Linux boxes via SSH: suspended when disconected | Hacker News Reader

Linux boxes via SSH: suspended when disconected

shellbox.dev

316 pointsmessh159 comments

Disposable Root Servers: https://www.thc.org/segfault/

Segfault offers free unlimited Root Servers. A new server (inside a Virtual Machine) is created for every SSH connection.

    - Dedicated Root Server for every user.
    - Pre-installed tools on Kali-Linux.
    - Outgoing traffic is routed through NordVPN/CryptoStorm/Mullvad.
    - Reverse TCP/UDP port on a public IP.
    - Transparent TOR to connect to .onion addresses.
    - Log in via .onion, .gsocket or direct ssh (port 22 or 443).
    - Encrypted DNS traffic (DNS over HTTPS).
    - Pre-configured .onion web server. Just put your files in /onion.
    - Encrypted storage in /sec and /home with your password.
    - Encrypted storage is only accessible while you are logged in. Keys are wiped on log out.
    - Only the user can decrypt the data. We do not have the key.
    - No Logs.

Different 'tilda' services:

    - https://tilde.town/
    - https://tilde.club/
    - https://tilde.fun/
    - https://ctrl-c.club/
    - https://tilde.green/
    - https://tilde.guru/

OG shell access:

    - https://blinkenshell.org/
    - https://freeshell.de/
    - https://sdf.org/

I suspect this service will be abused by all kind of people and will have to shut down.

It's been up for years

or quickly subsidized by three letter agencies

yeah that is what I was thinking "Ah how cute, it's the ops team from a state" lol but probably not - didn't look into / not interested but guessing it's an existing info sec consultancy behind it that do sometimes work those kinda places or banks etc.

it is not the cheapest on a per hr basis, so I hope it will self select to not be used for such purposes

This is fascinating idea. I created an idea like this on top of firecracker and custom golang ssh client to build something like this for my own personal use case (the abstraction part of pricing and how to connect it seemed the more difficult part for me atleast)

What stack does this use underneath?

Good luck with launch, this idea is similar to railway in terms of pricing model. I discussed about it a few comments back and I think its an interesting idea and we are seeing alternatives within such pricing model

Also are you using some cloud provider itself or building it yourself, I'd be interested in so many details to discover

Have a nice day and looking forward to ya response! Good luck with your project!

Hi thanks for the interest!

This is all written in python and the AsyncSSH package. Firecracker for VMs with memory mapped files for ram. Paddle for billing. Caddy as a reverse proxy for certificates.

It works on top of very large bare metal instances.

I'm thinking maybe open sourcing but it will take some more work on the code to make it publishable w/o embarrassing myself :)

Do you do something similar to the modifications codesandbox has done to firecracker, regarding mmap ram? (They have multiple blogposts about it on their blog)

Would love to chat about details there

I have read about it, but currently using vanilla Firecracker w/o any memory optimizations. It is as simple as it gets for now

THanks for your response! as well

I am interested in which bare metal instances from which provider are you using if I may ask since I had a similar idea (as mentioned before) and I wanted to deploy it on hetzner but I was always worried that hetzner's policy might be too harsh for it even though they are one of the cheapest options out there

Which server provider did you end up using?

Thanks once again for your in depth response, these are the things I come to hackernews for! cheers and looking to ya response

Hetzner auction servers, not cloud

Hm I had thought the same! Interesting thanks for responding once again but what are your thoughts on the fact that someone can abuse the situation and your account might get banned and hetzner has a pretty strict policy in that

When I wished to create something as such, this was the most major thing I was worried about. I am curious what your thoughts are on it and how are you managing it (the fact that anyone might abuse in your service which could then impact you and hetzner relations and they might block/restrict you)

I have heard that hetzner requires you to respond in hours or similar. Like I am interested, did you talk to hetzner people (they are usually very kind and I love that about them) or not, because I remember asking some question to that in similar vein but I had gotten the answer that I am still responsible for what happens downstreams and that worried me

How will you handle for example if someone uses this for crypto stuff that's against TOS is hetzner.

Hetzner is cheap but they are sticklers for rules. Need photocopy of ID when renting servers etc. I just got elsewhere now

Where did you go if I may ask?

