Zero information available on mobile.
I thought it is some kind of portfolio site that does not work on mobile.
How? It just says `ssh exe.dev`. Unless you are clairvoyant.
scroll down and hit the "about" link. I do agree though the landing page could be more resourceful.
I'm not going to SSH to a random server.
It looks like some people who work there are watching this thread, so to them I say: You have got to explain what this is, not just say "the disk persists..." and expect people to dig deeper. Most aren't that curious.
Homepage -> blog -> docs -> "all docs" button:
Which has an about and pricing etc.
That is very counterintuitive to just find out what this is.
It's really annoying when you're interested in a product but can't find a price.
> ssh exe.dev
> The disk persists. You have sudo.
I've seen enough of these kinds of services in my lifetime that I also immediately knew what it was, for example sdf.org, which is one of the OG services, and various "tilde" services like tilde.town.
> ssh exe.dev
> The disk persists. You have sudo.
on mobile
And cannot open keyboard if that is needed. It is like big CTA but does not do anything.
Very strange landing page for maybe cool product.
I think knowing what the ssh command does is a pretty low bar for this platform
it's fiine i think
... which it is.
I think it's the combination of 1) really quick to get going, 2) isolated and disposable environments and 3) can be persistent and out there on the Internet.
Often to get element 3, persistent and public, I had to jump through hoops in a cloud console and/or mess with my 'main' resources (install things or do other sysadmin work on a laptop or server, etc.), resources I use for other stuff and would prefer not to clutter up with every experiment I attempt.
Here I can make a thing and if I'm done, I'm done, nothing else impacted, or if it's useful it can stick around and become shared or public. Some other environments also have 'quick to start, isolated, and disposable' down, but are ephemeral only, limited, or don't have great publishing or sharing, and this avoids that trough too. And VMs go well with building general-purpose software you could fling onto any machine, not tied to a proprietary thing.
This is good stuff. I hope they get a sustainable paid thing going. I'd sign up.
Also, though I realize in a sense it'd be competition to a business I just said I like: some parts of the design could work elsewhere too. You could have an open-source "click here to start a thing! and click here to archive it." layer above a VM, machine, or whatever sort of cloud account; could be a lot of fun. (I imagine someone will think "have you looked at X?" here, and yes, chime in, interested in all sorts of potential values of X.)
I don't think that it's actually public? From one of their explainers, no public IP is assigned, so you'll need to ar least have to use an additional service like Cloudflare Tunnel to use it for hosting anything.
ssh exe.dev share set-public <yourvmname>Trying my way around it now. Not sure what is going on:
me: apt install apache
the shell: exe.dev repl: command not found: "apt"
me: bash
the shell: exe.dev repl: command not found: "bash"
Thanks for trying it!
Oh, I think I found a real shell now! You have to click "VMs" then on the VM and then "Terminal".
Yay, this is great!
Small nit: I think you should make it more clear in the docs (if not in the landing page) that one can just use any key with the ssh command the very first time and it automatically gets registered. Also on the web UI one should have the ability to add the ssh keys. I logged into the web UI first, and was a bit confused.
I think the pricing is alright for the resource and remote development features, though might be a bit much if someone doesn't need higher level of resources for deploying something that's mostly already developed.
Anyway, this reminds me of a product called Okteto that had similar UX. They were focused on leveraging k8s for declarative deployment. But for some reason they suspended their managed cloud/SaaS offering for individual/non-enterprise clients, I wonder if it was because they couldn't make the pricing work. Hope that doesn't happen here.
— $20/month
— 25 VMs
— 2 CPUs
— 8GB RAM
— 25GB disk
— 100GB bandwidth
Is this 2 CPUs/8GB RAM per VM (in other words, 50 CPUs/200GB RAM)? If so, this is an unbelievable bargain (too good to be true?); other cloud providers charge hundreds of dollars per month for an equivalent VM.
If, OTOH, it's 2 CPUs/8GB total, Hetzner offers an equivalent VM for about $5/month (with much more disk and bandwidth), and I'm not sure what the exe.dev value proposition is. (I'm also not sure why one would want to split 25 VMs across so few shared CPUs/such little memory.)
The goal is to reduce the marginal cost of creating a VM to zero. Instead of installing a container manager or using Unix users, just make another VM.
(I will get a better version of this table online tonight.)
What is the advantage of this? Unless you need something exotic like different kernel configurations per instance, what's the problem with using containers on the same instance?
BTW, a Hetzner dedicated server with 2 CPUs/8GB RAM that would let me run my own hypervisor is about $14 USD/month. For anyone who's a big enough power user to care about the distinction of running distributed workflows on VMs versus containers, I'm not sure that an extra $5/month is worth your "hypervisor as a service." But then again, HN commenters infamously poopooed Dropbox [0], so what do I know? :-)
Consider this: sometimes when you are using a VPS, you start a new project and say to yourself, "I should put this on a new VPS." Not all the time, but it does happen. And when it does, we are faced with the problem that starting a new project immediately costs us $X/month. I would like a new project to initially cost nothing.
Is that possible and useful with exe.dev? The docs say:
On the networking side, we don't give your VM its own public IP. Instead, we terminate HTTPS/TLS requests, and proxy them securely to your VM's web servers. For SSH, we handle ssh vmname.exe.xyz.
> run docker compose
You can run multiple compose stacks in a single VPS.
> you start a new project and say to yourself, "I should put this on a new VPS."
I never did that.
The only difference is the bandwidth: vps in europe givr you 10 tiles that, unmeterred.
Very cool for training: I can make people log into those vm and deploy nginx just for learning.
But my perception from the homepage is you can. Am I wrong?
SSH is really the only protocol you can do shenanigans like that over, it's a shame not to use them.
[1] (seems overloaded right now) https://words.filippo.io/whoami-updated/
Edit: it comes out of the box with screenshot capabilities. The defaults on this are very well considered. Im impressed within the first 15 min. Edit2: this is very neat. I will be recommending it to my non-coder friends who don’t really have the local setup to use Claude but would like to try a Claude-like tool.
also it's a bad ui meme