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Comment by freemint | Hacker News Reader

I find the pricing structure surprisingly similar to Hetzner Cloud. There are the same RAM and CPU core tiers running the same AMD EPYC 2nd Gen (one to one and onto mapping).

Except prices for storage is almost double. And hourly costs are higher which is kinda hidden by not assuming 24/7 operation compared to Hetzners monthly pricing. You will pay less with Hetzner as they also offer hourly billing.

More smoking guns, while moonhome.io is hosted by Amazon both app.moonhome.io and alpha.moonhome.io (shared by the founder on Twitter) resolve to 78.47.78.87 which is static.87.78.47.78.clients.your-server.de which is an Hetzner IP. [1]

For my own legal safety i am not claiming that this service is just reselling Hetzner Cloud. Just that i found a lot of things that convinced me that that could be reselling Hetzner Cloud. Same disclaimer applies to all comments i made in this thread.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20211014004453/https://mxtoolbox...

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> More smoking guns

What is your agenda? What do you have against this guy and his service he's offering? You have other comments that seem negative toward this service or its creator.

Heroku is "just the Amazon cloud", but at a higher price. Of course it offers additional features which some people find beneficial enough to justify the higher price compared to bare AWS.

Likewise, if MoonHome is providing attractive extra features (simplicity, turnkey) on top of Hetzner, then shouldn't it charge more than Hetzner?

In my experience, Hetzner is a great foundation to build on if you're happy with Frankfurt/Helsinki being your endpoints. So this is a plus to me.

Perhaps I'm missing something from the home page, but which additional features does it offer exactly? Automatic system updates, which is possible to do with just normal linux distributions anyway?

I mean it says "MoonHome is not a browser-based cloud IDE. You get full access to a remote server over SSH.". So you get ssh access, just like you would with a VPS.

All I see on the main page as far as technical functionality goes is just VPS features phrased differently.

From what I've read on the main page plus some of the documentation pages is that it gives you

- preconfigured dev environment with some tools already installed (using asdf, which is easy to add more tools with)

- preconfigured firewall (which of course is easy to do yourself, but it's done already)

- instructions on how to do some of the ssh tunneling things necessary to connect your local apps/tools with the remote ones

- "managed" OS (kept updated for you)

- support, someone to ask for help if you're stuck trying to do something

None of these are particularly difficult to do on your own, but this just packages them all into a service.

If you roll your own with a VPS, then you do have some setup to do if you want to harden and configure it. Then you have to choose/use a tool to manage that configuration so you can spin up and blow away an instance on demand.

It may be some (a lot?) more expensive than a bare, plain VPS, but perhaps the it is worth 10-20$/mo for a dev who wants to travel light (cheap laptop/chromebook) and have one less thing to worry about.

It is awesome that you parsed all that out. I wish those were advertised on the front page clearer instead of Hetzner Clouds server pricing structure for a higher price (I would say some upcharge like at most almost double) with a little bit misleading pricing. I was mislead for 5 min. Maybe a switch over the table between X hours per month and 24/7 could make that clear.

Also scouring many cloud providers and finding the most performance per dollar one is also a service the person provided once. If they will always to try to get the best deal for their customers, let them know that.

I am not sure how many of those features could be implemented by just a docker container or something similar.

> If you roll your own with a VPS, then you do have some setup to do if you want to harden and configure it.

I actually considered doing something similar using Hetzners cloud API once. An end point for distributed computing and Hetzner was place that seemed to cheapest performance/dollar with hourly billing. [1]

[1] https://github.com/freemin7/discount-cloud-geekbench-5

> What is your agenda?

I just like Hetzner a lot and instantly recognized the pricing hardware tiering structure. I was a bit suspicious how the could sell it cheaper per month as Hetzner (which excited me) until I noticed that by monthly they mean when you shut down your machine every night.

I also couldn't find anything on their website that says where they are hosting it.

As I like Hetzner fan I am sad that there wasn't a reference to Hetzner. The website to me advertises Hetzner Clouds features a lot more then service they provide on top.

Hetzner is a good place and I also used that fact in another reply to say that this service is not unrealiable because it runs on someones else's infrastructure.

I think that the person considering subscribing should know it runs on Hetzner as that has Latency implications of the services are in Gunzenhausen, Falkenstein or Helsinki. Hetzner is also a regional company for me as I lived quiet close to them

I ran a little code on this comment:

    >>> sorted({w: comment.split().count(w) for w in comment.split() if comment.split().count(w) > 1}.items(), key=lambda x: -x[1])[:3]
    [('I', 9), ('Hetzner', 7), ('that', 7)]

7 sentences, 7 occurrences of "Hetzner". It really does read like a CEO-optimized advertisement.

Doing my best? Do you have some suggestions for rewordings? I am not a native speaker, so you are welcome.

By not talking about your specific supplier as part of your branding, you increase the flexibility to change your supplier later on. For now, moonhome.io probably uses hetzner, later they may get a deal for something else, or start running their own data center directly or who knows what else.

Do you really care if your iPhone RAM chips or CPUs were phabbed by Samsung or TSMC? OLED panel from LG that year, Samsung the next year, etc.

What would be wrong if they're reselling Hetzner? Obviously the price difference come from whatever they include on top.

Actually wondering about this as well, currently considering making my own SaaS, though it's not like there's that many approaches to do billing.

