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Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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

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