Comments on: Special Offer: 50% off all new Brightboxes

By: Jeremy Jarvis

Jeremy Jarvis — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:22:13 +0000

@Brandon: Why things might be generally less affordable in the UK compared to the US is probably a discussion to be had with a professor in economics, which I’m not ;)

However, it’s important to compare like-for-like. When compared to our two main US-based competitors right now our pricing actually offers better value. Also, interestingly, with the weakening of the pound against the dollar over recent months, our US-based customers will have seen the cost of their Brightboxes go down considerably :)

@David: If you buy a box during the offer period and upgrade later outside of the offer period, you’ll essentially retain the amount of unused credit. So, say you buy a Brightbox 256 on annual plan during offer period – you essentially get a credit of £195. If you wanted to upgrade 2 months later, we’ll give you a credit of £162.50 (i.e 10 months worth of your original credit).

By: David Vrensk

David Vrensk — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 10:39:30 +0000

Nice offer, but could you clarify what happens if I sign up now and then upgrade? In your FAQ you say “You’ll be charged a pro-rata amount to cover the period until your next billing date” which is fair. My q is “pro-what-rata?”, i.e. if I sign up for the 256 version and 2 months later realise that I need to upgrade to 2048, will you charge 10/12 of the standard list price or of the discounted one?

By: Brandon Zylstra

Brandon Zylstra — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 08:26:48 +0000

I’m curious: why is it that hosting is so much more expensive in England than in the U.S.? Even with the 50% discount that’s significantly more than I’d pay on my side of the pond.

I’m not being critical of Brightbox, as I gather this is true generally in the U.K., but I’m baffled as to why that would be.

By: John Leach

John Leach — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:29:32 +0000

Alex: because the MySQL cluster *is* shared there can be no guarantees about your indexes being in RAM at any given time. We do sell fully managed dedicated MySQL systems (usually two MySQL boxes in multi-master) with backups etc. This is the only way to guarantee resources (we recommend that most of our larger customers go for this).

But, to give you an idea of the MySQL specs, RAM is usually 4G, CPUs are 2.8Ghz dual, or 2.3Ghz quad. Disk is either 4 or 6 disk RAID10.

I checked out that mysqlreport program – cute tool. I ran it on our busiest shared server and thought I’d just post the entire unedited results:

http://forum.brightbox.co.uk/forums/brightbox-help/topics/example-mysql-cluster-statistics

Hope that helps. Ask any further questions about this on that forum post and I’ll try and answer.

By: edster

edster — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:50:23 +0000

Hi Folks, great offer.
Cheeky question, I have a couple of brightboxes used for testing and beta sites. Can I just cancel those and get 2 new brightboxes at the offer rate?
thanks again for the great service.
/Ed

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:27:26 +0000

err, can’t do the math: I was referring to a 8GB mysql server shared by 16 people, not 8 :)

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:45:49 +0000

Jeremy: thanks for the note. Currently I’m running my own mysql on together with my app at slicehost, but the biggest problem is that a 512MB xen based VPS with a mysql server is less performant than a 8GB mysql server shared by 8 users. In other words, exactly the mysql service made me interested in Brightbox in the first place. I guess you can’t disclose any more information regarding the mysql service, e.g. via “mysqlreport -all” (see: http://hackmysql.com/mysqlreport )?

By: Jeremy Jarvis

Jeremy Jarvis — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:35:12 +0000

@Alex: Yes, a Brightbox is essentially a rails-optimised xen vps instance which is setup to work very closely with our deployment gem and we then offer a bunch of services alongside it, such as the mysql service – so most customers don’t need to worry about managing MySQL.

The wiki page about our MySQL service is here:
http://wiki.brightbox.co.uk/docs:mysqlcluster

Of course, it’s not for everyone – it sounds like you might want to run your own MySQL dbs which you’re free to do on a Brightbox as you’ve got full control.

By: Jeremy Jarvis

Jeremy Jarvis — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:27:27 +0000

@Thomas: If you wanted to pay for two years now, we can do that with the discount :) just file a helpdesk ticket after you’ve ordered.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 11:12:40 +0000

Quite interesting!

I’d love to know the stats of the MySQL cluster which is part of the offer, as I have a rails app with a huge join table of 300MB which is accessed so frequently that its innodb index should be stored in RAM and not on disk. If I have my own VPS, I can always define the memory mysql shall use via /etc/my.conf, but here it seems as if I have no options at all.

Unfortunately the wiki has no information at all about the MySQL cluster, therefor making Brightbox a either really great or a really bad deal. Which is why I’m looking forward to the details.

PS: I’m also missing the basic explanation on what Brightbox really is, after some searching through the wiki it appears it’s basically a ‘normal’ VPS with root account and preinstalled rails/passenger, plus a apt repository with packaged software that’s frequently used in the rails world. But is there anything I could do with a VPS I can not do with Brightbox? This info might help getting people that are currently VPS users to switch to Brightbox.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 10:28:03 +0000

What a great news!

Is the special offer annual pricing available only the first year or also next ones?