[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...

[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.

[comice]

(Brightboxer here!) Brightbox also have IPv6, own AS+network+peering, been around years (2007), managed services, live migration, KVM (with virtio), and 15k SAS disks as standard.

Bytemark do indeed have more granular server specs, but Brightbox have snapshots, load balancing, distributed firewall, cloud ips, multiple zones (in geographically separate datacenters), ec2 compatibility.

Flexibility means different things to different users.

[oceanician]

I'm glad that both of these companies exist and offer globally competitive hosting, and are both local to myself.

Can either offer a service where you can create a new server setup with a RoR / Db setup from an image though?

I mostly use Heroku until I have users these days, but I do think there's maybe a trick in offering mirroring of the heroku functionality from the cmd line :)

Keep up the great work.

[neilwilson]

It's fairly straightforward on the Brightbox cloud. You get the server to where you want it and then create a 'snapshot'.

You can then create new servers from that snapshot as required.

[oceanician]

Perhaps there's public snapshots that you can start with?

[andatche]

Brightbox also operates its own AS, has offered IPv6 from the beginning and uses KVM with virtio, not Xen for Brightbox Cloud.