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Show HN: Dply – Free temporary Linux servers

673 points by OwainX 10y ago

OwainX 10y ago
This is a project I've been working on for a while. Dply allows you to quickly create a temporary cloud server (1CPU/512MB RAM/20GB SSD) for free. You can have one free server running at any time. Log in with your Github account and it will allow you to create your server using your Github ssh-key. Servers are free for 2 hours and expire after that time (unless you choose to add more time via credit card or bitcoin). It's a quick and easy way to demo some code on a live server or just play around with a few popular Linux distros. We also provide the ability to create a button for your project allowing you to let people create a server with your service/project running on it for free to try it out. Create a yaml or bash user-data script and others can launch servers with it. For the last 11 years on and off I've run a small Linux distribution. I work for a well known cloud host by day but in talking with users learned that it's a hassle sometimes to create an account, billing profile and all that when you just need to quickly test or share something so I built this in my free time. Do you expect to make money on this? Honestly, no idea. I have a decent credit grant that will cover free 2 hour servers for a while so it was worth trying out. How do I log into my server? All servers are created with ssh-key authentication only. You are provided the option to select from the ssh keys on your Github account when you create a server. Your key will be applied to the "root" account. I am happy to answer any questions about dply.co and would love any feedback.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Can I make another free server immediately afterwards? What's your anti-abuse policy/process?
  - OwainX 10y ago
    As a free service we will pretty strictly enforce abuse reports and take action on them. We're using a few methods to profile users based on their github account/ssh key and other factors to block abusers once their identified. Dply servers are blocked from using SMTP ports to prevent spam. Yes. You can create another server once the first expires but automating this process is not allowed and therefore we do not provide an API.
    - ryao 10y ago
      What constitutes abuse? I imagine certain applications that would be fine with the server going up and down every 2 hours. That would effectively mean that they would have free service indefinitely. For example, a Tor bridge.
      - rounce 10y ago
        Shhhh, you're gonna ruin it for everybody else!
        oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
        We were all thinking it.
      - wheelerwj 10y ago
        Or bitcoin miners
        brianwawok 10y ago
        You would mine maybe 1 penny per day. Not worth the click.
        wheelerwj 10y ago
        ....that's not how fraud works. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7490766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7490766 Just google aws bitcoin mining abuse and see what happens when shitty people have access to free servers.
        iancarroll 10y ago
        Pretty sure it only makes sense when you can spin up AWS GPU instances, which you probably cannot do here.
        10y ago
- detaro 10y ago
  Looks cool, I hope it works out for you! First impressions: From the sub-pages ("how it works" etc) you should add clearer links to the start page/maybe add a login button on those as well? You should have some info about who you/your company are if you want people to maybe give you money (maybe that's even legally required)
  - OwainX 10y ago
    Great feedback. The goal was to keep things as clean and basic as possible but the site itself will continue to be improved as we learn more about how people use the service.
- cschep 10y ago
  how will you deal with abuse? scripts to just spin and mine bit coin etc. cool project!
  - OwainX 10y ago
    This initial release is designed to test two things. 1.) Our abuse processes. The goal in this area is to both be very strict in preventing abuse while trying to do so with as little inconvenience for legitimate users as possible and 2.) Testing the ROI. Cloud servers are really inexpensive for short periods and we will be testing conversion rates to see if the project can be self-sustaining through the added time model.
    - nixgeek 10y ago
      At the point someone's wanting something for a month, why wouldn't they go pay $5 to DigitalOcean, vs. $10 to you?
      - hobofan 10y ago
        Why wouldn't Dply just become a DigitalOcean reseller and only cost $5? I could definately see this working out as a customer aquistion channel for DO, eith Dply getting a referral fee.
        joantune 10y ago
        Because he works for AWS :D. But ditto for AWS
        OwainX 10y ago
        Actually, I work for DO :) But Dply is not a DO project or product. It's my personal side-project and while I have DO's blessing to run it, it's otherwise unrelated and acts like any other DO customer reselling or running an SaaS. Automatic deletion, the built in user-data button system and our acceptance of Bitcoin and Alipay provide options that DO itself currently does not offer. This is the MVP/Initial Beta of Dply and we're hoping to learn a lot from it. One thing we are testing is whether we'll see high enough conversion rates by users adding time to their servers to cover the costs of the free servers and hopefully make a profit. Acting as a DO referrer is a backup option that could add credit to the platform to help cover costs if the current model proves unsustainable.
- netrap 10y ago
  The server name field might be better suited to be a white box like the rest of the options after you click New Server. Nice idea. Might want to have some kind of vetting of accounts if it gets bigger.
  - robotresearcher 10y ago
    Strongly agree. I missed the server name field and got an error about the syntax for server names instead of 'you didn't enter a server name' error. Field should be visually similar to the other fields.
