OwainX

We've rolled out an initial version of the "expire now" functionality. Click the [X] in the top right of any free server's box in the dashboard and you'll be taken to a confirmation page letting you expire the server's remaining time immediately

The "How it works" page has been updated to remove this reference until we include the FreeBSD image.

Thanks!

Containers and container services are great but sometimes you need a full server and doing a PaaS with containers has it's own challenges to ensure isolation, have network setup work easily and other factors. I use containers for some of my own stuff but other things are just better with a full VM.

Haha.. ok that one is hilarious.. and it's been fixed (the typo that is)

SMTP ports are blocked and we recommend using a transactional mail service if your server needs to send mail.

We're implementing a number of things to profile abusers and prevent abuse on the platform and will be strictly enforcing policies against abuse. The lack of an API and prohibition on automating the creation of servers combined with required Github profile for ssh keys help to make the service unattractive for most abuse cases. Our goal is to use these methods to prevent abuse while keeping a very low barrier to entry for legitimate users.

It's not and until your comment I wasn't familiar with Diply. Doesn't look like we offer anything similar but if I heard from them with concerns we'd consider changing our logo font to prevent confusion.

We'll be enabling FreeBSD soon

Thanks. A lot of this feedback I've been hearing from others today. We'll be updating the serer name field to stand out visually better and doing updates to the home page and informational pages to both highlight the button capability and better present details like pricing. An "expire now" option for servers on the free plan will be in place this weekend which will allow you to delete a free server before it expires.

There are quite a lot of cases where you could find yourself facing a large bill unexpectedly. Forgetting about a server you spun up to try something out, with may platforms having your server hacked (or even DDoSed) could result in huge bills for bandwidth. With Dply you only pay what you pay up-front if you choose to add time to a server. There are no bills racking up. The flip side is that if you forget about it, it could vanish on you. Automating your deployment with something like a user-data script that pulls your code from Github would make this less of a concern. Permanent services on Dply are certainly possible but not the primary use case for most users.

Yup. The way Dply works makes it a bad value prop for abusers. It's also not the best option for someone who would be better served going with DO directly or running a permanent service. Where we think Dply shines is with the button https://dply.co/button which makes it easy for OSS projects and others to let people try out their services at no cost and without a high barrier to entry. If I am reading the readme.md of a project on Github and there is a button to let me deploy an instance of it and try it out on a real server for free I'd be tempted to click it. If 2 hours isn't enough I might add more time. Each paid server covers the cost of a lot of free ones.

Having the ability to add more time with Bitcoin or Alipay is also a plus for some people.

Right now you can have one free server at any time. There is no daily limit currently.

We do not provide an API and automating server creation is a violation of our TOS and would be considered abuse.

When you need a server and can log in and fill out the form, you can create one :)

We found an issue where the stacktrace was originally enabled in our code twice so when it was switched off it was being overridden. That's been fixed. Adding better form validation for the button creation form is also on our list. Our primary focus as we receive bug reports is on issues that directly affect server creation, deletion and billing as those are the highest impact. Since the button form just creates a shortlink and saves some text it's a lower priority but we should have significant improvements in place for that page in the next week or so.

We've had several people suggest making this more prevalent and it's on our todo list :)

We'll be adding an "expire now" option for servers on the free plan this weekend :)

Actually, I work for DO :) But Dply is not a DO project or product. It's my personal side-project and while I have DO's blessing to run it, it's otherwise unrelated and acts like any other DO customer reselling or running an SaaS.

Automatic deletion, the built in user-data button system and our acceptance of Bitcoin and Alipay provide options that DO itself currently does not offer.

This is the MVP/Initial Beta of Dply and we're hoping to learn a lot from it. One thing we are testing is whether we'll see high enough conversion rates by users adding time to their servers to cover the costs of the free servers and hopefully make a profit. Acting as a DO referrer is a backup option that could add credit to the platform to help cover costs if the current model proves unsustainable.

DO absolutely allows (and encourages) resellers and SaaS platforms on their service. My day job is with DO and Dply was built as a side project to meet some needs I have heard from developers, students, and open source projects.

