Pricing for Brightbox Cloud (and last call for private beta) 19 Aug 11

In preparation for the official launch (more on that to follow soon), we’re announcing the close of the private beta phase of Brightbox Cloud.

We’ve had around 750 beta testers taking part in the private beta programme and we’re grateful to all those who submitted bugs, provided feature requests, and gave both postive and negative feedback. We’re also grateful to those who built web crawlers, TOR exit nodes etc and generally gave things a good hammering :)

Private beta testers get free cloud resources to play with as well as a 50% discount for the first 3 months when we “go public”.  We’ll be closing private beta registration on 25 August 2011 so this is the final call:  sign up for the private beta before it’s too late!

Brightbox Cloud Pricing

Now, the bit we’ve all been waiting for… I’m excited to announce provisional pricing for our new cloud offering.

Brightbox Cloud is a metered service, with resources charged by the hour or by the gigabyte. These new prices do not affect our existing unmetered Rails hosting platform – Brightbox Cloud is a completely separate platform.

Cloud servers

Cloud Servers are billed by the hour, depending on the “Server Type” which defines the RAM, disk size and CPU allocation of the server.

Load Balancers

Load Balancers are billed by the hour. Internet data in and out of Load Balancers is billed at the normal price. Each Load Balancer is highly available within a Region – designed to tolerate the loss of an entire Zone. Each Load Balancer supports multiple protocols and, at present, can handle 6000 concurrent connections (additional scaling options will be available soon to handle higher levels of traffic).

Price per load balancer instance (HA) = £0.04/hour

Cloud IPs

Cloud IPs are instantly re-mappable public IP addresses which can be mapped to any Cloud Server or Load Balancer within a Region. Each Cloud IP allocated to your account is billed by the hour. Cloud IPs can be allocated and released from your account at any time.

Price per Cloud IP allocated to account = £0.0035/hour (Free until 1 October)

Data charges

Internet data is billed by the gigabyte. Usage data is collected every minute by our billing system. Local data transfer, i.e. data transferred within the same Zone, is free-of-charge. Regional data, i.e data transferred between separate Zones, is free-of-charge until 1 Dec 2011.

Internet data (inbound) = £0.08 per GB
Internet data (outbound) = £0.12 per GB
Regional data transfer = £0.01 tbc (Free until 1 Dec 2011)

Any questions?

If you’ve got any questions about the pricing or anything else about the new cloud platform, drop us an email.

Passenger 3.0.0 beta3 packages for Ubuntu Lucid and Hardy 21 Sep 10

The team at Phusion have been hard at work on Passenger 3 and last week released a beta version for testing. Continuing our work with Passenger 2, we’ve been working hard on packaging it.

We now have Passenger 3.0.0-pre3 packages available for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) and Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy). As they’re pre-release versions, we don’t recommend them in production just yet and have put them in their own repository to prevent any accidental upgrades.

If you’re not already a Brightbox customer, then you’ll need to set up base access to our apt repository first.

Otherwise, just add the new passenger-testing repository (switch “lucid” to “hardy” if you’re on Hardy):

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.brightbox.net lucid passenger-testing" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-passenger-testing.list'

Then you can upgrade/install 3.0.0-1bbox1~pre3

apt-get update
apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger

Passenger now has a native library, which depends on your version of ruby. For simplicity, these packages currently require the ruby1.8 packages to be installed. You can, of course, switch to ruby1.9 and passenger will auto-compile the necessary native support for you. We’ll be providing packages for 1.9 support soon, so you won’t need to rely on the auto-compiling.

Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.02 Packages for Ubuntu Hardy & Lucid 16 Jun 10

We’ve built new 32 & 64bit Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.02 packages for Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid. The 2010.02 release of Ruby EE includes a number of backported fixes for critical bugs in Ruby 1.8.7p249 and we recommend users currently using our 2010.01 packages upgrade immediately.

For further information on using these packages see the release announcement for our Ruby EE 2010.01 packages.

Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.01 Packages for Ubuntu Hardy & Lucid 17 May 10

We’ve built  new 32bit and 64bit Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.01 packages for Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid. The new packages are now the default on new Lucid beta boxes. For Hardy, as before these packages are quite a major change from the default Hardy Ruby interpreter,which is 1.8.6, so we recommend you test thoroughly before putting it into production.

