FAQs

Can I load balance traffic across several Brightboxes?

Yes – we provide a Load Balancing service which provides a simple yet powerful solution to distribute traffic across two or more Brightboxes – providing both high performance and high availability from just £19/month.

The Brightbox load balancers perform a health check every few seconds on each of your Brightboxes. Should one of your Brightboxes become unavailable, it is taken out of the pool until it becomes available again.

How do I upgrade a Brightbox?

Simply login to your account and click the “Upgrade” link next to the machine you wish to upgrade. You can then choose the option you wish to upgrade to (e.g Brightbox 2GB). You’ll be charged a pro-rata amount to cover the period until your next billing date, at which point you’ll start to pay the regular price for the new product.

Upgrading is non-destructive, you just need to reboot your machine (at your convenience) to pick up the new disk quota.

How many Rails apps can I host?

We don’t impose any limits on the number of apps you can host on your Brightboxes. How many apps you can comfortably host on one Brightbox depends on how busy or resource intensive they are. Using Passenger together with Ruby Enterprise Edition will normally make the best use of your RAM resources.

Do I need to be a Sys Admin to use Brightbox?

Not necessarily, but a Brightbox is a self-managed server (unless you opt for Gold Support) so we do suggest customers have at least a basic understanding of linux server administration.

What stuff can I install/run on my Brightbox?

Pretty much whatever you want – you have root access to your Brightbox, so you’re in control. Subject, of course, to the Acceptable Use Policy :)

How are Virtual Server resources fixed?

Each Brightbox has a dedicated amount of RAM (256,512,1024 or 2048MB) and a percentage of total CPU usage (proportional to the RAM size), so a 512 box has twice the scheduled amount of CPU usage of a 256 box. CPU usage is also burstable up to around 95% of the total CPU of the host server.

Do you offer support and consultancy services?

Yes, please check out our Professional Support section for more information.

How does billing work?

You can choose to be billed on a monthly or yearly basis. Yearly purchases are discounted so that you only pay for 10 months to get a whole years service.

How many MySQL databases do I get?

We don’t limit the number of databases you can create (within reason). Instead, each Brightbox comes with a number of connections to our managed MySQL servers (1 mongrel = 1 MySQL connection).

Do you have reseller or referral programme?

Yes, we have an affiliate program which pays out a generous one-off payment per sale (between £39 and £199). If you’re interested in reselling our services, please get in touch

What if I go over my bandwidth quota?

If you occasionally go slightly over your bandwidth quota that’s not a problem. If you exceed your quota considerably, then you’ll be charged £5 +vat per 5 gigabytes (or part of) for traffic in excess of your quota at the time of billing.