving everyone the tools they need to discuss their interests, present products or services, or to simply express themselves. In short, we enable people to lay claim to a personal online presence of professional quality. Our clients range from individuals and small companies, to public institutions (EU/ECB) and large multinational corporations. Many have put confidence in us, and it's something we are deeply proud of.

More information on Gandi is available at: http://www.gandi.net/press

Email: wendy@gandi.net

Press contact: Wendy White - Phone: +44-7802-249-602 / Email: wendy@gandi.net