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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

What is the value add over just running your own SSH server at a persistent domain? The TUI? Unlimited bandwidth? Cost?

Essentially the value is in not having to set up your own SSH server. Or for providing you with 'throwaway' domains for any developer who wants to temporarily expose some locally running service.

One use-case I had was connecting an Android app over 4g to a backend service running on my development machine, for some ad-hoc debugging. Using a tool like this was more straightforward than setting something more permanent up manually (spinning up a server, certificates, DNS, etc). Especially for someone not super familiar with how to configure the tools involved.

This is not a SSH server. Yes, you can run your own SSH server at a persistent domain. But if you could run a SSH server with a persistent domain then you would not use Ngrok also right?

The value is in getting public URLs for sharing your localhost instantly without any infrastructure or software setup.

You can run the same command against any default configured ssh server.

I have never heard of ngrok, and have used ssh tunnels for over a decade.

I must be missing something.

This is a tool (like ngrok, or inlets, or sish etc) for easily opening a port on your local computer to the public internet.

So, for example, if you are hosting a web server locally on port 8080, you could ssh to a service like this, and then it would give you back a link such as h59dke4.example.com.

All traffic that goes to h59dke4.example.com:80 will actually be routed to your 127.0.0.1:8080

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