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.

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

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.

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

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 :)

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

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

ssh shellbox.dev keepalive box1

"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)?

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.

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.

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

Would love to chat about details there

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

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.

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.

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

GNU Screen is another alternative

ssh-keygen -t ed25519

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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.

Can be pretty fast.

Ps what's a DHT scraper?

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.

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

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

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.

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)

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 can count 4

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