Scaleway in France. Very happy with them.

Ps not doing anything illegal but I just don't like having copies of my ID everywhere. Too much data getting leaked these days. With Scaleway you just pay with your card and that's it.

Scaleway is on a bit more expensive side of things

Scaleway does have every primitive you might need but I don't know how good scaleway's support system is.

I have tried Upcloud for free and they are more expensive but they offer unlimited bandwidth (and the cap after 24 TB of free bandwidth/month is at 100 mbps)

Personally it depends on the solution, I have evaluated tons of servers and Scaleway's 0.10cents per month or 3 years per month for 1 gig 1 gb server is the cheapest for the smallest amount of resources needed

https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/virtual-instances/ and I think they offer only ipv6 but cloudflare tunnels is awesome

That being said, I personally prefer OVH as well. I have heard that their support can be shit but they are much more lenient than hetzner but their support is heard at times to be rough (someone recommended here to go talk on twitter to them if you want concerns solved as well and they have discord too so I guess)

But even after all of this, Hetzner's especially auction box are the king of undisputed prices and I am telling you after creating scripts scraping lowendtalks and many other things. There are some other options but none provide the safety of well founded company like hetzner (in terms of uptime etc.) and hetzner's pretty cool

They can be the very best (for some purposes they already are) but for the purposes of hosting other people's stuff or building own server on, they aren't so good because I think hetzner follows a strict policy.

Personally I am on netcup, I somehow looped it in such a way to get server of 8 gigs 4 core cpu 500 gb for 8$ / 3 months. I don't really use that server (too much or even barely, I have to give my brother access to that server so that he can run supabase on it because my servers literally empty aside from some basic stuff), I think at this point, these companies actively lose money for sure if I actually use what I own a decent amount of degree.

VPS/Cloud business is really fascinating ngl. I feel like though for some average use cases for which people used to buy 3$ servers for sprites.dev/exe.dev and now shellbox.dev are gonna be even cheaper (I thought about shellbox.dev and being honest, if I was capable to get hetzner auctions I would've done the same and there must be a middleman and they are more open about things as well and a lot of decisions are same of what I would've built)

Yup So I am probably throwing my full weight behind shellbox.dev as someone who wanted to build a cloud sometime ago. I got the idea of building cloud because I wanted to build something like this and none existed so I went into the rabbit hole but now its built. Now I can go the layer up that I wanted to in the first place now that this primitive has been built (an open source cloud solution where people can pay x$ to get access to a primitive like this)

I think I ended up building my own firecracker based (bottlefire) + ssh/golang based in the end for personal use and I will have it open source in the future (its really simple) and I hope that shellbox.dev can host it as well.

Honestly, we are seeing a lot of products in this space so lets hope that the best one wins! (I always appreciate competition)

> Scaleway is on a bit more expensive side of things

I don't agree. They're a lot cheaper than Amazon. And they don't charge all these hidden fees like ingress bandwidth for their compute services. Their glacier is also a ton cheaper than Amazon's (it does charge transfer fees but that's part of the model). I have 3 VPSes (stardust) for 9 euros a month, it's pretty ideal for me. They're in 3 countries too (you can only get 1 stardust per datacenter)

> Scaleway does have every primitive you might need but I don't know how good scaleway's support system is.

I have not had issues with them for years. But a few years back you could just contact them on slack and they would respond quickly. None of that hassle with creating tickets and CS agents deflecting because they're lazy or don't know. One time there was a recurring random issue and they just plainly told me "we know this particular service keeps having random issues, we'll discontinue it soon, much better to use this one instead".

This was really impressive. I work at work with the big tech names and they would never admit random instability issues like that. And they would never admit that one of their services is less than perfect. Probably because they're afraid someone will post it online and it'll cause a big fuss and requests for refunds. However I don't care about their reasoning. But these guys just plain told me what was up. It gives me a lot of trust, which I don't get from a party like Microsoft or AWS. They outsource their support to companies that outsource it again themselves and the resulting agents have no more knowledge than the kbase you can look up yourself.

So yeah I'm impressed. Not sure if their support is still like this because it's been rock-steady for years now.

