Maintenance period

Starting at 12:00 (midday) on Weds 17 Feb, the Brightbox control panel will be unavailable for approximately 20 minutes whilst we perform the updates. One of the updates will include a migration to create an owner user account (name and email address) for all existing active customer accounts.

Change of login from “username” to email address

Once the above maintenance period is completed, you’ll be able to login to the control panel again as normal, but now using your registered email address to login, together with the existing password.

Adding and inviting users

Once logged in you’ll be able to give other people access to your account via the “User access” link.

It’s important to note that initially, as described below, all users that you give access to your account will have full access (apart from the ability to invite other users).

Interim billing and technical roles

Currently, customers are able to specify two additional “contacts” on their account – a billing contact (receives cc’ed payment email notifications) and a technical contact (receives copies of support ticket notifications and server notifications). These “old style” contacts do not have access to the account, unless the account owner supplies them with the account username and password.

The main purpose of this work is to enable a “many to many” relationship between users and accounts i.e multiple users can access a single account and single users can have multiple accounts. We will be introducing a more extensive permissions system into the control panel in due course, but in the meantime the four “roles” that users can have will each have full access to the account but differ in their behaviour…

• Owner (one per account): Full access + add/invite new users to have access. The owner role is the person ultimately responsible for the account and can’t be assigned by users.
• Primary technical (one per account): Full access + single point of contact for Brightbox technical support to receive email notifications etc
• Technical (many per account): Full access.
• Billing (many per account): Full access + receive copies of payment email notifications

If you have any questions about these changes and how they will affect you, please drop us an email.

If the nightly log parser find any slow queries for your user, the data will be added to your list and an alert will be displayed when you login to the control panel.

Clicking the alert, will take you to the main MySQL service page where you will see a list of unacknowledged queries.

Of course, this feature will simply let you know you have a slow query that you should investigate and optimise. How to optimise your database queries is beyond the scope of this blog post :)

• Brightbox 256: was 50GB now 100GB/month (100% more!)
• Brightbox 512: was 75GB now 200GB/month (167% more!)
• Brightbox 1GB: was 150GB now 400GB/month (167% more!)
• Brightbox 2GB: was 250GB now 800GB/month (220% more!)

There are a few reasons for making these increases:

1. Our bandwidth costs per customer have decreased as we’ve grown, due to economies of scale
2. We’ve taken on a new bandwidth supplier for our new racks which has, again, provided significant cost savings (whilst providing increased network capacity and failover ability!)
3. Previous bandwidth allowances didn’t grow inline with RAM, which we think they should (and now do) 

Of course, this applies to both new and existing customers. Enjoy!

Caius is something of a legend in the Leeds Geek scene, even though he only moved to our lovely city a couple of months ago. The fact that most of us first “met” Caius through Twitter says something about his prolific and entertaining addiction :)

We’ve been using Hardy for months now to power our managed products and clusters and it’s proved very stable.  Some of the highlights:

• Ruby 1.8.6 as standard
• Apache 2.2.8 as standard
• Imagemagick 6.3 as standard (roll on the new rmagick gems!)
• Git 1.5.4 as standard
• Better virtualisation support – we can now live upgrade ram on Brightboxes without a reboot

It still comes pre-configured for Rails deployment and we’re still providing improved and extra packages where necessary (such as nginx 6.31).

We’re also still supporting our Ubuntu Dapper machines and can still pre-install Dapper for customers who are already using it on their other boxes.

Upgrading

Due to the way Brightboxes are built, you can’t easily upgrade your Dapper box to Hardy.  Currently, the only supported way to upgrade is to file a support ticket with us and we’ll rebuild your Brightbox as Hardy.  This will require downtime and redeployment of your app (a good time to move to the new Brightbox deployment gem if you haven’t already)

This work will take place between 1am and 3am every morning this week. We will need to log in to all boxes to make some Xen specific config changes during the migration. We’ll be contacting customers with HA clusters to arrange node failovers.

Apologies for the short notice.

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.

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.

Naturally, this applies to *all* customers.

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 :)

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

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.

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.