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Comment by timedoctor | Hacker News Reader

I would probably still use them even if this information is true because we never had any important data go through their service (just testing accounts) and because I am not aware of any good alternatives.

... would look for an alternative first! But for now assuming that this is not real, anyone checked if it is real?

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SauceLabs.com is an excellent alternative.

Every session gets a brand new VM and they have some great automation and manual features.

CrossBrowserTesting.com provides both live testing (over 750+ browsers), automated screenshots, and automated selenium / junit testing.

All VMs are destroyed after each use. It is more expensive to have to restart each time, but we feel it is the right way to do it, and it ensures a clean uncompromised configuration (disclaimer - I am one of the cofounders, so extremely biased :) )

I thought VM snapshotting facilities/copy-on-write made it almost trivial to start with a fresh virgin one every time. With enough RAM on the VM host the changes from one session wouldn't even need to be written to a physical disk.

We never write changes to disk, the code is trivial really. And it always launches from a locked snapshot.

What we are always trying to optimize is the time to the user screen. That is really the expensive part, once the disk reads happen we want a working session on the users screen as quick as we can get it. Or that is the plan anyway. :)

Currently attempting to convince our team to switch to you guys (not just because of this event) your service is sooo much faster!

Cool, thaaaaanks!

I've been using saucelabs for over a year. It's very comparable

Worth mentioning that Saucelabs takes security very seriously. If anything in this email is true (I can't speak to it at all), then I wouldn't use BrowserStack for testing anything connected to my systems. Sauce, on the otherhand, destroys every VM after each use, guaranteeing that you get a known good (and uncompromised) state for each usage. And unlimited manual testing is $10 a month, which is a great price.

(Disclaimer: Former Saucelabs employee. Currently doing other things unrelated and don't keep in touch, but I definitely know the Sauce claims in http://sauceio.com/index.php/2011/09/security-through-purity... are true.)

I've been looking into them for automated testing of our frontend, and their automated testing hours per day looks like the best bang for the buck for our price range.

Browserling.com is an alternative.

(Disclosure: I'm the co founder.)

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