Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
freemint
blunte
> More smoking guns
What is your agenda? What do you have against this guy and his service he's offering? You have other comments that seem negative toward this service or its creator.
Heroku is "just the Amazon cloud", but at a higher price. Of course it offers additional features which some people find beneficial enough to justify the higher price compared to bare AWS.
Likewise, if MoonHome is providing attractive extra features (simplicity, turnkey) on top of Hetzner, then shouldn't it charge more than Hetzner?
In my experience, Hetzner is a great foundation to build on if you're happy with Frankfurt/Helsinki being your endpoints. So this is a plus to me.
freemint
> What is your agenda?
I just like Hetzner a lot and instantly recognized the pricing hardware tiering structure. I was a bit suspicious how the could sell it cheaper per month as Hetzner (which excited me) until I noticed that by monthly they mean when you shut down your machine every night.
I also couldn't find anything on their website that says where they are hosting it.
As I like Hetzner fan I am sad that there wasn't a reference to Hetzner. The website to me advertises Hetzner Clouds features a lot more then service they provide on top.
Hetzner is a good place and I also used that fact in another reply to say that this service is not unrealiable because it runs on someones else's infrastructure.
I think that the person considering subscribing should know it runs on Hetzner as that has Latency implications of the services are in Gunzenhausen, Falkenstein or Helsinki. Hetzner is also a regional company for me as I lived quiet close to them
d33
I ran a little code on this comment:
>>> sorted({w: comment.split().count(w) for w in comment.split() if comment.split().count(w) > 1}.items(), key=lambda x: -x[1])[:3]
[('I', 9), ('Hetzner', 7), ('that', 7)]
novok
By not talking about your specific supplier as part of your branding, you increase the flexibility to change your supplier later on. For now, moonhome.io probably uses hetzner, later they may get a deal for something else, or start running their own data center directly or who knows what else.
Do you really care if your iPhone RAM chips or CPUs were phabbed by Samsung or TSMC? OLED panel from LG that year, Samsung the next year, etc.
a254613e
Perhaps I'm missing something from the home page, but which additional features does it offer exactly? Automatic system updates, which is possible to do with just normal linux distributions anyway?
I mean it says "MoonHome is not a browser-based cloud IDE. You get full access to a remote server over SSH.". So you get ssh access, just like you would with a VPS.
All I see on the main page as far as technical functionality goes is just VPS features phrased differently.
blunte
From what I've read on the main page plus some of the documentation pages is that it gives you
- preconfigured dev environment with some tools already installed (using asdf, which is easy to add more tools with)
- preconfigured firewall (which of course is easy to do yourself, but it's done already)
- instructions on how to do some of the ssh tunneling things necessary to connect your local apps/tools with the remote ones
- "managed" OS (kept updated for you)
- support, someone to ask for help if you're stuck trying to do something
None of these are particularly difficult to do on your own, but this just packages them all into a service.
If you roll your own with a VPS, then you do have some setup to do if you want to harden and configure it. Then you have to choose/use a tool to manage that configuration so you can spin up and blow away an instance on demand.
It may be some (a lot?) more expensive than a bare, plain VPS, but perhaps the it is worth 10-20$/mo for a dev who wants to travel light (cheap laptop/chromebook) and have one less thing to worry about.
jmnicolas
What would be wrong if they're reselling Hetzner? Obviously the price difference come from whatever they include on top.
KronisLV
Actually wondering about this as well, currently considering making my own SaaS, though it's not like there's that many approaches to do billing.
In my eyes, a pretty good option would be to automate VPS provisioning and allow each client to order a particular amount of resources, with the software installed on top of them. That way, multi tenancy can be limited to services that handle provisioning, billing and setup, while the individual instances can allow avoiding a single point of failure as far as the day to day operations are concerned.
Basing pricing on the underlying VPS costs with a profit margin in mind just seems like one of the few ways to do it, why would there be anything wrong with it, if the SaaS provides value?
freemint
There is not and if Hetzner would have been mentioned on the website I wouldn't have done detective work to find out it is hosted and I wouldn't have written any messages. Maybe there is something with branding that they can't tell they run on Hetzner but then they should work that out with Hetzner orbtgey are trying to hide. Anyway I saved people a registration and possibly renting an instance to figure out where they are.