> Personally it depends on the solution, I have evaluated tons of servers and Scaleway's 0.10cents per month or 3 years per month for 1 gig 1 gb server is the cheapest for the smallest amount of resources needed

Yes that's it, stardust

> https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/virtual-instances/ and I think they offer only ipv6 but cloudflare tunnels is awesome

No you can get IPv4 but you pay for it. This is the main cost of my stardust instances, about 3 euro per month including VAT. I don't use much IPv6 myself so I need it and it's not bad. That 3 bucks per VPS is nothing and it performs great. I really get a lot of use out of them.

> That being said, I personally prefer OVH as well. I have heard that their support can be shit but they are much more lenient than hetzner but their support is heard at times to be rough (someone recommended here to go talk on twitter to them if you want concerns solved as well and they have discord too so I guess)

OVH are really cowboys.. The fire in that datacenter exposed a lot of practices that really really should never have happened in a sane company.

And yes Hetzner is the king of power for the buck (if you need 24/7), that is true, especially baremetal if you don't mind your server being a few generations old.

PS: There's also the free server thing from Oracle of course. If you don't mind doing business with them. I do absolutely mind so that was not an option for me.

But I use my VPSes for constantly running stuff so one that goes on standby is simply not an option.

I wrote a very slow, good citizen DHT scraper the other day to do some research and the second I spun it up on a Hetzner box I got an email from them that summarized as "For real, bro? Computer says no."

They actually look into the stuff you put on the computer? That's even worse than I thought. I did get a strong feeling of distrust towards their customers when I tried to sign up but because of that I never went ahead with the deal. Dodged a bullet, clearly.

Ps what's a DHT scraper?

They just look at the traffic coming and going. I have a bunch of Hetzner boxes for different web projects that I've had forever and never heard a peep from them.

DHT is the protocol for P2P BitTorrent metadata transfer, essentially. It sorta lets you bootstrap a BitTorrent download without having a centralized tracker site. I'm trying to find a list of torrents for a research project and I need to monitor a lot of DHT traffic to see what is out there.

As others pointed out, this isn't a very strong offer, but I'm wondering, if it would be competitive (price/performance wise), does anyone have a use-case for this? I mean, I can name quite a few if it would offer me some hardware that my laptop I'm using to access it just doesn't have, like some A100-level GPUs and stuff, then it would be fantastic: login, do your job, forget about it until the next time you need it. But for anything else it feels like I'd just prefer something more… traditional? Like, DigitalOcean droplet, AWS instance, Linode VPS, you get the idea. At least a managed Docker container. Even if it's technically more expensive and less performant, we are talking like $5/mo, and you can pretty much always easily scale-up or buy additional storage volume, all these things. And it's all yours, for pretty much all practical intents and purposes.

Does anyone have a legit use-case when it would be actually nicer to use this on-demand type of service? (Once more, unless we are talking some serious on-demand hardware.)

For these kinds of services, I think the main value would be UX improvements, such as offering an environment preconfigured with a certain set of tools (e.g. nmap, tmux, curl, etc.) and other defaults. SSH in, and don't deal with a web panel. They may also be valuable in a learning environment where you don't want student servers running 24/7.

Other than those points, offering access to more powerful hardware is probably the best use-case.

What you've described sounds a bit like the very new https://exe.dev service! Which I discovered on HN just weeks ago.

I just subscribed to exe.dev and man is it a slick service… Shelly their ai is clever as all get out too

came across it few days back , thier signup has been broken for 2 days smh . wanted to try it out.

A legit use-case is long-lived but infrequently accessed sessions.

Think debugging, learning environments, or experiments where the hard part is recreating state, not paying for compute. A VPS can do it, but suspend/resume avoids either leaving it running or constantly rebuilding it.

$36/mo for 2/4/50 VPS without public IP... Ok, I get the idea that the service is for non-regular use, but I think even $0.005 per hour ($3.6/mo) of suspended state is too expensive. The same config in Hetzner is just $4.09/mo for 24/7 working VPS with public IPv4 address

Hi, That is a good point actually. The suspended price has to be significantly lower than the alternative. I'll revise it.

