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Comment by Egor3f | Hacker News Reader

$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

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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

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?

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.

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.

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).

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...

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

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!

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

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?

How do you upload files to a sprite box then?

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

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

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