British cloud hosting company Brightbox Systems was launched in 2005 when it began by hosting Ruby on Rails applications on dedicated hardware. After a complete restructuring in 2011, Brightbox launched its cloud hosting service, Brightbox Cloud.
Brightbox has some big-name customers such as Sony, the BBC, and MTV. Its well-designed website is in English.
Features and Ease of Use
Brightbox provides a broad range of cloud hosting packages, which differ depending on your needs. However, all the packages have these features in common:
- SSD storage
- Cloud firewall
- Supported for all operating systems
- Brightbox Manager panel
- Auto-install SSH keys
The “Brightbox Manager” custom control panel gives you complete control of your cloud resources such as servers and load balancers. The auto-install SSH keys allow you access your Brightbox cloud server without a password, and you can enable this from the start or subsequently from the control panel. Another way to access your cloud services is programmatically via the Brightbox API.
Pricing and Support
Brightbox offers three kinds of cloud servers: Standard, RAM optimized, and Storage optimized. Brightbox’s prices are pretty high compared with standard shared hosting, but this is not standard shared hosting.
Although there is no money-back guarantee, you get some free credit at the start of your subscription, which I guess is a kind of free trial. The only accepted payment method is a credit card.
When it comes to customer support, I wasn’t entirely happy with my interaction via the live chat channel. Firstly, it appears to be unavailable much of the time. Secondly, the support agent seemed quite reluctant to answer my questions and quite keen for me to send an email instead:
I did email my questions to the designated support email address, and I received a reply the next day. They also have telephone support and a support ticket system as additional communication channels.
The Brightbox website contains detailed guides and reference documentation about all aspects of its services, including how to access its API.