Still, there is the advantage of simplicity not having to deal with the web console etc. Some people may enjoy this

The interesting part here is that the box is stateful, unlike a Lambda. You return literally to the point where you left off.

A VPS does the same thing for far cheaper.

Lambdas can be stateful, for example Durable Functions on Azure,

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/dura...

Yeah this is a cool idea but the pricing is way too high. For anything I would use this for I could just set up any VPS from any provider for cheaper and it’s stateful in the sense that it’s my own VPS and my files/applications/tmux sessions/whatever will be there the next time I SSH in.

The UX here seems really nice, but after spending a couple minutes setting up the VPS, I essentially get the same UX (aka just ssh in and so stuff).

I’d potentially be willing to pay some premium over a standard VPS, but certainly not a 10x premium…honestly probably not even 2x.

I think it can be worth it if the suspended cost is much cheaper (like ten times) than an idle VPS, as long as you don't use the machine too often (if the active cost is 10 times more expensive than a VPS, it makes sense as long as you don't use it more than 800h a year).

Yeah my vpses cost as much as this one does while suspended. With unlimited data traffic.

And the big benefit of a remote box is that you can offload long running tasks to it.

Have fun racing to the bottom. If I can get an unsuspended VM at 5$ a month, the suspendable one has to be significantly faster or significantly cheaper. Then again, take my gnawing with a boulder of salt for I will not be a customer. I have my own server that is running 24/7 already.

Yeah, I don't really see the suspension as something worth paying more for; the only potential "feature" I can imagine is it being significantly cheaper, which seems tough given how cheap a VPS already is.

> which seems tough given how cheap a VPS already is.

A suspended machine only costs its disk usage to the hoster. You can have 800 of them on a machine with 4TB SSD. You can't say the same for VPS at all.

If the pricing for a product like this reflected that, it would certainly be more appealing to me. $5 a month is already so low though that unless I got way better performance for the same price or paid like, $0.50 a month or less for the same performance, it just doesn't seem worth it to me.

Yeah, same. If you’re competing on price, you have to have a competitive price. Unless you can come up with some solid real-numbers benefit to the environment or some other really compelling marketing angle, nobody cares if it’s theoretically the lower-cost way of doing things if that doesn’t translate into either a lower bill, or more service for a comparable bill.

The service seems neat, but the pricing seems more to be a novelty than a real service. Maybe I’m missing something.

it has to cost some amount in reserved capacity too. for every n suspended machines there is some small fraction of a machine's cpu/ram capacity that must be kept in reserve, like in a fractional lending system.

You can 'suspend' to SSD/aka hibernate.

Can be pretty fast.

I think gp means that when a customer wants to connect to the VM there needs to be hardware (CPU and RAM) available to run it. While this can be less than the total number of (suspended) VMs it has to have some buffer of "unused" hardware to account for usage spikes that still needs to be paid for.

I think gp's argument was that you must have enough capacity to run peak load, which will be way above average load.

Makes sense for dev boxes you spin up weekly but don't actually use 24/7. Like staging environments.

Those can just be VMs on a computer you already have. What's the advantage on putting them into a not publicly accessible cloud VM?

Why would I need to suspend a machine other than saving cost? Until your rare is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper, I just go to Hetzner and let it run.

What web console?

Interesting to compare with Fly's sprites: https://sprites.dev/#billing

One difference other than price is that sprites doesn't seem to use ssh

Also, they cost less than a shellbox when unused (idle), and more when used.

> and more when used.

Sprites pricing is based on usage, not reserved capacity, so depending on what you're doing I think it can actually be cheaper than Shellbox. You'll have to stay below 1GB of memory and have the CPU be mostly idle, which I'm not sure common workloads will.

You can use ssh with a sprite.

Nope, unless they changed this recently. It's an ssh-like way to connect and get a console/terminal, but it's not ssh, and there is no transfer capability

How do you upload files to a sprite box then?

https://community.fly.io/t/how-to-upload-and-download-files-...

Só, if you put this on a tailnet and there’s no proxy between you and the sprite, you’re saying you can’t SSH in? Are you sure about that?

Maybe I'm being dense, but could someone kindly explain to me the "Web App" example on that Sprites page?

