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.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid” now available 8 Jun 10

Available from today, you can now choose either Ubuntu Hardy or Lucid as the base OS when building new Brightboxes.

Ubuntu Lucid is the latest Long Term Support (LTS) version of Ubuntu with security fixes provided until April 2015. It brings a whole bunch of upgrades such as Ruby 1.8.7, Monit 5, Apache 2.2.14 and new packages like CouchDB, Sphinx, Chef, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, ejabberd and many more.

We’ve treated it to the usual Brightbox Ruby deployment tune-up, including our Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-2010.01 packages. Updated Phusion Passenger packages are now available on our newly Lucid-enabled apt repository.

When buying a new Brightbox, you’ll see a combo box that you can use to select Lucid (Hardy is still currently the default). Upgrading from Hardy to Lucid isn’t really viable due to the way Hardy boxes handle kernels, so you’ll either need to request a re-image (which involves wiping your box, so make backups!) or buy a new box and move your apps to it.

New: 4GB Brightbox PLUS increased CPU on 1GB and above! 19 Jun 09

A few days ago we added a new 4GB Brightbox product to our virtual machine range. Several customers have had 4GB boxes for a while now (on special request :) – but they’re now available for anyone. The 4GB Brightbox comes with burstable dual CPU, 50GB SAN storage, 25 MySQL cluster connections and 1.6TB/month data transfer!

We’ve also changed the CPU allocation for Brightbox 1GB and 2GB products so that they now also benefit from being able to burst to 2 CPU cores – effectively doubling CPU for both products!

Previously, the Brightbox 2GB product had a single “dedicated” core but having spent some time reviewing usage stats it was clear that CPU is considerably under utilised across all of our host machines so we could be confident that no existing customers would actually lose out by this change. If you currently have a 1GB or 2GB Brightbox and want to upgrade to the new CPU allocations, raise a support ticket and we’ll arrange the config change and reboot.

Now with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy powers 2 Oct 08

We’ve now switched to Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS) as our default Brightbox image.

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)

MySQL Maintenance: Thur 17 April 22:00-23:00 8 Apr 08

We’ll be doing some maintenance work on the MySQL cluster next Thursday, the 17th April starting at 22:00 and taking around an hour. There will be a couple of seconds interruption to service at 22:00 as we switch between cluster nodes, then a few more seconds as we switch back at around 23:00.  We’ll keep you up to date as usual using the status feed.

The maintenance is to apply some software updates but we’re taking the opportunity to do some MySQL performance tuning at the same time.

Ruby 1.8.6 and ImageMagick 6.3 for Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper 20 Mar 08

We’ve backported some packages useful for Ruby on Rails deployment to the long term support Ubuntu Dapper distro.  They’ve been available for a while but it only just ocurred to us this might be useful to others!

Dapper has Ruby 1.8.4 (though labelled as 1.8.2 in the package list) and ImageMagick 6.2.  Ruby 1.8.4 has some known problems that are fixed in 1.8.6 and the rmagick gem recently updated to version 2, reportedly fixing the memory leaks, but it requires ImageMagick 6.3.

We backported Ruby 1.8.6 p111 and ImageMagick 6.3 from the latest development version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) to Dapper.  They’ve been in use on a few boxes and no problems so far.  Feel free to make use of them.  We’ll be backporting any security updates as they come.

General details of the repository are here, with specific information about Ruby 1.8.6 and ImageMagick 6.3 on their own pages.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron is due out in the next few month, which brings a lot of this stuff with it.  Some of you might have the luxury of being able to upgrade to it, but some may need to stick with Dapper for a while – hopefully these packages will help you out.

Planned MySQL Maintenance: 6 Jan 2200hrs-2230hrs 31 Dec 07

We’ll be doing some work on the MySQL cluster on Sunday 6th January 2008 between 2200hrs and 2230hrs. We’re changing the way the clustering is managed to improve stability and also upgrading to fix some security bugs.During the window you may see two or three brief outages (less than 2 minutes at a time). We’ll keep the status page up to date as usual. If you experience any issues after the maintenance window has closed, please submit a support ticket and we’ll deal with it straight away.

Update: (7 Jan 2007) maintenance went well with only few seconds downtime.

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.