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Suggestion, after the server successfully created, show the command that they can execute to access the server (ssh root@<ip>, with <ip> being replaced with the real ip).

We've had several people suggest making this more prevalent and it's on our todo list :)

I haven't used your service yet, but if I understand the limitation correctly (only github logins/only one server per login) I think it should also be possible to automatically derive a subdomain name from the github username and have that point to the server. Not sure if that's a good idea, just throwing an idea over the wall :-)

This is a pretty cool service! I have had my moments when I had to set up the AWS free tier a few hours before a very important client meeting.

I have this gut feeling that this service will make the cloud technology a bit more accessible for a budding to medium skilled developer.

Personally, I have hesitated a lot to try out AWS and other cloud services at college due to the "over billing nightmare" you have every time you sign up with the credit card. This is particularly an issue at the part of the world I come from. Hopefully, this will bring down that barrier and bring more college students in to experimenting with the cloud tech.

Also, considering the way client meetings getting rescheduled in many cases might help you in generating a lot of cash. ;) (If they haven't created it to restore state in their yaml or bash user-data script, of course!)

> the part of the world I come from

Just curious, is a $5/month DO server cost prohibitive in your neck of the woods?

Pretty sure he is talking about the people that got hacked (with 2 factor on) and had their acc used to mine bitcoins. I remember reading about that twice one or two years ago

Or maybe even less nefarious reports about people accidently ordering a bigger machine and forgetting about it until the month is over. Can result in 1+k bill as well.

Or the most talked about problem. Downloading something from the glacier.

They're mostly avoidable problems. And they still terrify people with little income

There are quite a lot of cases where you could find yourself facing a large bill unexpectedly. Forgetting about a server you spun up to try something out, with may platforms having your server hacked (or even DDoSed) could result in huge bills for bandwidth. With Dply you only pay what you pay up-front if you choose to add time to a server. There are no bills racking up. The flip side is that if you forget about it, it could vanish on you. Automating your deployment with something like a user-data script that pulls your code from Github would make this less of a concern. Permanent services on Dply are certainly possible but not the primary use case for most users.

It's definitely a worry, but to their credit AWS at least are pretty nice about accidentally racking up a big bill. Last month I forgot to shut down a GPU instance I'd been experimenting with on my personal account and got hit with $150 I hadn't been expecting, but on explaining the situation to support they cancelled the bill from the previous month and applied a credit to my account to cover the time it had been active this month. I'm going to guess that's a one time thing, but the gesture was very much appreciated.

I like the simplicity, well done for getting this up and running!

Please be more open about the pricing though. When the service costs are not upfront and are buried in the FAQs, I lose trust in the service.

Every real customer of yours will want to know what it costs. Have a simple pricing page at the very least, and link to it from the standard 'how does this work?' and other places. Just saying that you can pay $2 to keep your server running longer is not good enough.

A great suggestion. We've received quite a few suggestions for improvement. As the MVP/First beta we aimed for absolute simplicity in the design and implementation as it's easier to add things than take them away. The homepage and informational sections of the site will receive some improvements over time as we get more feedback like this.

It's cool project. Well done! OP

This is my first try: I tested to create a "dply" button on https://dply.co/button. I tried not to fill out the form and clicked "CREATE BUTTON". The page replied with errors and their trace. SQL statements and other Ruby keywords were shown.

I think it would be better if there is an error handler, like a warning that form is not filled out completely.

We found an issue where the stacktrace was originally enabled in our code twice so when it was switched off it was being overridden. That's been fixed. Adding better form validation for the button creation form is also on our list. Our primary focus as we receive bug reports is on issues that directly affect server creation, deletion and billing as those are the highest impact. Since the button form just creates a shortlink and saves some text it's a lower priority but we should have significant improvements in place for that page in the next week or so.

The server name field might be better suited to be a white box like the rest of the options after you click New Server. Nice idea. Might want to have some kind of vetting of accounts if it gets bigger.

Strongly agree. I missed the server name field and got an error about the syntax for server names instead of 'you didn't enter a server name' error. Field should be visually similar to the other fields.

Same here

Agreed, I completely missed the server name field. Scanned over it thinking it was a horizontal line with a label below and didn't bother to read it.

That's a pretty cool service, I think I can use that for a github project of mine.

You should consider adding a "shutdown and delete" button to get rid of VMs when your users are done with them.

We'll be adding an "expire now" option for servers on the free plan this weekend :)

We've rolled out an initial version of the "expire now" functionality. Click the [X] in the top right of any free server's box in the dashboard and you'll be taken to a confirmation page letting you expire the server's remaining time immediately

> credit card or bitcoin

Thank you for allowing Bitcoin. Many people don't have a credit card (everyone who has one gets it only because all the American companies require it, but I never needed one in the Netherlands or Germany, the two countries I have experience with).

