HowTo Update Rubygems by hand 28 Aug 08

The recent security issue with rails has led to several customers having to dabble with Rubygems possibly for the first time. A few have reported problems with the smaller Brightboxes running  older versions of gems. Essentially they run out of memory as Rubygems tries to download and update the entire Rubygems index.

If you have this problem you should upgrade to Rubygems 1.2.0 or greater, which handles the index in a different and less resource intensive way. You will have to install the Rubygems update by hand. I have added some instructions to the wiki about how to do this.

New, lower pricing for Brightboxes 28 Jan 08

As we approach the end of our first three months since official launch we’ve now got a clearer view of our costs. So we’re pleased to say that from today the following revised pricing will apply to new and existing customers…

• Brightbox 256 (was £45/mo) now £39
• Brightbox 512 (was £75/mo) now £69
• Brightbox 1024 (was £125/mo) now £109
• Brightbox 2048 (was £220/mo) now £199

See the updated pricing matrix for more details. Enjoy.

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.

Hey, what’s the hold up? 28 Jun 07

If you’ve been paying close attention, you might have noticed the countdown timer recently disappeared from the holding page. Don’t panic, nothing sinister is happening :) It’s just that our testing has taken a little longer than planned (plus a delay in the delivery of some new shiny hardware set us back another week).

Jason Fried (37signals) was right and I should have listened:

..we don’t have release dates. It’s a great way to make sure things are never late.

Also, in response to some good early feedback, John’s been working on a deployment gem that will make it super simple to deploy your Ruby on Rails apps to Brightbox.