If you are a new customer of our hosting service, you must purchase your first share from the presentation page of the hosting section of our website.

This section of our wiki will show new Gandi hosting customers how the resource purchasing process works.

• To create a server, you must have at least one share. A "share" is a predefined package of components (CPU/RAM/disk space/network bandwidth) that is needed to run your server. You can therefore create a single server with one share or several shares, depending on the level of performance that you need.

• Choose the number of shares that you would like to attribute to your server. If you do not know how many shares you need, then start with one: it is very easy to add and/or remove shares to a server, even if it is already online.

• Next, click on the blue "buy shares" button that you see on the bottom of the page.

You can change your quota of shares depending on your server`s real-time performance needs. If your hosting account is already active, you can add or remove shares to your resources by clicking on the Manage your resources button.

You can also choose the length of commitment:

Monthly based shares

With a monthly based share, you are free to choose for how long you want to use our service. This means that you pay for your monthly share(s) every month, but that you are free to remove unneeded resources from your account at any time: your prepaid account will then be automatically refunded for the unused time that you paid for in advance.

Annual based shares

With the annual share, you will get a discount and you will only pay 10 months a year. However, unlike the monthly subscription you can't release an annual share before the expiration date.

All the hosting resource orders that you make from your Gandi account are billed from its prepaid account. When your order has been submitted, you will see the following on your screen:

Consequently, when you have chosen your payment means in order to checkout, your order immediately appears on the Orders in Progress page, while your payment is being processed by our system.

If you have placed an order but your prepaid account does not have sufficient funds, you will need to credit your prepaid account for the necessary amount to cover the order before it can be completed.

When your order has been completed, you will receive an email that will confirm the addition of the resources you have ordered to your Gandi VPS hosting account.

In the large majority of cases, if your order has not been completed within 5 minutes, then a payment problem has occurred. It is therefore necessary to credit your prepaid account before the order can be completed.

This being said, in the event that you choose to pay by check (something only possible from people paying in Euros from a French bank account), your Orders in Progress page will show that it is waiting for your check to be received and validated before your prepaid account will be credited. Once that has been done, you need to click on the link that you will see next to your order that will debit your prepaid account.