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.
- 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.
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]