    - lemiffe 10y ago
      Same here
  - reledi 10y ago
    Agreed, I completely missed the server name field. Scanned over it thinking it was a horizontal line with a label below and didn't bother to read it.
- Tepix 10y ago
  That's a pretty cool service, I think I can use that for a github project of mine. You should consider adding a "shutdown and delete" button to get rid of VMs when your users are done with them.
  - OwainX 10y ago
    We'll be adding an "expire now" option for servers on the free plan this weekend :)
    - OwainX 10y ago
      We've rolled out an initial version of the "expire now" functionality. Click the [X] in the top right of any free server's box in the dashboard and you'll be taken to a confirmation page letting you expire the server's remaining time immediately
- oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
  FYI, small typo on https://dply.co/how https://dply.co/how - "it's" should be "its".
  - smnc 10y ago
    Also on https://dply.co/help/sshkey https://dply.co/help/sshkey there's mention of "pubic" key instead of a public key.
    - Gruselbauer 10y ago
      Or it signifies the beginning of key-authenticated intercourse. Just saying...
      - ComodoHacker 10y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chastity_belt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chastity_belt
    - OwainX 10y ago
      Haha.. ok that one is hilarious.. and it's been fixed (the typo that is)
- Warp__ 10y ago
  Thanks a lot, this service looks really useful. Would it be possible to offer a LAMP install for two hours?
  - jenskanis 10y ago
    This is already possible. They support Cloud-init: https://dply.co/help/cloud-init https://dply.co/help/cloud-init
    - Warp__ 10y ago
      Ah, didn't read closely enough. Thank You.
- adito 10y ago
  Suggestion, after the server successfully created, show the command that they can execute to access the server (ssh root@<ip>, with <ip> being replaced with the real ip).
  - OwainX 10y ago
    We've had several people suggest making this more prevalent and it's on our todo list :)
    - dividuum 10y ago
      I haven't used your service yet, but if I understand the limitation correctly (only github logins/only one server per login) I think it should also be possible to automatically derive a subdomain name from the github username and have that point to the server. Not sure if that's a good idea, just throwing an idea over the wall :-)
- 0x54MUR41 10y ago
  It's cool project. Well done! OP This is my first try: I tested to create a "dply" button on https://dply.co/button https://dply.co/button. I tried not to fill out the form and clicked "CREATE BUTTON". The page replied with errors and their trace. SQL statements and other Ruby keywords were shown. I think it would be better if there is an error handler, like a warning that form is not filled out completely.
  - OwainX 10y ago
    We found an issue where the stacktrace was originally enabled in our code twice so when it was switched off it was being overridden. That's been fixed. Adding better form validation for the button creation form is also on our list. Our primary focus as we receive bug reports is on issues that directly affect server creation, deletion and billing as those are the highest impact. Since the button form just creates a shortlink and saves some text it's a lower priority but we should have significant improvements in place for that page in the next week or so.
- hashin 10y ago
  This is a pretty cool service! I have had my moments when I had to set up the AWS free tier a few hours before a very important client meeting. I have this gut feeling that this service will make the cloud technology a bit more accessible for a budding to medium skilled developer. Personally, I have hesitated a lot to try out AWS and other cloud services at college due to the "over billing nightmare" you have every time you sign up with the credit card. This is particularly an issue at the part of the world I come from. Hopefully, this will bring down that barrier and bring more college students in to experimenting with the cloud tech. Also, considering the way client meetings getting rescheduled in many cases might help you in generating a lot of cash. ;) (If they haven't created it to restore state in their yaml or bash user-data script, of course!)
  - phamilton 10y ago
    > the part of the world I come from Just curious, is a $5/month DO server cost prohibitive in your neck of the woods?
    - y4mi 10y ago
      Pretty sure he is talking about the people that got hacked (with 2 factor on) and had their acc used to mine bitcoins. I remember reading about that twice one or two years ago Or maybe even less nefarious reports about people accidently ordering a bigger machine and forgetting about it until the month is over. Can result in 1+k bill as well. Or the most talked about problem. Downloading something from the glacier. They're mostly avoidable problems. And they still terrify people with little income
      - OwainX 10y ago
        There are quite a lot of cases where you could find yourself facing a large bill unexpectedly. Forgetting about a server you spun up to try something out, with may platforms having your server hacked (or even DDoSed) could result in huge bills for bandwidth. With Dply you only pay what you pay up-front if you choose to add time to a server. There are no bills racking up. The flip side is that if you forget about it, it could vanish on you. Automating your deployment with something like a user-data script that pulls your code from Github would make this less of a concern. Permanent services on Dply are certainly possible but not the primary use case for most users.
- r0muald 10y ago
  Excellent project! I wish I had this kind of service available a few years ago. Minor question: are the servers configured for IPv4 only?
