Posts by Jeremy Jarvis

New: reboots and additional VM info in control panel 1 Jul 09

A few days ago we deployed some improvements to our control panel, enabling tighter integration with our backend infrastructure. For the technically minded (or remotely interested) we’re using the magic of AMQP/RabbitMQ to enable this integration and we’ll be using this system to do more over the coming months.

The first fruits of this integration include the ability to initiate a reboot of any of your Brightbox virtual machines and enable you to view more information on the underlying physical host server and storage device.

You can now reboot any of your virtual machines via the control panel by simply clicking the “reboot” link and specifying either a “soft” or “hard” reboot. A soft reboot is the equivalent of running the shutdown -r command within the OS, whereas a hard reboot is equivalent to cutting power. In most cases, if you want to reboot your virtual machine you’ll want to try the soft option first to avoid the risk of filesystem corruption.

The additional virtual machine information is available by clicking the “full details” link next to one of your products. You’ll now see an additional two rows of information, “Host server” and “Storage”, which will now enable customers to make more sense of our status messages when, for example, we need to do some planned maintenance on a particular host server.

We’re constantly working on improving our control panel and we hope these two items are useful to customers, more improvements to follow soon :)

New: 4GB Brightbox PLUS increased CPU on 1GB and above! 19 Jun 09

A few days ago we added a new 4GB Brightbox product to our virtual machine range. Several customers have had 4GB boxes for a while now (on special request :) - but they’re now available for anyone. The 4GB Brightbox comes with burstable dual CPU, 50GB SAN storage, 25 MySQL cluster connections and 1.6TB/month data transfer!

We’ve also changed the CPU allocation for Brightbox 1GB and 2GB products so that they now also benefit from being able to burst to 2 CPU cores - effectively doubling CPU for both products!

Previously, the Brightbox 2GB product had a single “dedicated” core but having spent some time reviewing usage stats it was clear that CPU is considerably under utilised across all of our host machines so we could be confident that no existing customers would actually lose out by this change. If you currently have a 1GB or 2GB Brightbox and want to upgrade to the new CPU allocations, raise a support ticket and we’ll arrange the config change and reboot.

New: Brightbox CDN (Content Delivery Network) service 26 May 09

I’m pleased to announce we’ve partnered with CDNetworks, a global leader in CDN technologies, to provide the new Brightbox CDN service - another significant addition to the Brightbox service portfolio.

The Brightbox CDN service works by seamlessly delivering static content (e.g images, css and javascript) to website visitors from a high performance “edge” cache server nearest to their geographic location.

The network of global cache servers consists of 45 Points of Presence (POPs) located in 23 cities, with multiple nodes at each POP - speeding up the serving of assets to a truly global audience.

Brightbox CDN integrates very easily with Rails’ built-in asset helpers. In most cases, customers will need to add just one line to their production environment config:

ActionController::Base.asset_host = "http://assets%d.<appname>.brightcdn.com"

Pricing is per GB, and customers can choose between two simple billing methods, either pay-as-you-go (no contract) or opt for a 12 month commit with significant volume discounts.

For more information, check out the Brightbox CDN service page on our main website. If you have further questions, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.

New: Load Balancing service 20 May 09

Today, I’m pleased to announce the launch of our new Load Balancing service - which enables customers to distribute requests across multiple Brightbox virtual machines with ease.

It’s always been possible to create virtual load balancers from standard Brightboxes, but our new service now provides a simpler, more reliable and cost effective solution.

How it works

1. We provide you with a new Load Balanced IP address (which resides on our load balancers), which you configure your domain to resolve to. 
2. Our load balancers distribute requests across your pool of healthy Brightbox servers.
3. Health checks are performed every few seconds on each of your Brightboxes. Should one of your Brightboxes becomes unavailable, it is taken out of the load balancing pool until it is available again.

Pricing for the load balancing service starts at only £19/month!  To get started, simply request the load balancing service from Extra Services in your Brightbox account.

If you have any questions on the service, please get in touch.

