This isn’t a classic hosting review. It’s just my notes on the pros, cons and specifics of Brixly.uk hosting provider (my affiliate link).
Update, July 2024:
Brixly was sold to Enix Ltd. Such acquisitions often result in changes in service quality (often for the worse, but not always).
Status: passive
I tested/used the service from November 2021 – to April 2022
Table Of Contents (T.O.C.):
- Who is Brixly?
- Problems starting
- Technical stuff
- Account resources – CloudLinux LVE limits
- Performance
- Technical support
- Prices
- Conclusion and recommendation
1. Who is Brixly?
No idea. Their website shows no info on which and whose servers they are using, which company provides them with bandwidth, nor who the owner is. However, my favourite sys-admin, Miguel (the owner of MyW.pt hosting) worked there for a while and I heard nothing bad about Brixly. Likewise, Ympker from LowEndSpirit forum had a good experience with Brixly.
So you could call my research: “monkey see, monkey do.” 🙂
On a more serious note: Brixly is a relatively small family-owned company from England. They’ve been in the business since 2018. Their motto is: “independent, honest and reliable.” They seem to be specialized in the reseller market, though they also offer “WordPress hosting” that looks very promising on paper (haven’t tried that).
2. Problems starting
From the very start, I had problems with signup. It got stuck, and wouldn’t take me to the payment page. I’ve tried several times, from two different browsers – no success. The guys from Brixly swear it’s never happened before.
After several attempts and support chat (very patient and willing to help), I finally tried to create an account first, and then order hosting from an existing account. That worked. Woohoo! 🙂
They are using a payment processor I hadn’t tried before (worldpay.com). After having ordered and paid for hosting, I got passwords for DirectAdmin and the payment processor in plain text emails. Of course I changed the passwords right away, though the payment processor sent the wrong instructions, so here I’m placing a link for changing those passwords.
Update, December, 2021: Brixly have changed their payment processor for a more standard and convenient one. As it should be. Sayonara worldpay.com, good riddance! 🙂
I also had a problem configuring DirectAdmin backups. Tech. support fixed that instantly. 🙂
Knowledge base and instructions require you to have enough knowledge and experience in order to figure it all out (fortunately, I have those).
Rant over, now the good stuff:
3. Technical stuff
Personal notes for the stuff that wasn’t clear enough in the knowledge base.
The customer control panel is well made. It provides a tool for an easy website or email migration to Brixly. Lovely. 🙂
SSH
Yes, SSH is available, which makes a lot of jobs easier. I’ve enabled it by enabling it for the user packages from within DirectAdmin, and by whitelisting my IP address from the hosting customer control panel.
I used DirectAdmin account username and password, with port 22.
CloudLinux, JetBackup (30-day backup retention), LiteSpeed – and all the other standard bells and whistles are there. Cool.
No Redis or Memcached – perhaps with a good reason (see this LowEndTalk forum discussion, starting from the linked post). Having said that, Redis does improve WordPress performance to a degree – but see chapter 5. 🙂
4. Account resources – CloudLinux LVE limits
- vCPU: 2 “cores” (200%)
- I/O: 50 MB/s
- IOPS: 1024
- Entry processes: 30
- Total processes: 100
- RAM: 2 GB
Roughly double the industry standard in terms of CPU and even RAM. Sweet. 🙂
Another super-neat thing is that for about $7 per month, per one DirectAdmin sub-account, you can get double RAM, Entry processes and vCPU. This is practical because you can host more resource-demanding sites under your reseller account for easier management (not having to order separate high-resource shared hosting accounts).
5. Performance
This all looks good on paper, but what about the “real-world” usage? Well, Brixly is faster than HostMantis! Which makes it officially the fastest reseller hosting I’ve used.
For anyone interested, these are my hosting performance testing methods.
Stability? Here are my uptime stats, where you can see for yourself.
Security? As far as I could tell, quite good.
Update, March 2022:
November and January uptime was 100%.
December was 99.97% (one 7-minute downtime).
In February, there were two short outages, and one lasting for several hours because SSL/TLS certificate auto renewal hadn’t worked. See the next chapter below for more details.
6. Technical support
They’re Brits, so what could I expect? Polite, competent, and riding on the wrong side of the road.
They respond quickly, solve problems, without an attitude that makes you feel like a client #490293.
Update, March 2022:
In February, SSL/TLS auto-renewal didn’t work. Tech. support says that’s because I’m using Cloudflare. I let them know that the auto-renewal works with Cloudflare for other providers whose services I’ve used and/or am still using – both with DirectAdmin and cPanel reseller hosting.
Manual renewal works, but that’s an extra hassle and far from convenient if hosting several websites.
For now, it’s “resolved” by the tech. support suggesting I configure Cloudflare to accept any certificate, not just the publicly trusted ones (for details, see the article about asymmetric encryption). Without going into many details, I don’t think this is a very good idea for any web-shops or similar sites that handle sensitive user data. So the solution would be to not use Cloudflare proxy, with all the pros and cons of that choice (Cloudflare DNS would still work, of course).
7. Prices
The prices are low. See for yourself on their website (using my affiliate link 🙂 ).
If the performance and stability remain as good (I’ll know in a few months’ time), $14 per month for reseller hosting is cheap. Other hosting packages are also quite affordable.
8. Conclusion and recommendation
I’m very happy for now – top class service at a bargain price. Still, I’ll give it a few more months before making any “final conclusions” – and of course, I’ll keep updating this article for as long as I’m using the service, as is the case with all of my hosting reviews.
This website is now hosted with Brixly (see the update below), and if all is OK, in 2022, I could start slowly moving the other sites over. 🙂
Update, March 2022:
After the auto SSL/TLS certificate renewal problems, and the way they’ve been handled (see chapter 6 for more details), I’ve decided to cancel my Brixly subscription.
Brixly is far from bad, but it seems that HostMantis, with all the pros and cons, have set some hard to beat standards in terms of performance, stability and flexibility.
Update July 2022:
HostMantis was sold and quality is worse – I now use & recommend MDDHosting.
Update, July 2024:
Brixly got sold to Enix and the quality is not great according to customer feedback on the LES forum.
According to Marx, capital has the tendency for concentration and centralization in the hands of the richest capitalists.
It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish.
In terms of resources available per one reseller hosting sub-account, Brixly is unmatched, yet very affordable. But, the way things are now, I prefer providers where SSL/TLS auto-renewals work fine, even with Cloudflare set up properly.
Does this mean Brixly is a bad provider? Not by a long shot! It only means that for me there are better options – and this article (as most articles on this website) is primarily intended as my personal reference. As far as I’m concerned, Brixly remains the best alternative for hosting several resource-hungry websites on a budget (offering unmatched high-resource reseller hosting). However, HostMantis and Veerotech seem a bit more reliable, I must say (though with a lot more limited reseller hosting resources).
Now is the time to add my affiliate link again – yachts won’t pay for themselves! 🙂
