Brightbox Cloud - general availability

Earlier today we officially removed the “beta” label and enabled full signup, meaning anyone can now signup and be up-and-running on Brightbox Cloud within minutes!

This general availability is the culmination of over 18 months of work here at Brightbox and a thorough private beta phase of almost 12 months.

In case you missed it, here are a few highlights:

• High performance, flexible Cloud Servers:
  Use any OS and even bring your own,
  Out-of-band access via an encrypted graphical console,
  Separate network segment for each Cloud Server - secure from spoofing or eavesdropping.
• Geographically isolated datacentre “Zones”:
  Effortlessly build highly-available systems which span multiple Brightbox datacentres.
• Instantly mappable Cloud IP addresses:
  Seamlessly move IPv4 addresses between your Cloud Servers and Load Balancers.
• Cloud Load Balancers:
  Balance traffic across a pool of Cloud Servers in multiple Zones,
  Highly available across a Region - designed to tolerate the loss of an entire Zone without disruption!
  Balance multiple protocols at once (HTTP, SSH, FTP etc) and handle 5000 concurrent connections comfortably (additional scaling options available soon)
• No-fuss import/export of your Cloud Server images and snapshots:
  Upload your OS images and download your snapshots as raw disk images via FTPS, Share your OS images with other Brightbox users by making them “public”.

Why not create an account now? - you don’t need to make any pre-payments and it’s easy to get started.

We also have many more exciting announcements about new features etc over the next few weeks so stay tuned!

posted 03 Oct 2011 by Jeremy Jarvis

Pricing for Brightbox Cloud (and last call for private beta)

In preparation for the official launch (more on that to follow soon), we’re announcing the close of the private beta phase of Brightbox Cloud.

We’ve had around 750 beta testers taking part in the private beta programme and we’re grateful to all those who submitted bugs, provided feature requests, and gave both postive and negative feedback. We’re also grateful to those who built web crawlers, TOR exit nodes etc and generally gave things a good hammering :)

Private beta testers get free cloud resources to play with as well as a 50% discount for the first 3 months when we “go public”. We’ll be closing private beta registration on 25 August 2011 so this is the final call: sign up for the private beta before it’s too late!

Brightbox Cloud Pricing

Now, the bit we’ve all been waiting for… I’m excited to announce provisional pricing for our new cloud offering.

Brightbox Cloud is a metered service, with resources charged by the hour or by the gigabyte. These new prices do not affect our existing unmetered Rails hosting platform – Brightbox Cloud is a completely separate platform.

Cloud servers

Cloud Servers are billed by the hour, depending on the “Server Type” which defines the RAM, disk size and CPU allocation of the server.

Load Balancers

Load Balancers are billed by the hour. Internet data in and out of Load Balancers is billed at the normal price. Each Load Balancer is highly available within a Region – designed to tolerate the loss of an entire Zone. Each Load Balancer supports multiple protocols and, at present, can handle 6000 concurrent connections (additional scaling options will be available soon to handle higher levels of traffic).

Price per load balancer instance (HA) = £0.04/hour

Cloud IPs

Cloud IPs are instantly re-mappable public IP addresses which can be mapped to any Cloud Server or Load Balancer within a Region. Each Cloud IP allocated to your account is billed by the hour. Cloud IPs can be allocated and released from your account at any time.

Price per Cloud IP allocated to account = £0.0035/hour (Free until 1 October)

Data charges

Internet data is billed by the gigabyte. Usage data is collected every minute by our billing system. Local data transfer, i.e. data transferred within the same Zone, is free-of-charge. Regional data, i.e data transferred between separate Zones, is free-of-charge until 1 Dec 2011.

Internet data (inbound) = £0.08 per GB
Internet data (outbound) = £0.12 per GB
Regional data transfer = £0.01 tbc (Free until 1 Dec 2011)

Any questions?

If you’ve got any questions about the pricing or anything else about the new cloud platform, drop us an email.

UPDATE 8 Nov 2011: We’ve extended free-of-charge usage period for CloudIPs, Regional data transfer and Image library storage until 1 Feb 2012.

posted 19 Aug 2011 by Jeremy Jarvis