$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 $4.09/mo for 24/7 working VPS with public IPv4 address
Hi, That is a good point actually. The suspended price has to be significantly lower than the alternative. I'll revise it.
Still, there is the advantage of simplicity not having to deal with the web console etc. Some people may enjoy this
Have fun racing to the bottom. If I can get an unsuspended VM at 5$ 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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 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)
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
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.