$36/mo for 2/4/50 VPS without public IP... Ok, I get the idea that the service is for non-regular use, but I think even $0.005 per hour ($3.6/mo) of suspended state is too expensive. The same config in Hetzner is just $4.09/mo for 24/7 working VPS with public IPv4 address
Have fun racing to the bottom. If I can get an unsuspended VM at 5$ a month, the suspendable one has to be significantly faster or significantly cheaper. Then again, take my gnawing with a boulder of salt for I will not be a customer. I have my own server that is running 24/7 already.
Yeah this is a cool idea but the pricing is way too high. For anything I would use this for I could just set up any VPS from any provider for cheaper and it’s stateful in the sense that it’s my own VPS and my files/applications/tmux sessions/whatever will be there the next time I SSH in.
The UX here seems really nice, but after spending a couple minutes setting up the VPS, I essentially get the same UX (aka just ssh in and so stuff).
I’d potentially be willing to pay some premium over a standard VPS, but certainly not a 10x premium…honestly probably not even 2x.
Sort of, but maybe not quite? When you spin up an EC2 spot instance, it's a fresh instance with whatever AMI you load into it, and it's a fresh boot at that time. (You can save persistent data to an EBS volume that you create once up front and then attach to each new instance, of course.)
With this service, it seems like the VM underpinning your session is suspended (like as if you were to suspend-to-RAM or hibernate your laptop), and then resumed the next time you sign in, so not only is the filesystem in the same state as it was during your last session, but any background processes that have spun up since then are resumed as well, and are still running.
Love this idea! Started building a version of it a while ago, but gave up because my resume time was too slow
My job has their own DCs, but inexplicably hosts devboxes in EC2 - an autosuspend feature for cost savings sounds awesome.
Feature request: let me give you a Dropbox folder to persist/load my suspended vms from/to, that way i dont get charged for storage when not using it, and i can walk away whenever i want
This is fascinating idea. I created an idea like this on top of firecracker and custom golang ssh client to build something like this for my own personal use case (the abstraction part of pricing and how to connect it seemed the more difficult part for me atleast)
What stack does this use underneath?
Good luck with launch, this idea is similar to railway in terms of pricing model. I discussed about it a few comments back and I think its an interesting idea and we are seeing alternatives within such pricing model
Also are you using some cloud provider itself or building it yourself, I'd be interested in so many details to discover
Have a nice day and looking forward to ya response! Good luck with your project!
This is all written in python and the AsyncSSH package. Firecracker for VMs with memory mapped files for ram. Paddle for billing. Caddy as a reverse proxy for certificates.
It works on top of very large bare metal instances.
I'm thinking maybe open sourcing but it will take some more work on the code to make it publishable w/o embarrassing myself :)
I am interested in which bare metal instances from which provider are you using if I may ask since I had a similar idea (as mentioned before) and I wanted to deploy it on hetzner but I was always worried that hetzner's policy might be too harsh for it even though they are one of the cheapest options out there
Which server provider did you end up using?
Thanks once again for your in depth response, these are the things I come to hackernews for! cheers and looking to ya response
Hm I had thought the same! Interesting thanks for responding once again but what are your thoughts on the fact that someone can abuse the situation and your account might get banned and hetzner has a pretty strict policy in that
When I wished to create something as such, this was the most major thing I was worried about. I am curious what your thoughts are on it and how are you managing it (the fact that anyone might abuse in your service which could then impact you and hetzner relations and they might block/restrict you)
I have heard that hetzner requires you to respond in hours or similar. Like I am interested, did you talk to hetzner people (they are usually very kind and I love that about them) or not, because I remember asking some question to that in similar vein but I had gotten the answer that I am still responsible for what happens downstreams and that worried me
Do you do something similar to the modifications codesandbox has done to firecracker, regarding mmap ram? (They have multiple blogposts about it on their blog)
Trying to use any of the commands in the home page, I just see "hugo@shellbox.dev: Permission denied (publickey).". Clearly I have to register first, but there's no clue as to how.
Pretty sure shellbox.dev has been around for at least 2-3 years though - EDIT nm they have a show HN from two days ago. I must be thinking of a similarly named/sounding service
Not sure about the security sandbox, but given that paddle.com (your payment provider) takes 5% cut you could consider accepting lightning (bitcoin layer2) payments. QR code generation for lightning invoice is instantaneous just as payment, and will cost less than 0.1% fee (payer pays fee anyway). But the security sandbox should be solid, else it will be used for illegal stuff.
