Brightbox Cloud Servers are performance-optimised virtual machines, backed by lightning-fast SSD storage that can be created on-demand in as little as 10 seconds!
Cloud Servers can be resized instantly to add RAM, CPU
and local SSD storage without rebooting.
Add flexible and highly available block storage
by attaching Volumes to your Cloud Servers
Cloud IPs are public IP addresses which can be instantly moved between Cloud Servers, Load Balancers or Cloud SQL instances.
Brightbox is a completely independent, wholly owned UK company. No staff outside of the UK have access to infrastructure and your data never leaves the UK.
Our high performance and highly available network provides each of your Cloud Servers with its own separate network segment, secure from spoofing or eavesdropping.
Brightbox Cloud firewall enables you to effortlessly manage access to, from and between your Cloud Servers. Its distributed architecture avoids the single points of failure and bottlenecks associated with many firewall solutions.
Brightbox works with any operating system. Choose one of our "official" images, import your own, or even PXE boot from the Internet!
Access to Brightbox Cloud Servers is passwordless. Simply add your SSH public key to your account and the keys are automatically added to new servers.
Cloud Servers can PXE boot from the network instead of loading the installed operating system - providing endless options for using obscure operating systems and rescuing broken servers.
Provide launch-time user data to enable customisation of your cloud servers or run cloud-init on launch.
Our browser-based graphical console enables you to connect securely to your Cloud Servers to view what is being output to screen - incredibly useful for diagnosing boot issues.
Brightbox cloud servers support native IPv6 connectivity, and can be directly accessed via IPv6 before a Cloud IP is mapped to them. Our firewall is also dual-stack.
We provide a RESTful API as well as a simple command-line interface. Our flexible OAuth-based authentication system gives you fine grained control over who has access to your account and resources.
Managing cloud server images is a breeze - simply upload your OS images and download your snapshots as raw disk images from Orbit via SFTP. Optionally share your OS images with other Brightbox users by making them "public".
Our cloud servers are on-demand, performance-optimised virtual machines, backed by our lightning-fast SSD storage and our next generation cloud network. Our cloud platform is designed from the ground up for high performance and high availability.
All our official linux cloud servers use SSH keys for logging in. When a new cloud server is created it will automatically install your SSH keys using cloud-init so that you can login securely straightaway. This is much more secure than emailing and sharing root passwords :)
We provide a number of “official” operating system images, such as Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows etc - but you’re not limited to officially supported operating systems, in fact you can use any operating system you like by importing your own images. You can even PXE boot from the network if you wish.
Actually, better than that - our Cloud IPs are “static” IPv4 addresses but they can be remapped instantly between cloud servers, load balancers and cloud sql instances. So, you never have to worry about updating DNS records and waiting for them to propagate each time you want to change something.
Yes. You can add Cloud IPs (re-mappable public IP addresses) to your account at any time and then point them at whichever cloud server you wish.
Yes. You can map as many Cloud IPs to your servers as you like.
Yes. Our Cloud IPs have a generic reverse DNS entry by default which you can replace by setting your own reverse DNS entry.
Yes, each cloud server is allocated a private IP address (i.e 10.x.x.x) by default.
We’re here to help you, so please do reach out by email or chat if you’re stuck.
Our datacentre facilities are located in Manchester, UK and are managed by Teledata UK Ltd (ISO 27001, PASF, NSI Gold Approved and BS5979).
Yes. Our cloud hosting infrastructure is built from the ground-up for high availability and so we guarantee you 100% uptime or a service credit should you experience downtime due to a problem with our infrastructure. Please see the full SLA details for more information.
Our billing system will bill you automatically at the end of your first month of service (i.e. one month after you sign up) and then on, or around, the same date each month after. You only get billed for cloud servers, load balancers etc that you have used during the month at the relevant hourly rate. In other words, you don’t have to pay upfront and you don’t have to commit to a monthly plan. Nice and easy.
When you’ve completed signup, we add a £50 credit to your account which will last for one month. You won’t be billed for any usage under £50 in your first month. You can see how much credit you have remaining from the dashboard.
We provide a fully managed distributed firewall service which enables you to control access to, from, and between your cloud servers. No more complex iptables configuration here!
Cloud servers are added to server groups, which in turn have a firewall policy which defines network access for servers in that group. When rules are changed they are instantly applied to the relevant group.
Yes, but maybe not quite how you imagine - our way is much safer :) If you want to move to a larger cloud server, you simply snapshot your existing cloud server, then build a larger one using that snapshot as the base “image” and then finally remap your Cloud IP address to point to the new server. Checkout our guide to snapshotting and upgrading your cloud servers.
Yes, please see the Managed Operations page for more details.
