Domain name registrar and VPS cloud-hosting provider Gandi has made some major changes in flexibility and operation of its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) products with introduction of new use-based billing and management.
Designed and implemented by Gandi in response to customer demand, the new billing system lets users quickly adjust IaaS systems with finer granularity, and precise controls over the cost of ownership.
Billing for resources is now hourly, with low, per hour, per resource pricing, automated payment and integrated alerting.
Gandi has already migrated 3,000+ client accounts to the new billing model from the existing reserve-a-resource model and plans to add remaining accounts within this week.
With the new model, Gandi no longer accepts payment in advance for Cloud VPS servers. It has been replaced by a new credit unit named ‘Gandi’. Customers can purchase these credits on demand from their Gandi prepaid account. They can also purchase these in packs at a discount which will be proportional to the amount they buy.
The concept of “share” at Gandi will also disappear. Gandi will now switch from a daily charge period to an “hourly” model. Customers can resize their servers at a very frequent basis and allocate additional resources for a limited time, thus paying exactly the number of credits consumed per hour.
Another feature added is the synchronization of the renewal dates for resources. Customers now just need to keep an eye on the number of credits and the estimated time remaining for use of resources available in their account.
Gandi has included a cost-saving gradual reduction of price based on the resources used per server. For instance, a single server with 8 CPUs and 8 GB of RAM will now consume a little less credit than 8 servers with 1 GB of RAM each. Customers can see the levels of price reduction when they create their server:
The billing process has also been streamlined. Customers can now set alerts and automatically purchase credit packs. They’ll also have a clear picture of what they consume, by resource and by server, and the corresponding credit/cash balance.
Some other newly introduced features are:
- The 100 GB limit on monthly bandwidth consumption has been increased to 500 GB.
- A new probe has been added to the watchdog to alert customers to abnormal bandwidth consumption.
- The ability to automatically reduce the bandwidth of the interface is being tested.
“We are changing our billing to allow customers to pay for only what they use and make it easier to leverage the recent enhancements to our cloud systems,” said Thomas Stocking, COO, Gandi U.S.
“In the process, we simplified the entire infrastructure as a service offering,” he added.
The new model has been designed with global customers and multiple currencies in mind. For detailed information, click here or mail Gandi directly.
