Gandi Switches to Usage-based Billing and Management Model for its IaaS Offerings

Cloud hosting provider Gandi has added new usage-based billing and management to its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) products. The company, which also offers domain name registration services, announced the improvements in an effort to increase the flexibility, operation and cost savings of its services through volume discounts.

Gandi's new system was designed and implemented to meet customer demand. Clients using the company's services will be able to quickly adjust their IaaS systems with finer granularity as well as retain more precise control over the cost of ownership.

The hosting provider has changed its billing schedule for resources to an hourly rate, and is offering low, per hour, per resource pricing in addition to automated payments and integrated alerting. Gandi is planning to finish the transition to its new billing system from the current reserve-a-resource model within the week. The new enhanced IaaS offerings will then be available to all new and existing customers.

Existing customers will not need to take any action to take full advantage of the new billing system. It was also designed to accommodate global customers and multiple currencies to ensure the company has a broad reach. Gandi manages more than 1.3 million domain names in addition to providing cloud computing services. The company's cloud hosting platform provides hosting for a broad community of people using the Internet to offer business services.

"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 of Gandi U.S. "In the process, we simplified the entire infrastructure as a service offering."

Specifics of the new changes include API enhancements, a new user interface for controlling IaaS servers, and up to 30-percent discounts for advance purchases. The company also doesn't charge for the first 500 gigabytes used in any given month, and offers a monitoring feature so customers will know when they get close to maxing out their bandwidth.