Posts tagged ‘announcements’

Brightbox - now with extra FiveRuns goodness! 17 Dec 07

FiveRuns logo

We’re really excited to announce today a new partnership with FiveRuns, the pioneer in monitoring products for Ruby on Rails. From today, our Brightbox 512 products and above will include FiveRuns RM-Manage monitoring.

FiveRuns’ RM-Manage is the first and only Rails application monitoring product to instrument and monitor all aspects of the Rails framework and its supporting infrastructure resources. Combining our scalable Rails hosting environments with FiveRuns industry-first monitoring tools will enable customers to ensure their Rails applications operate at peak performance in a fully monitored server environment.

Here’s what Dean Cruse, vice president of sales and marketing for FiveRuns, says:

Ruby on Rails developers require world-class hosting and management resources 100% dedicated to the framework, and Brightbox delivers. This partnership enables a combined and singular resource in the UK for Rails applications: simple and powerful Rails hosting expertise combined with the industry’s best Rails application monitoring offering.

Read the full Press Release posted on the FiveRuns website.

New customers of Brightbox 512 and above products will be activated with a FiveRuns account, and be able to log-in, download and install the RM-Manage client on their Brightbox servers. FiveRuns will provide full support for all of the new accounts directly. For more information on the partnership, see our partner page.

Existing customers just need to send an email to support@brightbox.co.uk to request their FiveRuns account.

Posted 17 December 2007 by Jeremy Jarvis ::: add comment

New 2GB Brightbox and another bandwidth boost for 1GB boxes 29 Nov 07

Earlier this week we added a new product at the top of the range - the imaginatively titled Brightbox 2048 :)

This new box comes with 2GB of RAM and also has a whole dedicated CPU core at it’s disposal giving an additional performance advantage. The Brightbox 2048 is priced at £220 per month, with the usual discount for annual payments. Check out the full list of specs and how it compares up to our existing rails hosting products →

Also, today, we added *another* 50GB of bandwidth to the Brightbox 1024 product, now giving a total of 150GB/month.

Posted 29 November 2007 by Jeremy Jarvis ::: add comment

Extra 25GB/month data on all Brightbox plans 1 Nov 07

We’ve updated all three plans with an extra 25GB data/bandwidth a month. So, a Brightbox 256 now comes with 50GB/month, 512 with 75GB/month and 1024 boxes come with 100GB/month.

Naturally, this applies to *all* customers.

Posted 1 November 2007 by Jeremy Jarvis ::: add comment

Special Launch Offer now available! 15 Oct 07

Launch Offer

Our special launch offer, “buy 6 months get 6 months FREE”, is now available to purchase. We’re currently only taking payments via Paypal (PayPal account not required) for the launch offer, although we can accept bank payments via CHAPS for those customers who are unable to use PayPal.

The launch offer is limited to 2 special offer boxes per customer and there are only 100 available in total. The offer will close on 29 October (in 2 weeks time).

** UPDATE ** (1 Nov 2007): We’re extending the launch offer for another week as we’re still working on our “proper” payments system. Those customers who have already signed up for the launch offer will get another month free :)

Posted 15 October 2007 by Jeremy Jarvis ::: 4 comments

Brightbox Pricing 10 Aug 07

Over the last few weeks we’ve been putting more thought to the pricing structure for Brightbox and have settled on the following provisional price matrix, which we think offers great value for what’s included:

Pricing Matrix

Each Brightbox includes

  • Customised Ubuntu 6.06 OS preinstalled
  • Brightbox Ruby on Rails stack
  • Apache 2.2/Mongrel
  • Monit for managing Mongrels
  • Subversion repository
  • Outgoing mail relay
  • Guaranteed (yet burstable) CPU resources
  • UK IP address
  • Root access
  • Mirrored MySQL db cluster
  • Mirrored RAID disk storage
  • Juniper Networks firewalling
  • Free Gigabit traffic between additional Brightboxes
  • Fully redundant public network
  • UPS and Generator power

Optional extras/upgrades

  • Additional bandwidth/data = £5 per 5GB/month
  • Additional storage = £10 per 5GB/month
  • Custom firewall rules = £10 per month
  • Extra IP address (e.g for SSL) = £25 setup

EXCITING NEWS!

We’ll be offering 100 special launch accounts which will feature a sweet discount - pay for 6 months and get 6 months free!

These special discounted accounts will only be available for 2 weeks after launch, and will be offered firstly to those who have participated in the beta programme and then those on the announcement email list, before being offered to the rest of the world. So signup to the mailing list here and make sure you get your hands on one of these special Brightbox accounts.

1 Rather than limit the number of databases you can create, each Brightbox comes with a limited number of concurrent connections to the MySQL database cluster

2 Prices quoted are exclusive of VAT where applicable

Posted 10 August 2007 by Jeremy Jarvis ::: add comment

The story so far 31 Jul 07

The beta programme is well underway now with around 50 beta users trying out Brightbox. We’ve already got some really useful feedback and are working on some tweaks to improve performance *and* make Brightbox even easier to use. We’ve also done extensive testing of our own involving thousands of Brightbox machines.

Of course, the question I hear all the time is “when?”. “When will you be going live?”. We’ve not got an exact date and we won’t be publishing a date until we’re ready to go and we’ve got a way to take payments :) Right now, David is working on the ordering/admin system that will be built into the main Brightbox website so customers will be able to order machines and have them automatically provisioned (we already have Ruby scripts to do this). We also want beta users to have at least a month to have a play around and do their own testing.

So, right now, we’re currently looking at a full launch early September.

Posted 31 July 2007 by Jeremy Jarvis ::: add comment

Brightbox beta program 19 Jun 07

We’re currently looking for a few more active Rails developers to help us test our new Brightbox rails hosting service and provide some valuable feedback. The ideal participants will most likely fit most of the following profile:

  1. Be developing in Ruby on Rails almost exclusively for new projects.
  2. Currently hosting, or looking to host in the next 3 months, at least one production rails app
  3. At least some experience of deploying rails to a production environment
  4. Be the decision-maker, have the casting vote or at least have a major say in where apps are hosted at their company or agency
  5. Have an active or rails-focused blog

Interested? drop a quick email to beta-req@brightbox.co.uk and tell us a bit about your app/apps and how you fit into the above profile. You might just get a free brightbox to play with, plus a nice discount when we launch.

UPDATE: (30 Jul 2007)
We’re well into the beta programme now so we’re not looking for any more beta testers.

Posted 19 June 2007 by Jeremy Jarvis ::: 2 comments