Dply operates with DO's blessing but is otherwise unrelated in any official sense. We launched under a credit like those offered in the Hatch program for startups: https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/

One of the biggest pieces of feedback we've received and near the top of the list to fix. To start with, we'll be giving this field a white background so it's not so easy to miss.

DigitalOcean does it's billing based on a per-minute basis based on their hourly rates. We have already implemented a feature in our backend code to allow users to "expire" free servers and are working on adding that to the dashboard UI and this option should be available this weekend.

For the initial release we focused on extreme simplicity in our design. It's easier to add things than remove them. We'll be making updates to the homepage and informational pages in the coming weeks to make information more prevalent and respond to feedback and suggestions like this one.

Scraping, when done responsibly (respecting robots.txt and not overloading a server with requests) wouldn't be considered abusive in most cases. While we will be strict in enforcing abuse policies, when it's obvious a user acted with good intentions we can work on a case by case basis.

We may create a community repository of user-data scripts allowing you to check a "Share this with the community" option on the Dply button creation page. For now, DigitalOcean has a nice Github repository of user-data scripts you can use: https://github.com/digitalocean/do_user_scripts/

Without going into too much detail we keep track of users, profiling things like ssh keys and github accounts, IP addresses and activity in order to make sure that abusers, once identified cannot come back. All payments are non-refundable (though if we break something we'll credit the time back in almost all cases) so if you pay with bitcoin and abuse the service you'd be out the money with no server left to show for it. The ephemeral nature of Dply servers means that verified cases of abuse will usually result in server deletion and account locking.

If even with the processes we have in place, abuse becomes an issue we could require that the Github account used has a certain amount of history and activity (doing more to profile the user that way). All these things combined with no API and automation of creation being disallowed makes for a low ROI on an abuser's time compared to other services already available.

Absolutely. Keeping costs low is key to having this model work. Each paid server can cover the costs of a lot of free ones but abuse policy enforcement takes people and that's much more expensive. There are quite a few transactional mail providers who offer APIs that can be used for most purposes where mail sending is needed.

This is the only report of this that we've seen and checking our web server we weren't able to find any 403's being returned today. If you see this again, please open a ticket by clicking the question mark in the corner of any page so we can investigate.

There will be soon. We've already implemented an "expire now" function in the backend for servers on the free plan and are working on adding it to the UI. We're hopeful that this feature will be available this weekend.

Dply is built on the DigitalOcean cloud which doesn't allow custom OSes so we are somewhat limited in that regard. As others have written scripts to convert a DigitalOcean droplet to Arch and Alpine we are experimenting with making those options available. It appears this exists: https://github.com/jeaye/nixos-in-place which might make NixOS possible as well. We will be carefully reviewing these options as just because there is a hacky way to convert a droplet on DO doesn't mean it'll result in something suitable for re-use or work as expected with cloud-init and ssh key insertion on Dply.

In general abuse is anything that is illegal under US law, causes a disruption of service or is otherwise disruptive to our ability to run the service. As far as our TOS goes, if we say it's abuse, it is. We will be very strict in our enforcement. We're hoping that backend procedures and processes we have in place will help us to profile abusers and prevent them from using the services as our goal is to prevent abuse while making the barrier to getting started as low as possible for legitimate users.

A tor bridge/relay might not be an issue but TOR exit nodes will almost certainly result in abuse complaints and action being taken.

You're welcome. Thanks to Stripe there was no extra work required on our end to accept Credit card, bitcoin and alipay. We hope to keep all these options around. There are concerns about having a bitcoin option leading to more abuse so we'll be gathering data over the coming weeks and hopefully the measures we're taking to prevent abuse will allow us to continue to offer the Bitcoin option.

A great suggestion. We've received quite a few suggestions for improvement. As the MVP/First beta we aimed for absolute simplicity in the design and implementation as it's easier to add things than take them away. The homepage and informational sections of the site will receive some improvements over time as we get more feedback like this.