Brightbox: First Impressions
by James
I’ve recently started using Brightbox to host a rebuilt Rails application for grain.org — I’d heard good things about Brightbox, and wanted to give them a try. Here are my first impressions.
Pricing
Brightbox servers start at £39/month for a virtual server with 10GB storage and 256MB RAM. You get 100GB of bandwidth per month, and five connections to a MySQL cluster (which is running very smoothly for me so far).
Myself and grain.org chose the slightly more expensive £69/month plan, which provides twice as much storage, memory, and bandwidth, and also includes New Relic RPM Bronze which would otherwise cost from around £25/month.
Signup
I didn’t sign up for the hosting account, but I’m told that Brightbox were able to re-activate an old account which the client cancelled a few months back. That seemed like a good start! As far as I can tell, the signup process was smooth and fast: I have access to a new Brightbox within a day.
Server Software
Brightbox servers use Ubuntu, which I have some experience with. It’s not to everyone’s taste, but I feel at home with it :) So far, the operating system has been very easy to use — I needed to install a some software that wasn’t included by default, and all it took was apt-get install package_name.
Brightbox servers also come with sudo, which is handy. The structure of the server is pretty standard, and you get a dedicated user (“rails”) for application deployment. SSH is fairly easy to configure, with instructions on the Brightbox Wiki, but I’ve been unable to stop SSH asking me for a password, which is a pain — that may be something I’ve done wrong, though, I can’t say.
Deployment & Application Management
One of my favourite things about Brightbox so far is their gem. This uses Capistrano and massively simplifies what would otherwise the complicated task of deploying a Rails application to an Apache/Mongrel set up. It’s even easy to change DNS records for a particular app. I love Capistrano, so bonus points there.
Support
I’ve had very little interaction with Brightbox support so far. I sent an email to their sales team before making the final decision about whether to use them for hosting, which email went un-replied for a few days until I emailed them a second time. To be fair, this is a one-off and hardly enough to judge quality of support on.
Community
One thing that really attracted me to Brightbox is their engagement with the Ruby and Rails community. It’s obvious that they’re genuinely interested in this software, and not just out to make some money off whatever’s cool on the internet this week. I know they’ve released several pieces of software (Ruby and Ubuntu-related, I think) back into the community, which is a big, big plus point in my eyes.
Conclusions
I’ve been using Brightbox for nearly a month now. So far, I’m impressed with the ease of deployment, server software, and community engagement — I’m hoping their support is of a similarly high quality too. It’s early days, but if you’re looking for a host for your Rails app, I’d recommend that you give Brightbox a try.