You're welcome. Thanks to Stripe there was no extra work required on our end to accept Credit card, bitcoin and alipay. We hope to keep all these options around. There are concerns about having a bitcoin option leading to more abuse so we'll be gathering data over the coming weeks and hopefully the measures we're taking to prevent abuse will allow us to continue to offer the Bitcoin option.

Can I make another free server immediately afterwards?

What's your anti-abuse policy/process?

As a free service we will pretty strictly enforce abuse reports and take action on them. We're using a few methods to profile users based on their github account/ssh key and other factors to block abusers once their identified. Dply servers are blocked from using SMTP ports to prevent spam.

Yes. You can create another server once the first expires but automating this process is not allowed and therefore we do not provide an API.

What constitutes abuse? I imagine certain applications that would be fine with the server going up and down every 2 hours. That would effectively mean that they would have free service indefinitely. For example, a Tor bridge.

Shhhh, you're gonna ruin it for everybody else!

We were all thinking it.

Or bitcoin miners

You would mine maybe 1 penny per day. Not worth the click.

....that's not how fraud works.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7490766

Just google aws bitcoin mining abuse and see what happens when shitty people have access to free servers.

Pretty sure it only makes sense when you can spin up AWS GPU instances, which you probably cannot do here.

When there are no costs, it makes sense spin up anything. You literally can't lose. It's just opportunity costs at that point.

Unless you missed the no API part. If it takes a person 5 clicks to launch an instance, the reward has to pay for the cost.

Why aren't people using AWS free tier to Bitcoin mine?

Seems a bad prop.

I am sure that some people did try to use the free tier, and that AWS probably has some decent controls in place to monitor for this type of activity. They are also a MASSIVE company that can absorb loss much easier than a startup. [1]

As far as the API goes, I don't know if you're aware of how hacking works, but not having an api has protected exactly no one ever. Calling your application secure because "it has a button, not an API" is completely absurd. [2]

As far as costs, you understand that people do thousands of tasks on mechanic turk for pennies right? 5 clicks to make a penny or two isn't out of the question, EVEN WITHOUT AUTOMATION, when the cost for living in some parts of the world is egregiously low. [3]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6818015

[2] http://www.seleniumhq.org/docs/01_introducing_selenium.jsp

[3] http://online-job-work.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/mechan...

> As far as costs, you understand that people do thousands of tasks on mechanic turk for pennies right?

You still have to invest either your time or hire someone to set things up for the mechanical turk setup - the opportunity cost you pointed out earlier. And pennies per turk isn't worth it if your ROI is micropennies per turk. Depending on how much friction there is, it may be cheaper to trick your turks into running the bitcoin miner on their own computers.

Not saying there's no potential for abuse - as you say, there is - but saying there's "no costs" and that "You literally can't lose" is about as accurate as saying there's "no profits" and that "You literally can't win". Unless CPU bitcoin mining is wildly more profitable than my understanding, given that you're competing against GPU and ASIC miners.

Maybe one of the alt-currencies that are supposedly harder to GPU mine...?

> Unless you missed the no API part. If it takes a person 5 clicks to launch an instance,

Or screen scraping. That's still a thing.

Yah. Except this is writing a script to mayyybbbbeee make a penny.

I understand hacking. I think this entire project is dead on arrival because it has no business value. He is offering to save me 2 cents at digital ocean and maybe profit if I pay 2x the DO price for a VM with less features. That is why this is a dead product.

Wringing your hands about being hacked to make $0.25 Bitcoin mining? That that is not the problem here.

Yup. The way Dply works makes it a bad value prop for abusers. It's also not the best option for someone who would be better served going with DO directly or running a permanent service. Where we think Dply shines is with the button https://dply.co/button which makes it easy for OSS projects and others to let people try out their services at no cost and without a high barrier to entry. If I am reading the readme.md of a project on Github and there is a button to let me deploy an instance of it and try it out on a real server for free I'd be tempted to click it. If 2 hours isn't enough I might add more time. Each paid server covers the cost of a lot of free ones.

Having the ability to add more time with Bitcoin or Alipay is also a plus for some people.

You can likely use curl in a script to do it.

In general abuse is anything that is illegal under US law, causes a disruption of service or is otherwise disruptive to our ability to run the service. As far as our TOS goes, if we say it's abuse, it is. We will be very strict in our enforcement. We're hoping that backend procedures and processes we have in place will help us to profile abusers and prevent them from using the services as our goal is to prevent abuse while making the barrier to getting started as low as possible for legitimate users.