  - OwainX 10y ago
    Right now they are but if there is enough interest we could enable ipv6 in an update in the near future.
- joosters 10y ago
  I like the simplicity, well done for getting this up and running! Please be more open about the pricing though. When the service costs are not upfront and are buried in the FAQs, I lose trust in the service. Every real customer of yours will want to know what it costs. Have a simple pricing page at the very least, and link to it from the standard 'how does this work?' and other places. Just saying that you can pay $2 to keep your server running longer is not good enough.
  - OwainX 10y ago
    A great suggestion. We've received quite a few suggestions for improvement. As the MVP/First beta we aimed for absolute simplicity in the design and implementation as it's easier to add things than take them away. The homepage and informational sections of the site will receive some improvements over time as we get more feedback like this.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  > credit card or bitcoin Thank you for allowing Bitcoin. Many people don't have a credit card (everyone who has one gets it only because all the American companies require it, but I never needed one in the Netherlands or Germany, the two countries I have experience with).
  - OwainX 10y ago
    You're welcome. Thanks to Stripe there was no extra work required on our end to accept Credit card, bitcoin and alipay. We hope to keep all these options around. There are concerns about having a bitcoin option leading to more abuse so we'll be gathering data over the coming weeks and hopefully the measures we're taking to prevent abuse will allow us to continue to offer the Bitcoin option.
- aceperry 10y ago
  Cool idea, I love it. Solves all of the probs you mentioned. I'm going to try it out and see how it works for me. Thanks.
- diwu1989 10y ago
  something that would be awesome is if there was a command line tool to spin one up & it'd have a ticking timer to let me know how much time is left.
  - bmh100 10y ago
    I agree with this. It would be much better to annoy users with constant "time remaining" notifications than to unexpectedly delete everything when the time expires. This would also function as an up-sell promotion, a literally "limited time offer" to extend the server's life. I'm not sure it's feasible, but what if you also added a command within the instance to extend its life to the next tier?
  - choicenotchance 10y ago
    Yeah. Something along the lines of: dply launch ... bunch of SSH log, logged into instance, see ASCII logo of DPLY like in EC2 servers.. $/home/random-user-11110101010/# AND WE ARE IN
- welly 10y ago
  Love this. I shall have all kinds of fun destroying various linux distros without a care in the world for the consequences. Looking forward to seeing where you go with this. I understand your reservations about building an API but is something I'll look forward to playing with when/if you do eventually provide one! Good luck with the project, I'll be watching this one closely.
- xr09 10y ago
  Awesome service! I've been testing it hard these days and I'm very pleased. One small request, could you allow changing the ssh port to 443 from the web?
  - xr09 10y ago
    Done! https://dply.co/b/MBKBIJqE https://dply.co/b/MBKBIJqE
tluyben2 10y ago
Ah! Brilliant, I was looking for this recently but could not find a reason why someone would make this though. Thanks!
libeclipse 10y ago
Doesn't work for me. I seem to be getting a 403 forbidden code when I authorise it.
- OwainX 10y ago
  This is the only report of this that we've seen and checking our web server we weren't able to find any 403's being returned today. If you see this again, please open a ticket by clicking the question mark in the corner of any page so we can investigate.
echeese 10y ago
Is this from Diply? It uses the same logo font and everything.
- tobltobs 10y ago
  That is the Pattaya font on Dply, which itself is a version of Lobster, which was/is a very popular font for Logos and websites. You will be very busy if you accuse every project which uses Lobster to be a ripoff of Diply. What do you mean with "everything"? The use of the color blue?
  - Exuma 10y ago
    How do you not see the similarity between "Diply" and "dply" that uses the identical font and a similar color...
    - tyingq 10y ago
      It honestly seems like a coincidence to me. Using a popular font (Lobster) for your logo means your logo will look like other people's logos. As for "similar color", the dply logo appears to be black. There is some blue (not the same blue) on the page, I guess?
      - Exuma 10y ago
        Diply's brand color is blue: http://diply.com/ http://diply.com/
        tobltobs 10y ago
        And don't forget those buttons with round corners. /s
        Exuma 10y ago
        I don't get your sarcasm. A logo matching in wording, font, and color, is different than a generic design aspect.
hellofunk 10y ago
This comes at a time when, as a Linux newbie, I am curious about exploring the range of various Linux distros and GUIs out there. Would this be a nice tool to see the differences in the windowing interface of various Linux distros and learning more about navigating Linux through X windows, KDE, Gnome, etc, vs just using a command line?
- Shengbo 10y ago
  These are servers, so you most likely won't get a GUI.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 10y ago
    Could definitely set up some script that goes and sets up a gui from a package repository - but the other comment is right, virtualbox is way better for this kind of thing.
