Brightbox Blog
brightbox.com · Company blog · on HN since 2011
Brightbox is a UK cloud hosting company whose blog covers cloud servers, IPv6, Kubernetes with Ruby, load testing, and systemd.
What HN saysHN commenters recommend Brightbox as a good, UK-based, privately owned host for European hosting, and cite its Rubynetes posts on generating Kubernetes YAML with Ruby.
15HN people shared it
10linked it in comments
38stories submitted
424story points
1 year agolast shared
2011people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The brightbox cloud comes out of beta8 people · 9 points · first shared 2011 · 1 comments on HN
- 2Brightbox launches IPv6 for Cloud Servers2 people · 30 points · first shared 2012 · 5 comments on HN
- 3How to run open source video conferencing on Brightbox with Jitsi2 people · 4 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 4An introduction to distributed load testing with tsung2 people · 2 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 5Building a Riak Cluster On Brightbox cloud1 people · 48 points · first shared 2012 · 4 comments on HN
- 6Simple solution to host multiple HTTPS sites on the same cloud server1 people · 44 points · first shared 2012 · 29 comments on HN
- 7Rubynetes: Using OpenAPI to validate Kubernetes configs1 people · 40 points · first shared 2020 · 9 comments on HN
- 8Solving the Dining Philosophers Problem with Systemd1 people · 34 points · first shared 2024 · 10 comments on HN
- 9Brightbox vs Amazon EC2: Phoronix Ubuntu 12.04 Benchmarks1 people · 32 points · first shared 2012 · 26 comments on HN
- 10CoreOS images now on Brightbox Cloud. Build a CoreOS cluster in 5 minutes.1 people · 27 points · first shared 2013 · 6 comments on HN
- 11Brightbox launches new lower-cost cloud server tier1 people · 27 points · first shared 2013 · 11 comments on HN
- 12Brightbox announces availability of Windows servers on its cloud infrastructure1 people · 18 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 13Orbit: Our new Geo-redundant Object Store1 people · 15 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 14Distributed IPv6-ready Firewall service from Brightbox Cloud1 people · 14 points · first shared 2011 · 1 comments on HN
- 15Ubuntu Precise daily builds available on Brightbox Cloud1 people · 10 points · first shared 2012 · 3 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
thehodge · 2025-10-16
Highly recommend - https://www.brightbox.com/ for European / UK hosting
neilwilson · 2024-01-23
Obligatory reference to Rubynetes - using Ruby and rspec to generate the YAML files that k8s loves.
[0]: https://www.brightbox.com/blog/2020/02/24/rubynetes-getting-helm-manif…
[1]: https://www.brightbox.com/blog/2020/02/12/rubynetes-kubernetes-config-…
[2]: https://www.brightbox.com/blog/2020/02/17/using-openapi-to-validate-ku…
sandstrom · 2013-10-15
A few more alternatives:
- http://gandi.net
- http://brightbox.com/
- AWS S3/Cloudfront (for static sites)
- http://wordpress.com
alexrbarlow · 2013-07-05
http://brightbox.com/ is quite good. Based in England as par as I know..
mhw · 2013-04-19
http://brightbox.com/ is UK based and privately owned. I don't think they've said anything about plans to expand into the US or otherwise.
robotmay · 2013-01-28
Brightbox are a UK company with a pretty decent cloud offering: http://brightbox.com
comice · 2012-04-18
Unlike Elastic IPs, Brightbox Cloud IPs can be mapped directly to load balancers, so you can avoid the SPoF that way (load balancers are highly-available, across zones): http://brightbox.com/#load_balancers
But we also have some other upcoming features for Cloud IPs that address this in another way :)
wunki · 2012-01-17
Thank you for your work and persistence Colin! I love using FreeBSD for my servers because of the consistency and great minds behind it. I love it so much that I have written a few posts how to setup a FreeBSD server [1].
Currently there are some other options for hosting your "virtual" FreeBSD server. Some good ones are RootBSD [2] (US), Brightbox [3] (UK) and TransIP [4] (NL). Quality wise that are equally good. I'm currently using TransIP because I'm located in the Netherlands.
Interesting to note is that the above providers make use of KVM virtualization technology. Phoronix did an interesting benchmark comparing Xen, Virtualbox and KVM. It showed that KVM was the winner on compute and disk performance [5]. Would be interesting to find out how FreeBSD performance on Amazon's XEN layer.
[1] https://www.wunki.org/
[2] https://www.rootbsd.net/
[3] http://brightbox.com/
[4] https://www.transip.nl/
[5] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1110_xen…
ivanhoe · 2017-08-02
Reading this article made it much clearer to me why both locks and transactions are needed: https://www.brightbox.com/blog/2013/10/31/on-mysql-locks/
stevekemp · 2014-12-10
As you say the problem with testing from a single laptop, or desktop system, is that your outbound pipe will get saturated.
If you want to do distributed testing you can rent a couple of virtual machines from Amazon, etc, and run tsung to test from a cluster:
http://brightbox.com/blog/2014/11/07/distributed-load-testing-with-tsu…