Instant Server - Click the button to get a virtual private server • Hacker News Board

First thought, isn't this a tad dangerous for the supplier? There seems to be nothing stopping me from using huge amounts of bandwidth just to screw with them. Or if I really was a bad guy, how much of an effective dos attack could be launched on ec2 hosted sites in the same az from these servers?

Re: Instant Server - Click the button to get a virtual private server

#9

Post by badhairday » Tue, Jun 11, 2013, 3:15 PM UTC

This is great, but I'd just prefer to use Vagrant and VirtualBox for vanilla Ubuntu VMs that I intend to destroy. It's so easy to set up and I can use it longer than 30 minutes, for free, if I desire.

Re: Instant Server - Click the button to get a virtual private server

#10

Post by gibybo » Tue, Jun 11, 2013, 3:18 PM UTC

The CAPTCHA really cramps your 'instant' style :( It would be great if it had more convenient ways of preventing abuse. Perhaps look at IP/current server load/user agent patterns/etc to give most people the benefit of the doubt, and only fall back to a CAPTCHA in edge cases?

Thinking about it more, just using an easier CAPTCHA would go along way to making it more user friendly. ReCaptha is hard. It usually takes me 2-3 squinting tries to get it right :/