- afandian 10y ago
  You want https://www.virtualbox.org/ https://www.virtualbox.org/
- OwainX 10y ago
  None of our base images include a GUI by default but by using a user-data script you can automate the setup of one. https://dply.co/b/kUfU1zhk https://dply.co/b/kUfU1zhk ^ This link will let you create an Ubuntu 16.04 server and will install and configure x2go and an XFCE desktop as soon as it boots. I prefer x2go since it runs over ssh and supports ssh-key authentication by default.
darkstar999 10y ago
It could use a 'destroy' button (on the page where it shows "add time", "reboot", "rebuild"). This could save you some money.
- andrewthetechie 10y ago
  I work with OwainX and he is having some issues with his HN account right now. He wanted to make sure that you know he heard your comment and an Expire Now option is coming for servers on the free plan later today!
Ivoah 10y ago
Is it possible to destroy a server before it's time is up? What if I made a server, but now want to try out a different one without waiting 2 hours.
- nixgeek 10y ago
  I think DigitalOcean probably bills Dply for one hour minimum so if you could immediately destroy and recreate then you'd quickly add up to a lot more OpEx.
  - OwainX 10y ago
    DigitalOcean does it's billing based on a per-minute basis based on their hourly rates. We have already implemented a feature in our backend code to allow users to "expire" free servers and are working on adding that to the dashboard UI and this option should be available this weekend.
    - nixgeek 10y ago
      That's not what their website claims. How am I billed? Each Droplet is billed per hour up to its monthly cap. Do I have to pay the cost of the server every time I create a new one? No—you only need to pay for 1 hour of usage. For example, spinning up a new 512MB server just to test something for a couple of minutes will only cost you $0.0074 https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#business https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#business
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  There seems to be a "Rebuild" button that allows you to recreate the server from another base image.
  - Ivoah 10y ago
    Yeah, I didn't notice that you could change the OS when rebuilding a server. It should also let you edit the cloud-init script thing.
AndrewVos 10y ago
I kept on getting the "Server name must be etc.". Took me a while to realise that there's a server name field at the top of the page. Maybe make it look like the other fields?
- JorgeGT 10y ago
  I also fell for this. The input field should probably be made more obvious (lighter background) because at first it looks like a cosmetic spacing rule.
  - oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
    It's sort-of using material design, but in this context the text field should probably have a 'placeholder' to make it clearer.
- OwainX 10y ago
  One of the biggest pieces of feedback we've received and near the top of the list to fix. To start with, we'll be giving this field a white background so it's not so easy to miss.
jcrawfordor 10y ago
I've seen a number of services just like this that come and go because of the persistent abuse problems this kind of thing attracts. Perhaps using github for authentication will help but I'm skeptical of how far it will get you. Do you have any other novel strategies to reduce the abuse problem?
- jpalomaki 10y ago
  What kind of abuse has caused problems for the other services?
  - tomcam 10y ago
    First, it can cost way too much money for the service to be sustainable. Second, it opens up many liability issues. Third, your upstream provider can stop the service when they feel there's any kind of a problem at all – even if you work for Amazon.
  - jcrawfordor 10y ago
    A very obvious case would be people sending email - spammers are always hunting to find ways to get their traffic out from IPs without reputation problems. They'll send email from this service and then the services IP addresses will become blacklisted - or more likely the underlying service provider will kick them out to protect their IP space. That's just the most trivial issue, though, and can be part way resolved by host blocking outbound in 25. You'll also get botnet C&C, hosting of illegal content, use to mask scanning traffic, etc. All of these are sometimes operated by people who do not have a problem with ephemeral services and will happily automate creating new accounts and setting up new "temporary" servers. Using github for authentication will partially help as github no doubt has mechanisms in place to limit automatic account creation, but I'd only trust that so far.
    - onetwotree 10y ago
      Looks like they already do that according to the FAQ.
robputt796 10y ago
Really wanted to give this a go but unfortunately when I try and create a server it doesn't do anything, just refreshes to the main dashboard. No error or any other detail is shown. But overall nice idea, would probably use it to provide demos of a script / project for a fixed 2 hour window.
- robputt796 10y ago
  ok, seems to be fixed now... it's simple, and effective.
andrewthetechie 10y ago
I work with OwainX and he is having some issues with his HN account right now (he's blocked from commenting?). He wants to make sure that everyone knows he's heard your suggestions and comments and is working on them. An Expire Now option for free servers should be coming later today!
creullin 10y ago
Pretty cool! Spun up a new server in like 30 seconds. I can see this being helpful for small POC's and the like. I'd say a good next step would be to add some more user-data example scripts for common setups. Awesome job!
- OwainX 10y ago
  We may create a community repository of user-data scripts allowing you to check a "Share this with the community" option on the Dply button creation page. For now, DigitalOcean has a nice Github repository of user-data scripts you can use: https://github.com/digitalocean/do_user_scripts/ https://github.com/digitalocean/do_user_scripts/
Filligree 10y ago
Would it be possible to add NixOS as an option? I'd find that very useful for demonstrating it to people, which... okay, might not be why you're running this. Nowadays I'm handing out shell accounts to my own server, which is mostly fine, but misses out on some of the functionality.