New: Brightbox Silver & Gold Support 23 Apr 09

Today, I’m pleased to announce the launch our new Brightbox Silver and Gold support plans - the details of which we’ve been working on for several months now. These new support offerings are based on customer feedback and experience we’ve gained delivering fully managed clusters and services for several large customers over the last 18 months.

Silver support acts as an extension to our renowned “standard” Bronze support and includes 24/7 emergency telephone support and 30 minutes of Hands-on support each month. Silver support is priced at £49/month or 20% of account spend (whichever is greater).

Gold support is our proactive, fully managed service and includes all features of Bronze and Silver plans plus inclusive Managed Backups, application/cluster support and 24/7 monitoring and response. Gold support is priced at £349/month or 30% of account spend (whichever is greater).

We continue to offer “Pay-as-you-go” hands-on support from our experts at £30 per 30 minutes.

For further information on support plans or any of our services, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.

Scotland on Rails Party, Friday evening 25 Mar 09

If you’re heading up to Edinburgh for Scotland on Rails 2009, you’ll be pleased to know that we’ve teamed up with the guys at Unboxed Consulting to provide free drinks and pizza for the Scotland on Rails party on Friday evening at Fingers Piano Bar in Edinburgh. It’s pretty much a last-minute addition to the programme, but I do think it’s important to have some sort of “official” party/social where everyone is invited. I’ve been to numerous tech events which have overlooked this, leaving those who have come on their own or who aren’t buddies with the elite to be left out.

Each SoR attendee will get a voucher for a free beer, glass of wine or soft drink and some pizza, so bring yours along and hand it to the bar staff.

When?
Friday 27th March @ 10pm (straight after lightning talks)

Where?
Fingers Piano Bar, 61 Frederick Street, Edinburgh EH2 1LH (map)

See you there!

Rails Business UK Meetup in London 2 Mar 09

This Wednesday (4th March), Rahoul and myself will be travelling down to the Big Smoke for the inaugural Rails Business Meetup at the Benugo Bar at BFI Southbank.

Afterwards, we’ll be out and about in London for a few hours so if any customers, potential customers or random rubyists fancy a coffee or a beer on us, drop me a mail at jeremy@brightbox.co.uk

Brightbox sponsor Scotland on Rails 2009 5 Feb 09

I’m pleased to announce that Brightbox will be sponsoring the Scotland on Rails conference in Edinburgh (26-28 March 2009). Alan and Paul (and others I’m sure) have done a great job of putting together what promises to be a thoroughly engaging and stimulating schedule, in fact, leading them to sell out before the early bird offer was over :)

John, David, Rahoul, Caius and myself will all be travelling up to Edinburgh for the event - so please come and say “Hi”.

Of course, never fear, we’ll bring plenty of our famous t-shirts and stickers :)

New features: Extra disk space, IP addresses & Multiple email contacts 30 Jan 09

Today we pushed a couple more updates to the control panel. Now, rather than creating a ticket, you can order more disk space and additional IP addresses for any of your boxes directly from the control panel. Additional disk space can be purchased for just £5 per 10GB block and IP addresses for £2.50/month (with one-off setup of £30).

We’ve also added the ability for separate billing and technical email contacts to your account in addition to the regular account holder email address (this is a stop-gap addition until we implement multiple users per account which is on our development roadmap :)

Here’s a summary of notifications and recipients:

• Order confirmation: account holder, billing contact & technical contact
• Successful or Failed payment: account holder & billing contact
• Credit card expiry notice: account holder & billing contact
• New virtual machine deployed: account holder & technical contact
• New Helpdesk request: account holder & technical contact
• Password reset: account holder
• MySQL slow query alerts: account holder & technical contact

Keep watching over the next few weeks as we announce more improvements, including remote reboots…

New feature: Label your Brightboxes 14 Jan 09

We’ll be releasing lots of cool features for our control panel over the next couple of months. The latest of these features is a small addition but something that customers will hopefully find useful, especially those with several Brightboxes.

You can now add your own simple labels to each of your boxes so you can quickly remember which box is which. Previously, you only really had the box hostname e.g myapp-001.vm.brightbox.net as a reference, but you can now also add your own label e.g “Bob’s staging server”.