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kricktoday at 1:17 AM1 replyview on HN

As others pointed out, this isn't a very strong offer, but I'm wondering, if it would be competitive (price/performance wise), does anyone have a use-case for this? I mean, I can name quite a few if it would offer me some hardware that my laptop I'm using to access it just doesn't have, like some A100-level GPUs and stuff, then it would be fantastic: login, do your job, forget about it until the next time you need it. But for anything else it feels like I'd just prefer something more… traditional? Like, DigitalOcean droplet, AWS instance, Linode VPS, you get the idea. At least a managed Docker container. Even if it's technically more expensive and less performant, we are talking like $5/mo, and you can pretty much always easily scale-up or buy additional storage volume, all these things. And it's all yours, for pretty much all practical intents and purposes.

Does anyone have a legit use-case when it would be actually nicer to use this on-demand type of service? (Once more, unless we are talking some serious on-demand hardware.)


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ronsortoday at 1:26 AM

For these kinds of services, I think the main value would be UX improvements, such as offering an environment preconfigured with a certain set of tools (e.g. nmap, tmux, curl, etc.) and other defaults. SSH in, and don't deal with a web panel. They may also be valuable in a learning environment where you don't want student servers running 24/7.

Other than those points, offering access to more powerful hardware is probably the best use-case.

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