- OwainX 10y ago
  Dply is built on the DigitalOcean cloud which doesn't allow custom OSes so we are somewhat limited in that regard. As others have written scripts to convert a DigitalOcean droplet to Arch and Alpine we are experimenting with making those options available. It appears this exists: https://github.com/jeaye/nixos-in-place https://github.com/jeaye/nixos-in-place which might make NixOS possible as well. We will be carefully reviewing these options as just because there is a hacky way to convert a droplet on DO doesn't mean it'll result in something suitable for re-use or work as expected with cloud-init and ssh key insertion on Dply.
tiger3 10y ago
This is great but a "destroy" button would be good.
accnt 10y ago
First, on the FAQ's section "How do I connect to the ssh service on my server?" is a typo: > An ssh-key is required to connnect to your server. Second, any plan other login/signup methods? Cool idea, I'll play with it.
- OwainX 10y ago
  No plans for different login methods anytime soon. The Github integration also handles the ssh key management so we don't have to store anyone's keys in our database or worry about updates on their key in Github not being immediately reflected. We'll get that typo fixed :)
AWildDHHAppears 10y ago
Amazon has a "free tier" for a microinstance. You need a cc to make an account,though.
emilburzo 10y ago
Very nice project, a lot of times I wished there was something to start a server for a quick ssh/ping/traceroute/debug from outside my network. Well done! A few security aspects that I've noticed so far: - calling the action(s) with an id that doesn't exist will show a pretty useful stacktrace, it should probably be disabled for production - calling the action(s) with ids close to my server, I can do things to other people's servers (presumably, I didn't confirm the action for any of those, but I can at a minimum see what others have named their servers) Not trying to be abusive, I just want to make sure we find the security bugs before the bad guys do, because I really like what you've built here.
- OwainX 10y ago
  Thanks. We also received a ticket about these issues and have deployed fixes. You discover all kinds of things when you go from 15 users to 700 in a matter of an hour or two :)
emcrazyone 10y ago
"Dply blocks common SMTP ports by default in order to prevent abuse of the platform and be able to provide servers for free." Why do this over simpler bandwidth throttling say after a certain threshold has been met?
- giosch 10y ago
  Because no spam is better than a low volume of spam
  - OwainX 10y ago
    Absolutely. Keeping costs low is key to having this model work. Each paid server can cover the costs of a lot of free ones but abuse policy enforcement takes people and that's much more expensive. There are quite a few transactional mail providers who offer APIs that can be used for most purposes where mail sending is needed.
ovao 10y ago
Nice service! I could see this being really useful for web scraping or for offloading compilation. (Or any relatively short computation, really.) I caught a bit of an awkward sentence on the FAQ though: "Unless specifically specified otherwise.." Just "specified" will do :)
- vidyesh 10y ago
  Wouldn't web scraping be considered abusive usage as it is frowned upon by most websites?
  - ovibos 10y ago
    IMO scraping is only abusive if the site explicitly asks to not be scraped (via the site's robots.txt)
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    There are plenty of ways to scrape responsibly.
  - ovao 10y ago
    It could be done in an abusive way, certainly.
  - OwainX 10y ago
    Scraping, when done responsibly (respecting robots.txt and not overloading a server with requests) wouldn't be considered abusive in most cases. While we will be strict in enforcing abuse policies, when it's obvious a user acted with good intentions we can work on a case by case basis.
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  The compiler tool chain is not installed by default on the Ubuntu 16.04 image I used. GCC installs in a few seconds. You'd need to automate the setup. So startup is a bit costly (in time) for compiling, CI, etc. Maybe dlpy could add a dev-ready image one day. edit: the init scripts make setup easy: https://dply.co/help/cloud-init https://dply.co/help/cloud-init
staticelf 10y ago
Cool idea and service, however, I would think this is going to be used a lot for abuse and since you are targeting people who only need a server for a very short span of time I doubt many will continue and actually paying for the service. But I hope you will succeed because there will probably come a time when I need something like this.
kingosticks 10y ago
Is the paid version supposed to work yet? I just tried to create a 2 day instance and clicking the "pay with card" button doesn't do anything. On a related note, does anyone know a good way to pay USD for things like this with a foreign (e.g. UK) bank account. If I use my UK VISA I get stung by my bank's criminal conversion change/rate. This is rarely something I need to do but it has arisen a few times now.
- ryanlol 10y ago
  Switching to a better bank will do it, but debit cards with free international transactions might be a bit of a fringe product. Credit cards tend to get much better deals.
