I find it hard to put into words but something about their service (which I've been on the beta of) feels more "direct" than AWS. I like and use AWS (EC2 and S3) but it feels like swimming in (tasty) treacle with layer upon layer of abstraction and minor delays (how long to boot an instance sometimes..?) Brightbox has its own downsides but there's a certain immediacy and directness to it that I find hard to explain here.

Few things:

Persistent local storage (hardware raid6 15k rpm disks).

Higher performance - fast hardware and access to more cores to burst to. We also use KVM, which is substantially faster than Xen (particularly in 64bit mode).

Fast server creation - servers usually built and booted within 30 seconds.

You can map Cloud IPs directly to Load Balancers (and more mapping options coming soon!)

And as we use KVM, we already support pretty much any OS and any kernel, without any fiddling. FreeBSD works a treat, with no special support required.

And we've got loads of ace stuff in the pipeline too, so more to come!

Also, all Brightbox customers are eligible for free hugs. We're just plain nicer ;)

(full disclosure: I'm a Brightbox bod, obviously!)

No lock-in - easy to take your images and use them elsewhere.

You can also take your AWS images and run them on Eucalyptus. Amazon also has some initial support for exporting to VMWare. In any case, there will always be a certain degree of lock-in, but it should not be at the image level. You can always use something like http://bitnami.org (disclaimer, I am the author :) that allows you to share the same environment locally, as a VM or as an AMI

In what sense is there less lock in with Brightbox than with EC2? I've run EC2 images on other IaaS clouds, and it's easy to pull an image out with ec2-download-bundle.

Oh. When I tried (admittedly a while ago) I couldn't get it working elsewhere and found a few others who had the same problem.

Better reliability wouldn't be hard, and the CLI looks pretty good.

Amazon has some pretty damn amazing uptime overall. Given the number of regions that are sitting at 100% uptime (like say, all of s3) it's hard to argue that they have uptime problems.

They really do need to work on getting ebs to cold boot properly though. It seems to have a habit of biting them. (But there's a good chance that anybody else at that sort of scale would have the same sort of issues)