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Comment by messh | Hacker News Reader

Hi, That is a good point actually. The suspended price has to be significantly lower than the alternative. I'll revise it.

Still, there is the advantage of simplicity not having to deal with the web console etc. Some people may enjoy this

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Have fun racing to the bottom. If I can get an unsuspended VM at 5$ a month, the suspendable one has to be significantly faster or significantly cheaper. Then again, take my gnawing with a boulder of salt for I will not be a customer. I have my own server that is running 24/7 already.

Yeah, I don't really see the suspension as something worth paying more for; the only potential "feature" I can imagine is it being significantly cheaper, which seems tough given how cheap a VPS already is.

> which seems tough given how cheap a VPS already is.

A suspended machine only costs its disk usage to the hoster. You can have 800 of them on a machine with 4TB SSD. You can't say the same for VPS at all.

If the pricing for a product like this reflected that, it would certainly be more appealing to me. $5 a month is already so low though that unless I got way better performance for the same price or paid like, $0.50 a month or less for the same performance, it just doesn't seem worth it to me.

Yeah, same. If you’re competing on price, you have to have a competitive price. Unless you can come up with some solid real-numbers benefit to the environment or some other really compelling marketing angle, nobody cares if it’s theoretically the lower-cost way of doing things if that doesn’t translate into either a lower bill, or more service for a comparable bill.

The service seems neat, but the pricing seems more to be a novelty than a real service. Maybe I’m missing something.

it has to cost some amount in reserved capacity too. for every n suspended machines there is some small fraction of a machine's cpu/ram capacity that must be kept in reserve, like in a fractional lending system.

You can 'suspend' to SSD/aka hibernate.

Can be pretty fast.

I think gp means that when a customer wants to connect to the VM there needs to be hardware (CPU and RAM) available to run it. While this can be less than the total number of (suspended) VMs it has to have some buffer of "unused" hardware to account for usage spikes that still needs to be paid for.

I think gp's argument was that you must have enough capacity to run peak load, which will be way above average load.

Makes sense for dev boxes you spin up weekly but don't actually use 24/7. Like staging environments.

Those can just be VMs on a computer you already have. What's the advantage on putting them into a not publicly accessible cloud VM?

Yeah this is a cool idea but the pricing is way too high. For anything I would use this for I could just set up any VPS from any provider for cheaper and it’s stateful in the sense that it’s my own VPS and my files/applications/tmux sessions/whatever will be there the next time I SSH in.

The UX here seems really nice, but after spending a couple minutes setting up the VPS, I essentially get the same UX (aka just ssh in and so stuff).

I’d potentially be willing to pay some premium over a standard VPS, but certainly not a 10x premium…honestly probably not even 2x.

I think it can be worth it if the suspended cost is much cheaper (like ten times) than an idle VPS, as long as you don't use the machine too often (if the active cost is 10 times more expensive than a VPS, it makes sense as long as you don't use it more than 800h a year).

Yeah my vpses cost as much as this one does while suspended. With unlimited data traffic.

And the big benefit of a remote box is that you can offload long running tasks to it.

The interesting part here is that the box is stateful, unlike a Lambda. You return literally to the point where you left off.

A VPS does the same thing for far cheaper.

Lambdas can be stateful, for example Durable Functions on Azure,

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/dura...

Why would I need to suspend a machine other than saving cost? Until your rare is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper, I just go to Hetzner and let it run.

What web console?

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