- lexalizer 10y ago
  There are a number of UK credit cards offering 0 fee payments overseas(Aqua, Post Office, I think AMEX). There is also a credit card from Halifax offering a good deal on withdrawals, but apparently, it's hard to get. In addition to that, there are a number of companies offering prepaid cards such as Revolut and another one which I can't remember now.
  - Deathmax 10y ago
    The other prepaid card company you're thinking of is probably Monzo.
  - kingosticks 10y ago
    I've not heard of Revolut so I'll look into them, thanks. I had a look at Monzo before but there was (and still is) a huge waiting list.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Is it a debit card? My credit card doesn't charge any extra fees for international transactions run in the local currency. Some shady merchants will try to claim they have to run in USD or can't take a US credit card but so far I've always been able to insist when abroad.
- 10y ago
fenollp 10y ago
CircleCI gives you 30 minutes of playtime on a 32 cores, 60GB RAM VM. All you have to do is log in with GitHub, start a build of any of your public repo & click "Rebuild with SSH". (No affiliations, I just find this mind blowing)
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Great tidbit. Perhaps it's just not well known. Edit: Multiple machines if your build is in parallel. Nice. > Parallelism and SSH Builds > If your build has parallel steps, we launch more than one VM to perform them. Thus, you’ll see more than one ‘Enable SSH’ and ‘Wait for SSH’ section in the build output. [1]: https://circleci.com/docs/ssh-build/#parallelism-and-ssh-builds https://circleci.com/docs/ssh-build/#parallelism-and-ssh-bui...
- mortar 10y ago
  I love this feature about CircleCI - Pretty sure your builds are limited to 4GB per container however.
martin-adams 10y ago
Sounds pretty cool. I was confused where to get the pricing with the text "Keep it longer for as little as $2 via Credit Card or Bitcoin". I had to go to the FAQ to know how much time $2 gave me. This is definitely for work you could live without, i.e. don't use it for production services. The automatically deleted approach as the first message does lower the trust of stuff not disappearing under your feet. I think the homepage could do with explaining who it's intended for.
- mSparks 10y ago
  I actually think its a great model. easy to deploy, easy to clean up afterwards. exactly how "Cloud" should be.
paradite 10y ago
I am not sure what's the use case for this. For deployment of small web apps, you have heroku, GAE and now, all of which offer "permanent" hosting.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Ditto. Or I can spin up a paid VM for an hour for a penny or less.
- jimmytee 10y ago
  It seems to be great to host Demos for open source projects on there!
antouank 10y ago
Great. Free VPN on demand :)
- therockspush 10y ago
  Exactly what I did. Good practice for getting a server setup quickly. https://medium.com/@therockspush/setting-up-a-free-cloud-based-vpn-d2f35f893515#.yk3onrgys https://medium.com/@therockspush/setting-up-a-free-cloud-bas...
  - antouank 10y ago
    It can be more automated. Here's what I do. https://gist.github.com/AntouanK/190a8e255f0d370ec875f80eaa3fc9f4 https://gist.github.com/AntouanK/190a8e255f0d370ec875f80eaa3... Lines 1-9 can be the cloud-init you pass to the server. Lines 12-15, run them one by one. Done.
gravypod 10y ago
> Your new server's first two hours are FREE. Keep it longer for as little as $2 via Credit Card or Bitcoin. Your server is deleted automatically when its time runs out, never incur unexpected bills. How much longer? This can't be $1/HR
- pkd 10y ago
  2 Days: $2 1 Week: $3 1 Month: $10 6 Months: $50 From https://dply.co/help/faq https://dply.co/help/faq
d--b 10y ago
Aren't you guys worried that this is going to be used for hacking?
- OwainX 10y ago
  Of course we are. The two things this MVP/Beta is testing are: 1.) Our backend abuse procedures and methods for profiling abusive users to keep them from coming back. 2.) Whether enough people will choose to keep a server by adding more time to pay for the free ones. Each paid server covers the cost of over 100 free 2 hour servers. We will continue to adjust things based on what we learn and in the future we may add things like a requirement of a certain level of activity and history on Github. Combined with being able to profile abusers this would create a high barrier to entry for anyone wanting to abuse the service without adding a big barrier for legitimate users.
kentwistle 10y ago
I selected the wrong SSH key to add to my server and now have to wait 2 hours to rectify my mistake. Cool service though!
wheelerwj 10y ago
You should disable bitcoin somehow, or this will end very, very badly for you.
- OwainX 10y ago
  Part of the goal in the beta is to improve the abuse processes and profiling abusive users based on the small amount of data we collect (Github account/ssh keys) with the goal of creating a process that lets us effectively block abusive users without creating higher barriers for others to get started. We'll be tweaking things as we go and whether to keep the Bitcoin option will depend on what the measurable effect of it turns out to be. In the future if abuse becomes a problem we may consider things like requiring a certain amount of history in the Github account.
