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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

Not a mobile issue. I am on desktop and had no idea what this service was because nothing on the initial UI explained what we were looking at. I went and double-checked when people here were talking about pricing and VMs. From the home page, I figured it was some text-based game or experiment and closed the page.

It looks like some people who work there are watching this thread, so to them I say: You have got to explain what this is, not just say "the disk persists..." and expect people to dig deeper. Most aren't that curious.

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>From the home page, I figured it was some text-based game or experiment and closed the page.

Same, my first thought was that it's some pentesting game where you're given a VM and your task is to somehow break it. The line "the disk persists. you have sudo" sounds like game rules.

It's odd to see how people are not accustomed to plain websites anymore. You click the 'About' link in the footer, and get a direct explanation of what it is, pricing and the entire documentation.

why do we need to click anything? Why wouldn't the relevant information be there in the initial view?

Gatekeeping mechanism. This effectively filters useless traffic and trash contacts.

You’re right that it probably filtered out a lot of traffic. Traffic that may have converted to users if they didn’t meet such a useless landing page

You truly, honestly believe that to be the real problem? Come on. You don't need to do whatever this is.

Even the 'About' page doesn't have much information either though

All the About page contains is:

> exe.dev is a subscription service that gives you virtual machines, with persistent disks, quickly and without fuss. These machines are immediately accessible over HTTPS, with sensible and secure defaults. You can share your web server as easily as you can share a Google Doc. With built-in optional authentication, so you can focus on your thing.

> Your VMs share CPU/RAM. Create as many VMs as you like with the resources you have.

As (probably?) their target audience, this is very clear to me. It’s a service to create persistent VMs and ssh into them. What’s missing?

Granted, navigation on mobile could be better – the “All docs” breadcrumb is the only way to find the pricing and rest of the docs. On desktop it is clearer.

What is the purpose of the landing page of this site, if it conveys nothing? Sure, 'about' explains what it is, but then from there I need to go back to a page that's called 'all docs' to see the link to pricing.

Don't defend this. It's not plain. It's obtuse.

A properly designed plain site will have the following text front and centre on it's hero:

"virtual machines in the cloud with persistent disks and sudo, starting from $20/month."

Given that this is an AD for the ten millionth VPS service, it should be upfront about the value proposition. Most people think its a game or something interesting and when they find out what it is they're disappointed. You dont want people associating that with your brand.

The website has a huge `ssh exe.dev`, so I'd expect that running that works, but:

    SSH keys are required to access exe.dev.

Why put an SSH command in a huge banner if I have to go around and register before I can use it anyway?

you don't need to register the key. just have some sort of key.

I thought it was one of those game sites where you had to "hack" it every step of the way to advance the next level.

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