"30 hours of wake time per month (~5 concurrent users avg), averaging 10% of 2 CPUs and 1 GB RAM"

Does that mean it would sit available but using 0% when there's nobody on the site, and just bill for usage when web traffic is causing the server to do work? So if the web app went a month with no visitors it would cost nothing (except for the file storage fees)?

> So if the web app went a month with no visitors it would cost nothing (except for the file storage fees)?

Yes that's the idea. The public URL for a sprite is served by a (free) load balancer. The sprite is normally suspended, gets resumed when a request comes in, then suspended again. Not sure on the exact timeouts, they probably don't suspend immediately after a response is sent.

Alright, thanks!

I think the comparison has to be with EC2 spot right? It feels like EC2 is the better deal, but maybe more of a pain to deal with their UI.

Sort of, but maybe not quite? When you spin up an EC2 spot instance, it's a fresh instance with whatever AMI you load into it, and it's a fresh boot at that time. (You can save persistent data to an EBS volume that you create once up front and then attach to each new instance, of course.)

With this service, it seems like the VM underpinning your session is suspended (like as if you were to suspend-to-RAM or hibernate your laptop), and then resumed the next time you sign in, so not only is the filesystem in the same state as it was during your last session, but any background processes that have spun up since then are resumed as well, and are still running.

EC2 instances can hibernate, too. You stop paying for the instance while it's hibernated; you pay the EBS storage cost only.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Hibernat...

Right you would need it to be on-demand to hibernate like that but even then a medium will beat these prices I believe.

I think you can technically hibernate the instance when the spot reclaim signal comes in. Then snapshot the instance and then terminate it.

Can then spawn a new instance from the snapshot and it should unhibernate

Whether the OS will like that... That's another point. As there will be things that change like smbios etc

That's a cold boot though and things like tmux sessions will disappear. (I'm assuming that doesn't happen with shellbox)

Pricing does not make any sense. I can get a AWS EC2 t4g.small (2 vCPUs, 2 GB memory) with a 50 GB EBS SSD (gp3) for a total of $16.26/mo.

Also many other services that are way cheaper are also charged per hour.

But you cannot suspend these vps so easily and fast. Shellbox.dev aims to be frictionless in that regard

I understand but they cost about the same running full time as the shellbox costs suspended so there's no need to suspend it.

I feel like one of the problems (this might solve) is that the servers can start up instantly since they are firecrackers so I can assume that a service shuts down automatically after some time and then they auto start when a server points to a particular resource aka sleeping (similar to how railway's sleeping mode works)

That being said One of the ideas I like about this is the idea that you can seperate 1 server into multiple chunks for fast loadouts using firecracker

I have built something for my own internal use case on top of firecracker + automatic ssh and I will probably share it in the future but the key idea I like about shellbox is that I can see this one service on which I can build a product, have a genuine use case and they mentioned open sourcing (I hope they do, mine implementation of firecracker-ssh uses bottlefire + golang/ssh library) and you can always cut out the middle man (they are more transparent about it imo than I've seen people)

Honestly, they can add multiple more higher level servers as well and have them be slowdown at 0.005$ as well, I feel like this will be the key unlock of shellbox.dev and I am hopeful that they might work on it.

There are tools for almost everybody now in this space which didn't exist a month ago. Exe.dev for people (currently its burning VC money but once it gets stable) would be for people who have like 25-40 vms and have a constant amount of VM's and shellbox is gonna feel more like for those where you can one day probably have a simple abstraction and you can host software rather easily and use it and then dump the server to either completely remove it or just be when you might need it

Another issue is that if shellbox.dev is like the story of icarus, if they fly too high, I think they might win the war but they will lose the battle and if they fly too low or the competitors and it's major differences just become price, they both might compete to the bottom and the problem is that in times of emergency combined with the presence of Murphy's law, when disaster hits (they are basically arbitraging unused hardware space in the idea that long term enough users might come that things would be much rather full, they need a buffer because the servers might have unused compute for which they will have to pay

So if someone flies completely tries to lowball the price, what would end up happening is that in case of diasaster, they might actually fold/lose money and sustainability practises would be thrown out of the way (Just ask anyone in lowendtalk what happened to veloxmedia recently)

Honestly I am pretty frugal so I would still argue with your point though. I feel like they can still slash the prices in half of suspended costs because I think sprites.dev (their competitor) costs nothing/negligibly virtually when they are not running.