If you are mostly reselling compute and storage be transparent where you get it from.
freemint
There is nothing bad with Hetzner being resold. But people should be aware that Hetzner is running underneath, so they can be informed about latency concerns, compare reliability and that these servers are running on green energy.
jlawer
No issues in itself, but would rule out my use as Australia to Europe latency is bad enough but it seems to be that hetzner how some of the higher latency routes
undefined
ithkuil
I created an account to play with it and noticed that when updating the ubuntu packages I see it uses the hetzner mirror > Get:1 https://mirror.hetzner.com/ubuntu/packages focal-updates/main amd64 libpam0g amd64 1.3.1-5ubuntu4.3 [55.4 kB]
and the IP address is owned by "Hetzner Online GmbH"
freemint
Thanks this is as I expected. Have fun with your instance! I wasn't prepare to setup spending money so I tried to figure out where it was hosted without buying an instance.
Xevi
Where exactly do you find these prices in Hetzner Cloud? They appear to be at a minimum twice as expensive to me.
A 16 vCPU and 32GB RAM server costs €59.38 per month. If you want dedicated vCPU then you'll have to pay €166.48 per month.
gallexme
They seem to automatically unprovision the server when not using them. The mlnly prices listed are
"price estimate based on average usage of 160 hours per month."
If you chdkc the hourly price They about twice as expensive as hetzner clouds offerings
hakube
You know, he could be using a dedicated server hosted on Hetzner.
easton
What's the value-add here over a traditional VPS? Codespaces (or Coder/code-server, or gitpod) have the benefit of launching in your browser and being really easy to destroy/spin up if needed. This seems like you're paying for a box and you'll get SSH credentials to connect to it.
Ease of use counts for something, of course, but the market for this is developers that probably either know how to use DigitalOcean or don't know what SSH is and will stick with Codespaces or its alternatives. Static IPs are also interesting, but given the use case for me is being able to nuke my dev environment just like I nuke a git branch, as long as it's accessible somewhere I don't know how much that matters.
(I'm not trying to be down on this at all, I don't know where I'd start with launching a VPS provider. But I think there's something missing from this landing page.)
freemint
I think it just resells Hetzner cloud offer at a premium.
boolean
> Currently, MoonHome is a single-man operation, 100% self-funded.
I wouldn't highlight this on the homepage as I don't think it's a plus. I personally wouldn't want my dev environment to depend on a single person operation.
jwr
Single founder of a self-funded business here.
If you'd rather depend on a larger company, you have to take into account that:
1. The costs will be much higher, because somebody needs to pay for all those salaries, benefits and offices. Hope you are ready to cover those.
2. It's just a façade anyway: a "serious company" makes us feel all warm and fuzzy, but can fold at any time without warning.
3. If it's a VC-funded company, there is no eventual exit outcome that is good for you as a customer: the business will either get acquired (with the service you are using being shut down or folded into something else), go bankrupt, or in the extremely rare case do an IPO (the service you are using will then degrade as the company will be adding mass-uptake features and upselling, see Dropbox). In other words, you aren't really a customer: you are growth material for the company, to be used and discarded once goals are achieved.
In contrast to that, single-founder businesses can be stable, mature, and sustainable over many years, much more so than services offered by larger companies.
watermelon0
Actually, in my experience, it's easier to get useful support for a paid product/tool/plugin that's developed by a single person or a small team, than for a product made by a big company.
movedx
Compared to what?
If you ran this yourself, like I do on LightSail, that would be a (worse) one man operation.
TheDong
The risk of a one-man operation in this case is pretty clear.
If the one dude running this gets hit by a bus, your dev environment vanishes and is useless, all data lost.
If you instead use LightSail, it's clearly better. You'd need quite a few Amazon employees to be on the same bus before a small accident would result in LightSail vanishing and becoming useless.
With both this, and hand-rolled stuff on LightSail, if you get hit by a bus yourself, of course the environment is useless, but that's an identical risk for both of them.
movedx
Fair. But would you rather know it's a one man operation and avoid it, or not know, thinking there is a team, and then get stung in the manner you're suggesting?
blunte
These days, aside from configuration (which is no small thing), one's data is often stored or at least very frequently backed up in the cloud.