  - wheelerwj 10y ago
    If that's the angle you are going to take, you should send me a message, will at the company I work for, bitaccess.co We have a lot of experience mitigating fraud and identifying fraudulent accounts. Might be able to give you a few pointers and save you some time.
nik736 10y ago
I am not really sure how this works exactly but since they are receiving my email and ssh keys from GitHub, can't they simply use it for malicious purpose?
- transitorykris 10y ago
  They have access to the public key, not the private key. If you're sufficiently paranoid you could imagine someone acquiring gtihub.com and waiting for `git origin add` typos (let's hope you're also paranoid enough to not ignore new/unknown server keys being added to your known_hosts file).
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - vuanotine 10y ago
    https://github.com/transitorykris.keys https://github.com/transitorykris.keys
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- darkstar999 10y ago
  The SSH key that github has is considered public. The public key can't be used maliciously. The private key is on your machine. The two keys have to be used together to make anything happen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSIDS_lvRv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSIDS_lvRv4
traviswingo 10y ago
Well done!
- OwainX 10y ago
  Thanks!
throwaway123dse 10y ago
Do you support freeBSD?
- peatmoss 10y ago
  The landing page suggests so, but the option to start a server with FBSD seems to be missing.
  - OwainX 10y ago
    The "How it works" page has been updated to remove this reference until we include the FreeBSD image.
- OwainX 10y ago
  We'll be enabling FreeBSD soon
  - _paulc 10y ago
    Was just about to ask for this - thanks for supporting. Very cool service btw.
djent 10y ago
Great service! I needed a free host to demo a class project. Works great, but the user script didn't setup right... maybe I just didn't know how to use it but I tried to follow your example. Would be great to be able to test that before running up a server. Edit: http://198.199.73.132:8080 http://198.199.73.132:8080 if you want to check it out in the next hour and a half
p4bl0 10y ago
If like me you are wondering about the prices, I finally found the FAQ (link in small font at the bottom of the page) and there is the relevant information: 2 Days: $2 1 Week: $3 1 Month: $10 6 Months: $50 So, if you need a long term server (which is not what this service is intended for) it's a lot more expensive than other cheap VPSs (it's easy to find OpenVZ VPSs for as little as $15/yr).
- http-teapot 10y ago
  The price reinforces the idea of free temporary Linux servers with short TTL. I think it's smart and the price point could possibly make up for the money lost providing a free service. I am curious as to how it'll turn out financially.
  - OwainX 10y ago
    That's the real test here. A 2 hour instance is dirt cheap and each paid server covers the cost of at least 100 free ones but until the data starts rolling in we don't know what the base conversion rate will be and whether this can be self-sustaining in the long run.
  - p4bl0 10y ago
    I totally agree with that, that's why I explicitly said "which is not what this service is intended for". My point was to inform people who might be looking for the same information as me, not at all to criticize this service.
kordless 10y ago
I did something very similar a few years ago with http://stackmonkey.com http://stackmonkey.com. Note the site's cert is currently invalid and there are no pool controllers running, so you can't start a server until someone starts a pool controller. The idea was to tie starts of instances to something decentralized (Bitcoin) and then securely fetch the configuration data from somewhere you control. Thinking IPFS for that in the next iteration.
maerF0x0 10y ago
if i can pay with bitcoin, whats to stop me from doing bad things with these servers?
- OwainX 10y ago
  Without going into too much detail we keep track of users, profiling things like ssh keys and github accounts, IP addresses and activity in order to make sure that abusers, once identified cannot come back. All payments are non-refundable (though if we break something we'll credit the time back in almost all cases) so if you pay with bitcoin and abuse the service you'd be out the money with no server left to show for it. The ephemeral nature of Dply servers means that verified cases of abuse will usually result in server deletion and account locking. If even with the processes we have in place, abuse becomes an issue we could require that the Github account used has a certain amount of history and activity (doing more to profile the user that way). All these things combined with no API and automation of creation being disallowed makes for a low ROI on an abuser's time compared to other services already available.
achr2 10y ago
The pricing seems very fair, you should make it more prevalent.
- OwainX 10y ago
  For the initial release we focused on extreme simplicity in our design. It's easier to add things than remove them. We'll be making updates to the homepage and informational pages in the coming weeks to make information more prevalent and respond to feedback and suggestions like this one.
wyldfire 10y ago
This is a really neat service. Thanks, I probably will get some leverage out of this.
hoschicz 10y ago
Have you evaluated using containers for this type of workloads? You could save a fuckton of money this way.
- OwainX 10y ago
  Containers and container services are great but sometimes you need a full server and doing a PaaS with containers has it's own challenges to ensure isolation, have network setup work easily and other factors. I use containers for some of my own stuff but other things are just better with a full VM.
homerguy69 10y ago
Is there no way to manually delete an instance?
