

Brightbox launches new lower-cost cloud server tier - jeremyjarvis
http://brightbox.com/blog/2013/09/11/new-standard-cloud-server-tier/

======
caiusdurling
(Full disclosure: I'm a former employee, still have personal servers as a
customer.)

Awesome news, still find the service provides more than other UK/EU providers.
(I don't use US providers personally mostly because of the added ping times.)

Having things like the cloud firewall & being able to migrate an IP from one
server to another _instantly_ just makes life so much easier. Said services
being cheaper is only going to make my wallet happier :-)

------
harrytuttle
[http://bigv.io/](http://bigv.io/)

Cheaper, better, waaaay more flexible, entirely UK based (this might be a
good/bad thing depending on where you are)

~~~
jeremyjarvis
better and waaaay more flexible how? genuine question.

~~~
harrytuttle
Bigger VMs (180Gb, 16 cores, 8 discs up to 16TiB storage), better basic VM
spec, graded discs (guaranteed SATA, archive, SAS, SSD), much cheaper basic
data included, live migration, integration with their dedicated servers,
managed service, generally cheaper, been around years (as bytemark.co.uk), own
DC, own Internet AS + network and peering, IPv6.

Ok and they use KVM instead of Xen with virtio drivers.

Paper about their systems: [http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2012/12/Design...](http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2012/12/DesignAndImplementationOfBigV.pdf)

~~~
petercooper
I'm a fan of both companies and think Brightbox and Bytemark are probably the
two best British providers in this space (and a bonus they're both northern!
:-)) BigV is a far newer product though and BB also has many of the features
you mention (IPv6 and 'been around years' for starters).

What I'm interested in though is KVM now generally considered better than Xen?
When I last looked into it a few years ago, there wasn't much in it and KVM
had some key disadvantages. Is KVM now distinctly better than Xen as I'm
admittedly inferring from your comparison?

~~~
mattbee
BigV has been running since 2011, it's only months younger, but built on
expertise from our old VM platform that's 10 years older.

Xen and KVM both drew from the same code, i.e. qemu, but qemu now has all the
important patches from KVM, and has featured paravirtualised I/O for years.

So I don't think the choice or virtualiser is fundamental to how you build a
hosting platform any more - we could have built BigV on top of Hyper-V if we
were masochistic enough ;-) and it would look the same from the outside.

One main difference between our platforms is that our storage is decoupled
(but not very far) from the CPU, so you can attach up to 8 discs of different
grades to your virtual machine. We can also live-migrate running machines, and
running discs to keep things running, rather than just carving up individual
boxes, discs & all, in our old VPS model.