If this service vanished overnight, you would likely just lose the time it takes to tune a similar dev environment. If you have a git repo with your dot files and such, and you use symlinks where possible in your tools to refer to your master config repo, then re-setting up your dev env can be nearly instant.
If this service was database hosting, then I would be more concerned about 1-person operation.
PeterStuer
In many midsize and large enterprises critical functions are not redundant. There is just the one person knowing how to do X or Y. If that one person disappears, your service will be down for a long time even if the company still exists.
filmgirlcw
It's a well-designed site, but as others have noted, there aren't enough details about how it works, how data is handled, and its security for this to be something I would ever even think about giving money to.
I don't have a problem trying to undercut Codespaces by selling a hosted preset cloud-environment offering, even if it is just built atop Hetzner, but I do have a problem with the lack of clarity about what it is and how it works.
There is a huge niche/hobby that is there are tons of VPS resellers and smaller hosts who just throw up a rack or two in a data center and then sell cheap VPS boxes, but the thing is, when you get something from a lowendbox type of place or an upstart VPS provider, you usually understand that the company might not be around forever, that support is spotty, and that you're on your own. When you target something as a hosted remote dev environment, for me, that requires a lot more trust (whether it should or shouldn't) because it's my dev environment.
Still, it's a nice idea and I'm sure we'll see more of these offerings pop up over time.
haarts
I've been doing a lot of this lately. I got the cheapest Macbook Air and SSH into my machine at the office. Tmux attach and go! Lag is never an issue for me. I could get used to this.
paxys
"Cheapest Macbook air" is still upwards of $1000 and more than capable of running serious workloads. This kind of remote development perfectly suits my $135 chromebook though.
gtirloni
> Lag is never an issue for me
Is that because you have extremely good latency to the VM or because delays while typing don't bother you? Just wanted to clarify as latency (especially over VPN) is what keeps me away from these solutions.
g051051
Typing lag...that reminds me of something I saw in the 90's. Someone was trying to figure out a production problem and asked for help. I sat down at their computer, and was trying to use their terminal shell window (HP/UX). It was terribly laggy, worse than I'd ever seen before. I asked if it was OK to exit and open a new window and they said OK. So I typed exit to close the telnet connection, then exit again to exit the terminal...but it didn't go away. So I typed exit again. and got another shell prompt. At that point I realized that they had been hopping from machine to machine without exiting. It turned out that the lag was from 22 nested telnet commands!
agrippanux
Check out Mosh, it’s an upgrade over ssh if you are doing remote development
TomatoTomato
No port forwarding though. Must use ssh
bengale
I’ve been using eternal terminal for this and it’s rock solid.
movedx
Me too. I'm on very powerful hardware but the thin-client nature of using Remote-SSH is friggin' sweet.
dreyfan
This is a really rich description of a completely standard VPS.
omarfarooq
The more you tell, the more you sell. David Ogilvy
playpause
A remote dev environment is just one of many use cases for a VPS. They're not the same thing at all.
My brain just isn't good at servers. I have set up many generic cloud servers over the years, but I always hate doing it, it takes me ages to get it right, and I find it hard keep track of everything once set up, and I'm always worried I might have set up something wrong and end up with a security hole or a runaway bill. If I was looking to set up a remote dev environment right now, I would be far more inclined to spend a few dollars per month in overhead for someone to hand-hold me through the process, by providing a clear and simple pricing structure, docs, and support, all narrowly focused on the use case of remote dev environment.
If you're someone who is comfortable playing around with servers, then it makes more sense for you to go lower-level and just set up your own VPS, as you'll probably value the extra freedom and flexibility. For many developers though, that flexibility isn't worth it for the extra complexity and time it takes.
smackeyacky
I have a lot of questions about this. What kind of machine can I provision? Can I make a remote mac for XCode shenanigans? What if I have some awful Windows thing I need to rebuild but don't want to install Visual Studio locally any more, is this a decent substitute for running up a local VM?
What kind of security is sitting around my source code? How would I guarantee when I stopped using the service that a copy wasn't kept somewhere?
