We recently previewed some upcoming changes to how users interact with Brightbox accounts. This feature will be going live at 12:00 GMT on Weds 17 Feb and since it represents a change in behaviour for existing customers, I’ve summarised the details below.

We’ve just pushed some updates to the MySQL slow query warning interface in the Brightbox control panel, which includes two main improvements.

Firstly, where the same (or very similar) query occurs more than once, they are aggregated together rather than being recorded as individual slow queries. The user interface displays the count so you can see exactly how many times this slow query occurred in the last 7 days.

Secondly, the full SQL query is now displayed, so customers now have more information with which to optimise their applications.

Over the last few months, we’ve been seeing increasing number of requests about our SLA (Service Level Agreement) – do we have one? if not then why not? and so on.

We’ve been reasonably resistant to publishing an SLA until now, not because of doubts over our infrastructure or ability to deliver, but because of the minimal value we felt it would add for customers in the event of actual downtime. We’re a pragmatic bunch at Brightbox and like to avoid adding things just for the sake of it or “because everyone else does” :)

The Phusion team released Passenger 2.2.9 today, which adds support for Rails 3, the GEM bundler, and fixes a couple of bugs.  As usual Brightbox are providing Ubuntu Hardy packages for i386 and AMD64 architectures, available now from the Brightbox apt repository.