Shellbox does have this one benefit in comparison to sprites.dev in that they are more "No signup, no config, no complexity" and their small niche scale feature might still make sense.

Sprites.dev uses fly.io (a deeply awesome company) as well and it seems to have the most momentum right now as well

I think that these companies/projects will change their pricing and multitude of things will happen. I am really excited about this space.

Someone should probably create a comparison between exe.dev, sprites.dev and now shellbox.dev comparing each and every

Currently the price is in the same ballpark as dev.exe ($20/month no suspendind) ans sprites.dev (higher for suspended butnlowe for running)

I think this is mostly true functionally, but not experientially.

A VPS gives you persistent state, but it still assumes you’re willing to manage that state. The distinction here seems less about what’s possible and more about who carries the ongoing operational burden: the user or the service.

How did you find $4 on Hetzner? I didn't see anything close!

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/

CX23 is €3.49/mo, but you can save 0.50€ if you forgot ipv4.

There's been so many of these lately.

I really need to share a blog post on doing this exact thing with a VPS, 2 commands to install and setup lxd.

And then client side bash function to just make and connect via tmux and delete when you're done.

Self hosting these services is too easy to do and you can have more control of your data and better specs.

On this same idea, I just started working on shelley-lxc: https://github.com/jgbrwn/shelley-lxc

Work in progress/alpha, but the core functionality works as a proof of concept. Super exciting working on this kind of stuff.

It's funny to me as well. Being initially inspired by Yelp's dockersh I wrote a functional MVP of the same concept around 2 years ago. It used a custom Go sshd-proxy to spawn kata-container backed pods in kubernetes. I used it personally for a very brief period of time, and found it useful as a small timesaver for testing things. I wasn't comfortable with monetizing it though. After seeing a few of these pop up, I realize maybe I missed my chance to be early.

As far as self-hosting goes, it looks like there are some FOSS projects now, eg https://containerssh.io/

i looked at containerssh once and it was way to featureful for me. I came up with a simple ssh daemon that basically does spawn arbitary containers on ssh login and destroys on exit: https://github.com/abbbi/sshcont

This looks quite similar to exe.dev which was on here a while ago - anyone know how it compares?

Pretty sure shellbox.dev has been around for at least 2-3 years though - EDIT nm they have a show HN from two days ago. I must be thinking of a similarly named/sounding service

Maybe you mean keypub.sh? That is another project of mine with similar graphic design.

Actually I was thinking of the Devbox cloud thing, which I think they call Jetify Cloud now

Love the site design btw. Super attractive on mobile.

I think exe.dev is subscription. In Shellbox.dev you have funds and pay very little when not connected

Do you do any resource scaling at all? What happens if my workload hammers the VM resources?

This is a very cool idea and I like the simplicity of the business model! SSH has a ton of great features and its ergonomics are excellent for terminal enthusiasts. Most of us want to ssh into our cloud compute anyway. As a founder of an ssh platform (https://pico.sh) I just wanted to say welcome and good luck!

Also If you ever want to chat about ssh feel free to reach out!

I've been trying to come up with a hypothetical use case for this. I can't use this as a server without keeping an active session right? I wonder if you could get around this by sshing into itself from inside the primary session. Is that an edge case you've considered?

This is a feature I want to implement: an option to keep boxes running while disconnected. Maybe with something like

ssh shellbox.dev keepalive box1

Maybe this and other future extended features could be configured via some host-accessible mounted conf.d? Otherwise if I forget to use that command on every login, I might just forget, logout, and go on thinking my server is still running.

The feature can be discussed here: https://github.com/skariel/shellbox.issues/issues/3

For this use case, why wouldn't you just instead run a VPS on AWS or some cheaper platform?

You definitely should

I have issue with that balance cut off at $5. How one spends the entire balance then?

It is odd, I would have thought $0 is the more obvious number there. It seems you can refund via a shell command though, so the money is not trapped

Given they delete the boxes at $0, that may be cutting it close. That said they should add a flag that lets a user run down to the $0 if they want to live dangerously. They could also change it to $1 since that's their minimum balance required for refund.

