Free upgrades for everyone! 27 Sep 10

50% extra RAM

Brightbox’s birthday is a matter of days away and we’re starting our fourth year by increasing RAM for all Brightboxes by 50%. We’ll be upgrading existing Brightboxes over the next couple of weeks, though the product names in the control panel will change straight away.

MySQL connection quotas doubled

Since you’ll now be able to fit more app processes on your Brightboxes, you’ll need more MySQL connections, so we’re doubling those for all products too.

New Relic RPM for all

And as if this wasn’t enough, we’re expanding our New Relic RPM offering to include all Brightbox sizes. See our wiki page for more details about getting it set up.

We’re taking the opportunity to rename our products too, as naming by RAM size starts to get a bit ugly when you move beyond powers of two. The table below shows how the products are being renamed and what your new RAM size will be. Happy birthday us!

We’ve got some other big things in the pipeline too, so stay tuned. The next few months are going to be great.

Update (19 October 2010): We have now completed these upgrades for all customers. The extra MySQL connections are already available to everyone. Customers who have not rebooted their Brightboxes recently will need to do so in order to start using their extra RAM.

New Relic RPM now included on Brightbox 512 and above 20 Aug 09

FiveRuns announced last week that they would be ceasing the Manage service from 25th August. We have partnered with FiveRuns since December 2007 to bundle the Manage service with Brightbox products so we were sad to learn of its end-of-life.

However, we have been working hard over the last week to find an alternative solution and I’m very pleased to announce that we’ve agreed a partnership with New Relic to include their Bronze RPM monitoring service with all Brightbox 512 products and above.

New Relic RPM allows you to monitor 24×7, detect problems in real-time, drill down to find the causes and continuously tune your Rails applications for high performance.

Request your account

We hope to integrate our control panel with the New Relic APIs, but for now to get your free Bronze account:

1. Create a New Relic free (Lite) account, making a note of your account name, and email address used for registering then…
2. Submit a Brightbox support ticket, including your New Relic account name, and the email address to request your free upgrade to Bronze RPM.

New Relic have an excellent Knowledge Base which includes instructions for installing the monitoring agent into your Rails applications and much more.