A tor bridge/relay might not be an issue but TOR exit nodes will almost certainly result in abuse complaints and action being taken.

Are you saying one can / can't spin up a free two-hour server more than once?

Let me quote the parent post:

> Yes.

Thanks for pointing out that I should be clearer.

Really what I was seeking is to clarify the ambiguity in the parent post's "yes but sometimes no" answer.

Presumably the creator has some limitation in mind such as one user can only spin up so many free 2-hour boxes per 24-hour period, 30-day period, etc. I don't think this was answered clearly as the current answer does not define any limitations which is presumably not reality or it would be abused.

Right now you can have one free server at any time. There is no daily limit currently.

We do not provide an API and automating server creation is a violation of our TOS and would be considered abuse.

When you need a server and can log in and fill out the form, you can create one :)

FYI, small typo on https://dply.co/how - "it's" should be "its".

Also on https://dply.co/help/sshkey there's mention of "pubic" key instead of a public key.

Or it signifies the beginning of key-authenticated intercourse. Just saying...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chastity_belt

Haha.. ok that one is hilarious.. and it's been fixed (the typo that is)

Looks cool, I hope it works out for you!

First impressions: From the sub-pages ("how it works" etc) you should add clearer links to the start page/maybe add a login button on those as well?

You should have some info about who you/your company are if you want people to maybe give you money (maybe that's even legally required)

Great feedback. The goal was to keep things as clean and basic as possible but the site itself will continue to be improved as we learn more about how people use the service.

Love this. I shall have all kinds of fun destroying various linux distros without a care in the world for the consequences. Looking forward to seeing where you go with this. I understand your reservations about building an API but is something I'll look forward to playing with when/if you do eventually provide one! Good luck with the project, I'll be watching this one closely.

how will you deal with abuse? scripts to just spin and mine bit coin etc. cool project!

This initial release is designed to test two things.

1.) Our abuse processes. The goal in this area is to both be very strict in preventing abuse while trying to do so with as little inconvenience for legitimate users as possible and

2.) Testing the ROI. Cloud servers are really inexpensive for short periods and we will be testing conversion rates to see if the project can be self-sustaining through the added time model.

At the point someone's wanting something for a month, why wouldn't they go pay $5 to DigitalOcean, vs. $10 to you?

Why wouldn't Dply just become a DigitalOcean reseller and only cost $5?

I could definately see this working out as a customer aquistion channel for DO, eith Dply getting a referral fee.

Because he works for AWS :D. But ditto for AWS

Actually, I work for DO :) But Dply is not a DO project or product. It's my personal side-project and while I have DO's blessing to run it, it's otherwise unrelated and acts like any other DO customer reselling or running an SaaS.

Automatic deletion, the built in user-data button system and our acceptance of Bitcoin and Alipay provide options that DO itself currently does not offer.

This is the MVP/Initial Beta of Dply and we're hoping to learn a lot from it. One thing we are testing is whether we'll see high enough conversion rates by users adding time to their servers to cover the costs of the free servers and hopefully make a profit. Acting as a DO referrer is a backup option that could add credit to the platform to help cover costs if the current model proves unsustainable.

My bad!

I can see the potential for this in the following scenario:

People start using it to showcase the service/software by clicking on a button on GitHub.

Or imagine yet: going to the docker hub, clicking on a button, and getting a server with that up and running.

This might be huge. Providing support for an image with docker and allowing one to use docker compose or the such seems the way to go here.

If this post doesn't reach some of the projects with more potential, you should try to reach out to them yourself.

Nobody's gonna mine bitcoin on a machine with half a gigabyte of RAM and 1 CPU.

Doesn't mean nobody is going to try...

Excellent project! I wish I had this kind of service available a few years ago.

Minor question: are the servers configured for IPv4 only?

Right now they are but if there is enough interest we could enable ipv6 in an update in the near future.

Awesome service! I've been testing it hard these days and I'm very pleased. One small request, could you allow changing the ssh port to 443 from the web?

Done! https://dply.co/b/MBKBIJqE

something that would be awesome is if there was a command line tool to spin one up & it'd have a ticking timer to let me know how much time is left.

I agree with this. It would be much better to annoy users with constant "time remaining" notifications than to unexpectedly delete everything when the time expires. This would also function as an up-sell promotion, a literally "limited time offer" to extend the server's life. I'm not sure it's feasible, but what if you also added a command within the instance to extend its life to the next tier?

Cool idea, I love it. Solves all of the probs you mentioned. I'm going to try it out and see how it works for me. Thanks.

Thanks a lot, this service looks really useful.

Would it be possible to offer a LAMP install for two hours?

This is already possible. They support Cloud-init: https://dply.co/help/cloud-init

Ah, didn't read closely enough. Thank You.