Love this idea! Started building a version of it a while ago, but gave up because my resume time was too slow

My job has their own DCs, but inexplicably hosts devboxes in EC2 - an autosuspend feature for cost savings sounds awesome.

Feature request: let me give you a Dropbox folder to persist/load my suspended vms from/to, that way i dont get charged for storage when not using it, and i can walk away whenever i want

The Dropbox idea sounds super interesting

I would use this with expensive GPU instances so I don't forget them running. Not so useful for cheap instances.

Excellent point. This may be better proposition for more expensive instances

Unrelated in many ways, but I have the reverse problem:

When I suspend my Linux machine, my ssh connections are lost.

Anyone know of a good solution for this?

PS: Yes, I know about tmux/screen but I'd like a solution that keeps the connection, because I often forget to start a screen session. Also, I'd like my X11 applications to keep working.

Use tmux. Ssh in and start a tmux session. If the connection breaks you can ssh back in and reconnect to the tmux session later.

GNU Screen is another alternative

Yes, thanks, but it does not work for me since X11 applications lose their connection too.

Mosh on server and client keeps the SSH connection going during suspension or network drops, etc.

https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh

Nice! But not a solution since it does not support X11 forwarding.

WDYM lost? do you roam? I used to have a job with simple OpenVPN to connect to the servers (via public IP, just routed through the VPN tunnel) and ssh connections stayed during my trip from office to home. Probably needs both sides not to be overly aggressive with keepalives and such. VPN just reconnected at home, but tun0 device and its local ip stayed the same, ssh connections also stayed.

If you do not roam other side may do TCP keepalives or even ssh protocol keepalives and close the connection for you. Unless you can tune that, not much to do.

Other solutions might be mosh (mobile shell; haven't tried) or just running screen or tmux on the other end and just resume where you left of after quick reconnect.

Cool idea, but where's the "sign up" button?

Trying to use any of the commands in the home page, I just see "hugo@shellbox.dev: Permission denied (publickey).". Clearly I have to register first, but there's no clue as to how.

You are missing an ssh key. Run this first:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519

There is no support for ed25519 host keys (confirmed using ssh-audit). Would be nice to have though.

As an aside, you should use ssh-audit to get recommendations for what to disable as far as less than ideal options/configs go.

But why? Genuinely want to know what one might use this for. I can imagine it would be cool for a remote dev environment but the selling point would have to be that it’s far cheaper than the alternative.

Simpler, easy to use, more enjoyable and fun are also valid reasons

What’s difficult to use in Hetzner or DigitalOcean?

One thing can be simpler than another without either of them being difficult.

Apart from the payment part, this could be used entirely from a machine without a GUI. You can do the same with others using Terraform or aws-cli but it requires setup first.

What about SSH requires GUI?

I mean I SSH to my Hetzner Ubuntu fun box usually from Powershell or PuTTY, but sometimes I SSH from a Debian server without any GUI.

> I SSH to my Hetzner Ubuntu fun box

How did you provision your Hetzner Ubuntu fun box in the first place? That's the part that usually needs a GUI

I could imagine using this to access a beefier machine besides my main work computer. But indeed paying for stopped VM is difficult to sell. There was a suggestion to propose pre installed tools in different images which I find a good idea. Otherwise the workflow all by ssh is cool!

I made something similar last week using rust. It uses docker container with bunch of tool pre loaded. if anyone interested source code https://github.com/TheYkk/agentman

What a brilliant billing and account interaction interface. I legitimately wanted to build something like this for a transactional SMS provider where it would all be provisioned, managed, configured on the CLI. Do you have any tips on how you built this out so elegantly?

Would love a SMS provider that was simple to use. Have used twilio in the past and every time I come back it, it feels like they've added yet another layer of abstraction to the process.

But I suspect that spam and abuse means that becoming an SMS customer is going to have to be complex. Though just the ability to automate SMS msgs to a few pre-defined and verified numbers would be valuable and negate spam risk.

> Note: The -O flag is required for OpenSSH 9.0+ to use legacy SCP protocol.