In my eyes, a pretty good option would be to automate VPS provisioning and allow each client to order a particular amount of resources, with the software installed on top of them. That way, multi tenancy can be limited to services that handle provisioning, billing and setup, while the individual instances can allow avoiding a single point of failure as far as the day to day operations are concerned.

Basing pricing on the underlying VPS costs with a profit margin in mind just seems like one of the few ways to do it, why would there be anything wrong with it, if the SaaS provides value?

There is not and if Hetzner would have been mentioned on the website I wouldn't have done detective work to find out it is hosted and I wouldn't have written any messages. Maybe there is something with branding that they can't tell they run on Hetzner but then they should work that out with Hetzner orbtgey are trying to hide. Anyway I saved people a registration and possibly renting an instance to figure out where they are.

If you are mostly reselling compute and storage be transparent where you get it from.

> If you are mostly reselling compute and storage be transparent where you get it from.

Genuine question: why or why not?

If someone is reselling compute with very few changes and wants to hide where it's sourced from, then i guess it's understandable from a business perspective but at the same time could indeed be considered dishonest. Is that your reasoning?

But at the same time, if someone is reselling compute with custom software or non-trivial automation around it, then i guess the software/automation itself is the product, in which case the compute is just a means to an end? At least in my eyes, if i'd be buying services from something like Mailgun, or something like Heroku, i might not necessarily care that much about where it's running from (except for maybe caring about latency). Would you agree with a statement like that?

Doesn't it all seem a bit blurred, where to draw that line of what's okay and what isn't? Is reselling compute without references to the underlying host/company not somewhat common?

The reason why I make any judgement about this is because I am an utilitarian. I see 3 Booleans that influence the outcome

- Is it product that adds value?

- Is the person inspecting the website a customer or a potential competitor?

- Is the platform of which the computation is resold listed?

I am only interested in cases where the product actually adds value. So I we can discard that other part of the possibility tree and demand that every company acts as if it adds value.

This leaves us with a 2x2 grid.

- potential customer & transparent: The user can make an educated decision before having to register, for additional hardware questions people can look at the original hoster, website focused on value add, using trusted hoster gives legitimacy

- potential competitor & transparent: competitor can clone your service without creating an account

- potential consumer and no transparent: greater uncertainty for consumer, "Why does he hide it", maybe negative experiences because it wasn't obvious that might not be suitable for tasks due to particular issues with underlying hoster (such as ping time), positive features (such as Hetzner running on green energy) are lost, with unclear hoster reliability of the infrastructure in question, lack of access to historic data that does exist.

- potential competitor & not transparent: competitor has to create to learn in what data centers the servers are as creating an account and renting a few instances would allow him infer any information he needs to know

We can suspect there are more customers than potential competitors and competitors are ore willing to learn about your service then people visiting the website by having this information available you make the life competitors are single digit $ harder, at the cost of having a harder time getting the trust of many more customers and potentially losing business.

So either the product should 't exist xor it is irrational to not make this information available easily as it hurts reseller and potential customers more than it hurts a slightly motivated cloner of the service.

Thank you for the writeup! That is solid reasoning, even if many of the companies out there would prefer not to publish too much information about the underlying infrastructure, or their expense structure.

My only nitpick would be this:

> ...using trusted hoster gives legitimacy

This can also simply lead to all of the smaller/regional hosts out there to be viewed as not trustworthy, just because they're not known to a wider audience and therefore haven't got the positive reputation that the likes of DigitalOcean, Vultr, Scaleway, Hetzner and many others could have!

> This can simple lead to all of the smaller/regional hosts out there to be viewed as not trustworthy, just because they're not known to a wider audience and therefore haven't got the positive reputation that the likes of DigitalOcean, Vultr, Scaleway, Hetzner and many others could have!

While I agree that this is a concern it is my opinion orthogonal to (I mean it literally becomes an irrelevant when you project along) the question "transparency good or bad?"

A hosters name gives you something you can Google. If there a post from someone 4 years ago asking whether it is any good the answers gives you helpful information independent from marketing claims. You might also be able to look at IP ranges and their trust scores or reverse DNS IPs to find out in what neighborhood you end up.

No issues in itself, but would rule out my use as Australia to Europe latency is bad enough but it seems to be that hetzner how some of the higher latency routes

There is nothing bad with Hetzner being resold. But people should be aware that Hetzner is running underneath, so they can be informed about latency concerns, compare reliability and that these servers are running on green energy.

I created an account to play with it and noticed that when updating the ubuntu packages I see it uses the hetzner mirror > Get:1 https://mirror.hetzner.com/ubuntu/packages focal-updates/main amd64 libpam0g amd64 1.3.1-5ubuntu4.3 [55.4 kB]

and the IP address is owned by "Hetzner Online GmbH"

Thanks this is as I expected. Have fun with your instance! I wasn't prepare to setup spending money so I tried to figure out where it was hosted without buying an instance.

Where exactly do you find these prices in Hetzner Cloud? They appear to be at a minimum twice as expensive to me.

A 16 vCPU and 32GB RAM server costs €59.38 per month. If you want dedicated vCPU then you'll have to pay €166.48 per month.

They seem to automatically unprovision the server when not using them. The mlnly prices listed are

"price estimate based on average usage of 160 hours per month."

If you chdkc the hourly price They about twice as expensive as hetzner clouds offerings

You know, he could be using a dedicated server hosted on Hetzner.

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