As with our other Ruby EE packages, they upgrade (i.e replace) the standard 1.8 Ruby installation. This means all your gems stay the same, and everything on your system immediately starts using them (Phusion’s own Ubuntu packages do not work like this).

These packages are also the best way to get Ruby 1.8.7 on Hardy, which you’ll need if you’re playing with Rails 3.

If you’re on a Hardy based Brightbox, just create or edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list to contain the rubyee-testing component like so:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ hardy rubyee-testing

If you’re on one of our Lucid beta boxes provisioned before today, simply create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list and add the rubyee component:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ lucid rubyee

Finally, update and upgrade libruby1.8:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libruby1.8 irb1.8 libopenssl-ruby1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 rdoc1.8 ruby1.8

If you’re not on a Brightbox, see the instructions on our wiki first. The wiki also documents how to revert back to the old packages.

Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2009.10 Packages for Ubuntu Hardy 9 Nov 09

We’ve built 32bit and 64bit Ubuntu Hardy packages for Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2009.10.  These packages are still in beta, and this is quite a major change from the default Hardy Ruby interpreter,which is 1.8.6, so we recommend you test thoroughly before putting it into production.  We’ve been using them for a couple of days with no problems though.

As with our other Ruby EE packages, they upgrade (i.e replace) the standard 1.8 Ruby installation. This means all your gems stay the same, and everything on your system immediately starts using them (Phusion’s own Ubuntu packages do not work like this).  We’ve tested it with the usual Railsy native gems, RMagick, Mongrel, fasthread etc. and have had no problems.

If you’re on a Brightbox, just edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list and change the rubyee component to rubyee-testing:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ hardy rubyee-testing

Then update and upgrade:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libruby1.8

If you’re not on a Brightbox, see the instructions on our wiki first. The wiki also documents how to revert back to the old packages.

As said above, we now have 64bit packages available too (which was recently made easier by some Debian package dependency updates, also included in our repository).

Please let us know how they worked out for you on our forum. Thanks!

Multi CPU beta testers wanted 27 Apr 09

We’re looking at offering multiple CPU Brightboxes and need some willing beta testers.  You need to have a Hardy Brightbox with at least 2gig of RAM (we have some secret 4gig customers out there, we’ll be offering 4gig boxes to everyone soon, don’t worry :). Not everyone is eligible – it depends on which of our clusters your box is on, but we might be able to arrange a move for you if you’re really keen.

In most cases the upgrade shouldn’t even involve any downtime, but in some we may need to upgrade your kernel which will require a reboot.  We have a number of multi CPU boxes already running with no problems, so we don’t expect any serious issues.

If you’re interested, just file a support ticket from within the control panel and someone will be in touch to arrange the free upgrade.

Passenger 2.2.1 Ubuntu beta packages with NGINX support 22 Apr 09

The Phusion team released a new version of Passenger last week, 2.2.1, which sports a shiny new NGINX extension.  It also adds chunked file uploads (Apache only) and improves restarts.

We’ve had to restructure the way our Ubuntu packages are built to enable installation of the NGINX extension, so needs more extensive testing than usual.  The packages are now available for Ubuntu Hardy in our testing repository.

You’ll need to add our testing repository to your apt sources list. And if you’re not on a Brightbox, you’ll need to import our key and add our stable repository too.

Once you’ve done that, you can install the new version of Passenger.  If you’re wanting to just install the Apache version:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger

This will pull in a new dependency, passenger-common.

If you just want to get stuck in with the new NGINX support, install the nginx-brightbox package:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx-brightbox

This will also pull in the passenger-common dependency. This is NGINX 0.6.36 plus some useful modules: upload progress, upstream fair, geoip, ey-balancer and access key. It will replace any other NGINX packages you have installed (NGINX does not support dynamic modules like Apache).

You can install both Apache and NGINX side by side, but you’ll obviously need to run them on different ports.

The 2.2.1 Apache package has already had quite a bit of testing by us, but the NGINX package has had very little. We’ve already come across a Passenger bug with reloading NGINX (reported here), though we expect this will be fixed quickly.  So basically, these are good to play with but not for production just yet.

