According to Gandi's announcement Tuesday, the company's Web hosting is unique because of its extreme flexibility, whereby users can buy "shares" of a server, each representing 1/64th of the total capacity of a server, starting at £7, $14, or 10 euros per share per month until December 31, 2008, after which point they will be available for £8.5, $16, or 12 euros. A flash demonstration and an interactive webpage show clients how they can increase or reduce the power of their server at anytime with no loss of 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,'" Gandi.net chief operating officer Joe White said in a statement. "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."

Experienced users can use this to create their own dedicated server and configure it however they wish, while others can use pre-fab servers programmed for use as web-servers, mail-servers or game servers.

"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," White said. "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."

Gandi's infrastructure is based on high-availability servers using Serial Attached SCSI (or SAS) disks running RAID 60 for network resilience.

"This is the beginning of a new chapter in Gandi's history," chief executive officer Stephan Ramoin said in a statement. "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."

A new player in the hosting industry, Gandi was formed in 1999 and was privately purchased in 2005 by "an experienced executive team," according to the company. Gandi manages more than 760,000 domain names worldwide, making it the largest registrar in France and sixth in Europe.