Is it backed up / a snapshot done regularly? What kind of control do I have over those snapshots, the timing of them and deleting them if I decide to stop using the service?
freemint
> What kind of machine can I provision?
Virtual Private Servers with AMD EPYC 2nd Gen cores, probably resold from Hetzner Cloud at a premium.
> Can I make a remote mac for XCode shenanigans?
Maybe QEMU, probably runs Linux.
> How would I guarantee when I stopped using the service that a copy wasn't kept somewhere?
The offer GDPR compliance just like Hetzner Cloud
> Is it backed up / a snapshot done regularly?
Nothing on the website. Since they charge more for storage, maybe they do something?
jagger27
The pricing seems reasonable and more or less inline with what an equivalent VPS would cost. I have a couple questions:
> When not used, Moonhome is disconnected from the network for maximum protection. When running, it sits safely behind the built-in network firewall.
So does this mean when I ssh in it proxies and forwards the connection to the actual host which is otherwise unexposed to the public internet? Seems like a reasonable thing to do, I guess.
> We update system images every night, so you don’t have to worry about any of that.
Okay, this seems fine at first glance but it’s really unclear. If I have Go installed, for example, will that be updated automatically or are my own development tools fully under my control and up to me to update? Also, what is the underlying distribution behind all of this? Is it just running ‘apt upgrade’ on a cron job or are you doing something else?
Is it a giant stack of Docker containers with some persistent storage?
Is this open source? Can I run a single command on a North American Digital Ocean droplet and run this closer to home? I don’t see much point in putting my dev env on the other side of an ocean.
xtracto
> more or less inline with what an equivalent VPS would cost.
I am curious of what the VPS options would look like pricewise, and how would a DIY approach entail.
A 32GB DigitalOcean droplet is $192 a month . A 32GB VM in OVH is $62.56 a month. Same thing in Oracle Cloud is around $145 (according to their confusing cloud cost estimator), and AWS r3.xlarge with 32gb is around $252
ipaddr
"Monthly price estimate based on average usage of 160 hours per month."
Not apples to apples.
freemint
You get an awfully similar selection of instances to the ones you get a MoonHome in the standard tier at Hetzner Cloud.
daviddaviddavid
At a glance, the screenshot on the main page seems indistinguishable from Visual Studio Code with the remote-ssh plugin, which is my daily driver and works fantastic.
stef25
Interesting that more and more people seem to be using remote dev environments. Do you have any guides on building a good setup? I get the VS Code + ssh plugin part but how do you manage urls / domains and keeping things private?
omarfarooq
"We do not have access to your data"
How can I independently verify the accuracy of this claim?
reilly3000
You could encrypt your drive to be sure.
robjan
It would have to be E2E encrypted which would break the functionality of a remote development environment
everyone
"Modern notebooks prioritize pretty screen and battery time. And when you do need some more computing power you end up with hot casing and laud fans. It is no longer a pleasant experience. "
I guess they mean modern mac notebooks
danparsonson
And presumably 'loud' not 'laud'
xnyan
If the developer is here, I like the website! One question that stands out to me, after visiting your site I don't really see how this is significantly different from a VPS. The features (CPU, ram, bandwidth, public IP address, semi-managed OS, storage) seem to be more or less on par with what I would pay with AWS Lightsail, Linode VPS or a dozen other providers.
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
I find the pricing structure surprisingly similar to Hetzner Cloud. There are the same RAM and CPU core tiers running the same AMD EPYC 2nd Gen (one to one and onto mapping).
Except prices for storage is almost double. And hourly costs are higher which is kinda hidden by not assuming 24/7 operation compared to Hetzners monthly pricing. You will pay less with Hetzner as they also offer hourly billing.
More smoking guns, while moonhome.io is hosted by Amazon both app.moonhome.io and alpha.moonhome.io (shared by the founder on Twitter) resolve to 78.47.78.87 which is static.87.78.47.78.clients.your-server.de which is an Hetzner IP. [1]
For my own legal safety i am not claiming that this service is just reselling Hetzner Cloud. Just that i found a lot of things that convinced me that that could be reselling Hetzner Cloud. Same disclaimer applies to all comments i made in this thread.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20211014004453/https://mxtoolbox...