Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

moonhome.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 97 posts

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#61

Post by KronisLV »

jmnicolas wrote: post #54
freemint wrote: post #26

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 gun…

What would be wrong if they're reselling Hetzner? Obviously the price difference come from whatever they include on top.

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?

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#62

Post by ithkuil »

freemint wrote: post #26

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 gun…

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"

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#64

Post by blunte »

freemint wrote: post #26

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 gun…

> 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.

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#65

Post by blunte »

TheDong wrote: post #25
movedx wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to what? If you ran this yourself, like I do on LightSail, that would be a (worse) one man operation.

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…

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.

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#66

Post by a254613e »

blunte wrote: post #64
freemint wrote: post #26

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 gun…

> 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…

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.

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#67

Post by PeterStuer »

TheDong wrote: post #25
movedx wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to what? If you ran this yourself, like I do on LightSail, that would be a (worse) one man operation.

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…

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.

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#69

Post by blunte »

a254613e wrote: post #66
blunte wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 functional…

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.

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#70

Post by jlawer »

jmnicolas wrote: post #54
freemint wrote: post #26

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 gun…

What would be wrong if they're reselling Hetzner? Obviously the price difference come from whatever they include on top.

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
Post reply on HN