Live data from Hacker News

MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

moonhome.io

21–30 of 97 posts

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#21
post #19

> 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.

Compared to what?

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

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#22
post #21
post #19

> 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.

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

Compared to GitHub Codespaces or LightSail which have proper support teams behind the products.

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#25
post #21
post #19

> 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.

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 you get hit by a bus yourself, of course the environment is useless, but that's an identical risk for both of them.

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#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 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...

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#27
post #6

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 do…

I think it just resells Hetzner cloud offer at a premium.

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#28
post #18
post #9

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 l…

> 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

"Monthly price estimate based on average usage of 160 hours per month."

Not apples to apples.

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#29

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 was…

> 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?

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#30
post #18
post #9

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 l…

> 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

You get an awfully similar selection of instances to the ones you get a MoonHome in the standard tier at Hetzner Cloud.
Post reply on HN