Why isn't SFTP supported?

WIP, this is still in MVP phase...

Looks cool. You probably need a fyi or faq indicating that how the account system works.

Cool idea if you have a more specific niche requirement than it would initially appear, but genuinely nice to know this is available if such a use-case happens to cross my path.

$0.005/hr while stopped is $43.8/year. That's... that's not bad! Worthwhile as a backup place to do work on open source, host an irssi.

Given the price when stopped is comparable to price when running on cheaper VPS providers like Hetzner, I'd say that it isn't exactly good either

What are the legalities of having a cash balance, withdrawable? (So not "credits" or something)

Do you need a banking license, or partner with someone who has?

ALS no mention of GB’s of bandwidth provided.

If it's hetzner then it's probably not something you have to worry about unless you are talking like terabytes per day

I'm curious: what's the use case? Usually when I need a server I need it to stay on and have a public IP.

I wish runpod.io and others had this feature. I've forgotten to stop my pods a few times and only learnt about it when my balance became $0.

Not sure about the security sandbox, but given that paddle.com (your payment provider) takes 5% cut you could consider accepting lightning (bitcoin layer2) payments. QR code generation for lightning invoice is instantaneous just as payment, and will cost less than 0.1% fee (payer pays fee anyway). But the security sandbox should be solid, else it will be used for illegal stuff.

> you could consider accepting lightning (bitcoin layer2) payments.

uh? i lost interest in bitcoin a few years ago, did bitcoin get actually usable for payments ?

Not really. I mean, I guess the lightning stuff makes it settle/confirm faster than doing an on-chain transaction, but bitcoin as a store of value is still essentially gambling. So you'd want to immediately sell it and convert it to USD (or a stable coin, I guess), and presumably you're incurring fees at whatever exchange you're using.

5% for paddle does sound like it kinda sucks, but I feel like any lower fee you'd end up paying with bitcoin would get eaten up by complexity, annoyance, and currency conversion risk.

lightning also works for USDT, if you prefer that.

> 5% for paddle does sound like it kinda sucks

Don't underestimate the benefit of it doing international VAT collection and payment. Especially for small amounts.

Is it non-American all the way down?

I was born in Argentina, so technically American, yes ;)

If it is successful then the next region would be in the US

Weird fun fact (as an Argentinian who went to school in England for a few years): in English-speaking countries, America is not a continent in the same way as in Spanish. In English they have two continents: South America and North America.

So the word "American" in English does not mean the same as "Americano" in Spanish.

There's really no natural word in English to refer to someone from "El continente Americano", because no such continent exists in English. That's why they use the word "American" to refer to someone from USA exclusively.

Frankly, the model with the single America continent doesn’t make any sense, because south and north Americas are so different in both geographical and cultural/historical sense.

Continents are about geology not culture

Well, North and South America are two different tectonic plates[1].

[1] https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/tectonic-plates-earth

They really aren't, there's no objective way to divide the world into exactly 7 continents (or 6) using geology.

America, Afro-Eurasia, Australia, Antarctica

I can count 4

Based on what?

Based on being large landmasses

Potentially any island is a continent if your cutoff is low enough

Europe says hi.

"American" to refer to USA exclusively does make sense either way because USA shares the continent with at least two other countries no matter how you slice it.

You probably meant "doesn't make sense".

Correct

That sounded fascinating as a rather large difference in world view stemming only from using different languages.

It turns out that there are various models for the number of continents, and that is (phew) known in Spanish, too. See the Wikipedia page [1] (link to Spanish version) for instance. This is for European Spanish though, but I couldn't find a version of the page in es-AR.

[1]: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continente#Modelos_continental...

I think "the Americas" means the continent(s), and America (to some extent) can mean either but it would feel more like something used as a gotcha at a pub quiz.

You're definitely right about there not being a word for someone from that continent though.

That is weird isn't it "Asian, African, European"

This is incredible.

No "command line tools" to install. No absurd over-complicated web APIs.

Cool project but Hetzner can provide a cloud-vm for $5 (running)

btw I am not from Hetzner

I love the text-mode QR code.

is there a typo in the title? disconnected takes 2 n (sorry for the nitpick)

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