If you need any help with these packages, try our Passenger support forum.

Beta testers required to trial new Content Delivery Network (CDN) service 5 Nov 08

We’re currently working on offering a Content Delivery Network (CDN) service for Brightbox customers.  This will accelerate the serving of your static assets, distributing them around the globe and serving from the closest server to the user.  We’re trialling a partnership with Panther Express to provide this service, who provide CDN services for some pretty huge sites, such as LiveJournal, The Guardian and Shopping.com.

It can be used with the built-in Rails asset host system too, so no heavy modifications or fancy plugins.  We’re looking for some beta-testers, so if you’re interested please drop us an email to hello at the brightbox address and provide us details of your current static asset bandwidth usages if possible. All customers are welcome!

Brightbox Gem v2 beta 9 May 08

We’re proud to announce the beta version of our new Brightbox deployment gem. It is available from the Brightbox gem testing repository at http://gems.brightbox.net/testing. You can add this repository to your list by following these instructions.

This gem is a complete rewrite, to take advantage of the latest features of Capistrano and Rails. The Gem works with the current version of Capistrano (2.3) and supports the deployment of Rails 2.x applications.

FEATURES

Deploy with a single command

You can deploy a Rails application onto the Brightbox system with a single command (deploy:initial). We’ve tried to reduce the amount of work required to get an application working. You can follow our simplified initial deployment guide on our wiki

Focus on new deployment

The Brightbox gem is designed to allow you to quickly deploy an application to your new Brightbox. We’ve created sensible defaults for many of the Brightbox command options, and trimmed as much of the fat as we can from the deployment process. But because the gem generates Capistrano files you can tailor this starting point to your exact needs using the full power of Capistrano.

Deploy your working copy

The gem uses the new ‘:none’ scm option in Capistrano that simply zips up the current directory and deploys it on the server. No more messing around with version control security until you’re ready. Just deploy and go.

Automatically creates database configuration

The standard ‘mysql’ command allows you to put the database, username and password in a file called ‘.my.cnf’ in the ‘rails’ user home directory on the server. The mysql command will then read that file and logon to the database directly. If your application is short of a ‘production’ section in its config/database.yml then the recipes will take the contents of ‘.my.cnf’ and create a production section dynamically.

Automatically creates databases and gems

Rails now has rake commands for creating databases and installing required gems. Where these are available the recipes will use them automatically. For Rails 2.0 users we’ve created a simple ‘stop gap’ rake task that you can use to specify your required gems.

Separate server and client gems

Once the gem is released all new brightboxes will come with the server gem preinstalled. For older boxes you will need to install the server tools manually. Log into your brightbox and run:

sudo gem install brightbox-server-tools -y --no-ri --no-rdoc

Logs Rotated

The gem asks the operating system to monitor the size of the application logs and rotate them when they get too big or too old. No longer should a neglected log file bring your server to its knees.

Mongrels Cleaned

Mongrel tend to be dirty when it falls over and leaves PID files lying around to trap the unwary. The new gem cleans up dirty PID files before it restarts.

Works alongside Capistrano

We’ve simplified the recipes so that, wherever possible, they augment the existing Capistrano deployment commands we all know and love rather than replacing them. That way your deployments gain the benefits of Capistrano improvements as well as improvements in the Brightbox gem. Free software at its best.

NOW WE NEED YOUR HELP!

We’d like as many Brightbox customers to use the new gem and let us know what they think of it so that we can hone it to perfection. Please give it a go and then pop along to our Brightbox Beta discussion group (http://groups.google.com/group/brightbox-beta) and let us know any feedback or problems.

NGINX 0.6 for Ubuntu Dapper 11 Apr 08

We’ve backported NGINX 0.6.29 packages from Debian experimental to Ubuntu Dapper and included the fair proxy balancer module.

It’s in our testing repository at the moment so give it a whirl (it will of course install on any Ubuntu Dapper box, not just Brightboxes).  We have a page on the Brightbox wiki on how to configure NGINX for your Brightbox apps too (which can easily be adjusted to any NGINX install really).

If you’re playing with any of this beta stuff (like these packages or the Brightbox gem) and have feedback or need help, feel free to discuss it on the Brightbox-beta Google group that i just set up.