Still, there is the advantage of simplicity not having to deal with the web console etc. Some people may enjoy this
A suspended machine only costs its disk usage to the hoster. You can have 800 of them on a machine with 4TB SSD. You can't say the same for VPS at all.
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.
And the big benefit of a remote box is that you can offload long running tasks to it.
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...
Can then spawn a new instance from the snapshot and it should unhibernate
Whether the OS will like that... That's another point. As there will be things that change like smbios etc
Does anyone have a legit use-case when it would be actually nicer to use this on-demand type of service? (Once more, unless we are talking some serious on-demand hardware.)
Other than those points, offering access to more powerful hardware is probably the best use-case.
I really need to share a blog post on doing this exact thing with a VPS, 2 commands to install and setup lxd.
And then client side bash function to just make and connect via tmux and delete when you're done.
Self hosting these services is too easy to do and you can have more control of your data and better specs.
As far as self-hosting goes, it looks like there are some FOSS projects now, eg https://containerssh.io/
Work in progress/alpha, but the core functionality works as a proof of concept. Super exciting working on this kind of stuff.
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
Also If you ever want to chat about ssh feel free to reach out!
ssh shellbox.dev keepalive box1
But I suspect that spam and abuse means that becoming an SMS customer is going to have to be complex. Though just the ability to automate SMS msgs to a few pre-defined and verified numbers would be valuable and negate spam risk.
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
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
As an aside, you should use ssh-audit to get recommendations for what to disable as far as less than ideal options/configs go.
Why isn't SFTP supported?
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.
Don't underestimate the benefit of it doing international VAT collection and payment. Especially for small amounts.
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.