Not really. I mean, I guess the lightning stuff makes it settle/confirm faster than doing an on-chain transaction, but bitcoin as a store of value is still essentially gambling. So you'd want to immediately sell it and convert it to USD (or a stable coin, I guess), and presumably you're incurring fees at whatever exchange you're using.
5% for paddle does sound like it kinda sucks, but I feel like any lower fee you'd end up paying with bitcoin would get eaten up by complexity, annoyance, and currency conversion risk.
I've been trying to come up with a hypothetical use case for this. I can't use this as a server without keeping an active session right? I wonder if you could get around this by sshing into itself from inside the primary session. Is that an edge case you've considered?
Maybe this and other future extended features could be configured via some host-accessible mounted conf.d? Otherwise if I forget to use that command on every login, I might just forget, logout, and go on thinking my server is still running.
Weird fun fact (as an Argentinian who went to school in England for a few years): in English-speaking countries, America is not a continent in the same way as in Spanish. In English they have two continents: South America and North America.
So the word "American" in English does not mean the same as "Americano" in Spanish.
There's really no natural word in English to refer to someone from "El continente Americano", because no such continent exists in English. That's why they use the word "American" to refer to someone from USA exclusively.
But why? Genuinely want to know what one might use this for. I can imagine it would be cool for a remote dev environment but the selling point would have to be that it’s far cheaper than the alternative.
Still, there is the advantage of simplicity not having to deal with the web console etc. Some people may enjoy this
The UX here seems really nice, but after spending a couple minutes setting up the VPS, I essentially get the same UX (aka just ssh in and so stuff).
I’d potentially be willing to pay some premium over a standard VPS, but certainly not a 10x premium…honestly probably not even 2x.
With this service, it seems like the VM underpinning your session is suspended (like as if you were to suspend-to-RAM or hibernate your laptop), and then resumed the next time you sign in, so not only is the filesystem in the same state as it was during your last session, but any background processes that have spun up since then are resumed as well, and are still running.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Hibernat...
My job has their own DCs, but inexplicably hosts devboxes in EC2 - an autosuspend feature for cost savings sounds awesome.
Feature request: let me give you a Dropbox folder to persist/load my suspended vms from/to, that way i dont get charged for storage when not using it, and i can walk away whenever i want
What stack does this use underneath?
Good luck with launch, this idea is similar to railway in terms of pricing model. I discussed about it a few comments back and I think its an interesting idea and we are seeing alternatives within such pricing model
Also are you using some cloud provider itself or building it yourself, I'd be interested in so many details to discover
Have a nice day and looking forward to ya response! Good luck with your project!
This is all written in python and the AsyncSSH package. Firecracker for VMs with memory mapped files for ram. Paddle for billing. Caddy as a reverse proxy for certificates.
It works on top of very large bare metal instances.
I'm thinking maybe open sourcing but it will take some more work on the code to make it publishable w/o embarrassing myself :)
I am interested in which bare metal instances from which provider are you using if I may ask since I had a similar idea (as mentioned before) and I wanted to deploy it on hetzner but I was always worried that hetzner's policy might be too harsh for it even though they are one of the cheapest options out there
Which server provider did you end up using?
Thanks once again for your in depth response, these are the things I come to hackernews for! cheers and looking to ya response
When I wished to create something as such, this was the most major thing I was worried about. I am curious what your thoughts are on it and how are you managing it (the fact that anyone might abuse in your service which could then impact you and hetzner relations and they might block/restrict you)
I have heard that hetzner requires you to respond in hours or similar. Like I am interested, did you talk to hetzner people (they are usually very kind and I love that about them) or not, because I remember asking some question to that in similar vein but I had gotten the answer that I am still responsible for what happens downstreams and that worried me
Would love to chat about details there
Trying to use any of the commands in the home page, I just see "hugo@shellbox.dev: Permission denied (publickey).". Clearly I have to register first, but there's no clue as to how.
ssh-keygen -t ed25519
uh? i lost interest in bitcoin a few years ago, did bitcoin get actually usable for payments ?
5% for paddle does sound like it kinda sucks, but I feel like any lower fee you'd end up paying with bitcoin would get eaten up by complexity, annoyance, and currency conversion risk.
ssh shellbox.dev keepalive box1
Why isn't SFTP supported?
So the word "American" in English does not mean the same as "Americano" in Spanish.
There's really no natural word in English to refer to someone from "El continente Americano", because no such continent exists in English. That's why they use the word "American" to refer to someone from USA exclusively.