“Carbon Neutral” Rails Hosting 23 Dec 08

Over the next few months, I’d like to highlight via our blog a few aspects of Brightbox which may not be immediately obvious.

The first of these is our commitment to minimise the environmental impact of our business. Since we launched Brightbox in September 2007, we have offset the CO₂ emissions from operating our business through our partnership with Climate Care. Our offsetting covers emissions from the following…

• Energy used at our datacentres
• Energy used for lighting and electricity at our office
• Travel by Brightbox staff to and from our datacentres
• Travel by Brightbox staff to events, conferences and meetings
• Commuting by Brightbox staff from home to office

As expected, the largest contributor of these is electricity used at our datacentres. We’re constantly working on improving energy efficiency and we’ll go into more depth about that in a future post.

Most Carbon offsetting programmes seem to be focused almost entirely on planting trees – which is fairly low down on Climate Care’s list of priorities. In fact, their portfolio for 2007/08 didn’t actually include any reforestation projects. Here’s a snippet from an interview last year with Stella Bell of Climate Care:

Firstly, I’d like to make the point that offsetting is not about planting trees (although there are a lot of companies out there who would try to convince you otherwise). For example if you wanted to offset the UK’s emissions for a year, you’d need to plant an area the size of about Devon and Cornwall with trees, and then ensure that they didn’t die, become diseased, get chopped or burnt down for the life of the offset (anything between 50 and 100 years) – the following year you’d need to find another piece of land the same size and start again. This is not something we can plant our way out of, so we should be focusing our efforts – as Climate Care is – on funding renewable energy and energy efficiency which reduce dependency on fossil fuels.

Brightbox builds Hardy Passenger package 21 May 08

We’ve created an Ubuntu Hardy package for Passenger – the apache ‘mod_rails’ hosting solution written by the team at Phusion, and sent the resulting patches back upstream to improve Passenger for everybody.

The package is available from the Brightbox repository at http://apt.brightbox.net and is called ‘libapache2-mod-passenger’.

Brightboxes have the repository in place by default, but you can easily add the repository to your system with the following commands:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.brightbox.net hardy main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox.list'
sudo sh -c 'wget -q -O - http://apt.brightbox.net/release.asc | apt-key add -'
sudo apt-get update

There will be a beta Passenger Brightbox machine available soon and we’re probably going to need some volunteers to trial it out. So if you like your Rails Hosting bleeding edge then let me know and I’ll put you on the list.

If you do use the .deb, be warned that I’m changing it all the time at the moment as Passenger evolves and I’m following Passenger trunk very closely.

Brightbox – now with extra FiveRuns goodness! 17 Dec 07

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.

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.

Why we chose Ubuntu Dapper Drake 3 Aug 07

We’ve had a few beta testers ask about why we chose Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) as our primary Xen guest installation, as opposed to one of the more recent releases such as Edgy or Feisty. We chose it primarily because of its support contract.

Ubuntu’s release schedule sees a new version released roughly every 6 months. These releases contain the very latest versions of the software packaged with it and are supported for only 18 months. Once in a while a version is selected as Long Term Support release (LTS) which gets 5 years of server support (3 years for desktop). By support, I mean the Ubuntu team are committed to releasing security upgrades in a timely manner. Dapper was the first LTS version and is support through to June 2011.

If we’d chosen Edgy, security upgrades wouldn’t be available to us after April 2008, forcing all of our Brightboxers to upgrade to Feisty, and so on every 18 months. With the speed that the Rails community jump deployment strategy ships some might say this isn’t a problem, but most installations do need long term stability and Dapper provides that.

There are some issues though, mainly that Dapper’s version of Apache is too old to support the nice proxy balancing stuff that’s used for Mongrel deployments¹. To solve this, we chose to use a backported Apache package². This does mean that we have to commit to backporting all security fixes, but this is trivial compared to all our guest machines needing a full upgrade every 18 months. We still get the Ubuntu team working for us on the other 99.9% of packages.

For our users who like to ride the bleeding edge, they can still upgrade to Feisty themselves if they know what they are doing but for most, this isn’t what Brightbox is all about.

¹ A beta tester pointed us in the direction of this bug report requesting an official Apache backport for Dapper. The more people testing these packages and voicing their support, the more likely this might happen.

² We’re using the backported Apache package provided by kodefoo.com at the moment (http://www.kodefoo.com/2007/2/18/deploying-rails-on-ubuntu-dapper/) but are ready to roll our own if necessary.

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.

Brightbox says “Hello World” 19 Jun 07

Welcome to Brightblog!

We’ll be using this blog to post interesting stuff (in our opinion) about the new UK-based Rails hosting service we’ll be launching soon.