- OwainX 10y ago
  There will be soon. We've already implemented an "expire now" function in the backend for servers on the free plan and are working on adding it to the UI. We're hopeful that this feature will be available this weekend.
djhworld 10y ago
I'm wondering what the digital ocean terms and conditions are around this, Dply looks like it is subcontracting their infrastructure, is that allowed?
- OwainX 10y ago
  DO absolutely allows (and encourages) resellers and SaaS platforms on their service. My day job is with DO and Dply was built as a side project to meet some needs I have heard from developers, students, and open source projects. Dply operates with DO's blessing but is otherwise unrelated in any official sense. We launched under a credit like those offered in the Hatch program for startups: https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/ https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/
Procrastes 10y ago
First impressions: * I love this idea. This is basically what I use Digital Ocean for, and this reduces the steps. * I would like to see bitbucket sign-in and keys support. * I missed the server name field on my first pass. My eyes were drawn to the drop-downs. So when I hit the submit I got an error and, even then, it took me a moment to see where the servername should go. * I probably wouldn't have noticed the "create a button" if I hadn't read about it here. * I agree with others that a "destroy" option would be nice. * The button is cool. This whole approach makes me want to start embedding cloud-init scripts in all my repositories. But then I loose using cloud-init for pulling down my personal dotfiles and preferred packages. I'll have to think about how to solve that. Great idea! I hope this takes off.
- OwainX 10y ago
  Thanks. A lot of this feedback I've been hearing from others today. We'll be updating the serer name field to stand out visually better and doing updates to the home page and informational pages to both highlight the button capability and better present details like pricing. An "expire now" option for servers on the free plan will be in place this weekend which will allow you to delete a free server before it expires.
VertexRed 10y ago
The biggest issue that I can see with this is abuse. Do you have a way of preventing email spam and outgoing DoS attacks?
- OwainX 10y ago
  SMTP ports are blocked and we recommend using a transactional mail service if your server needs to send mail. We're implementing a number of things to profile abusers and prevent abuse on the platform and will be strictly enforcing policies against abuse. The lack of an API and prohibition on automating the creation of servers combined with required Github profile for ssh keys help to make the service unattractive for most abuse cases. Our goal is to use these methods to prevent abuse while keeping a very low barrier to entry for legitimate users.
znpy 10y ago
If you need temporary linux servers, check out linuxacademy.com. I have a paid account and besides accessing the content, i can spin up to six virtual machine to test stuff, at no extra cost besides the montly fee.
PetahNZ 10y ago
Ever wanted to find out what happens when you rm -rf / --no-preserve-root Well now you can find out.
- welly 10y ago
  brb, off to rm -rf / --no-preserve-root. Edit. ls -al / ls: command not found etc.
  - ben0x539 10y ago
    That's what echo * is for!
debt 10y ago
this is awesome! great work.
petters 10y ago
Just tried this and I really like it. I hope this is here to stay. The Dply button could be huge!
kaizoku111 10y ago
For those who want Arch Linux, you can just run this script: https://github.com/gh2o/digitalocean-debian-to-arch https://github.com/gh2o/digitalocean-debian-to-arch

673 points by OwainX 10y ago

This is a project I've been working on for a while. Dply allows you to quickly create a temporary cloud server (1CPU/512MB RAM/20GB SSD) for free. You can have one free server running at any time. Log in with your Github account and it will allow you to create your server using your Github ssh-key. Servers are free for 2 hours and expire after that time (unless you choose to add more time via credit card or bitcoin). It's a quick and easy way to demo some code on a live server or just play around with a few popular Linux distros. We also provide the ability to create a button for your project allowing you to let people create a server with your service/project running on it for free to try it out. Create a yaml or bash user-data script and others can launch servers with it. For the last 11 years on and off I've run a small Linux distribution. I work for a well known cloud host by day but in talking with users learned that it's a hassle sometimes to create an account, billing profile and all that when you just need to quickly test or share something so I built this in my free time. Do you expect to make money on this? Honestly, no idea. I have a decent credit grant that will cover free 2 hour servers for a while so it was worth trying out. How do I log into my server? All servers are created with ssh-key authentication only. You are provided the option to select from the ssh keys on your Github account when you create a server. Your key will be applied to the "root" account. I am happy to answer any questions about dply.co and would love any feedback.

pjc50 10y ago
Can I make another free server immediately afterwards? What's your anti-abuse policy/process?
- OwainX 10y ago
  As a free service we will pretty strictly enforce abuse reports and take action on them. We're using a few methods to profile users based on their github account/ssh key and other factors to block abusers once their identified. Dply servers are blocked from using SMTP ports to prevent spam. Yes. You can create another server once the first expires but automating this process is not allowed and therefore we do not provide an API.
  - ryao 10y ago
    What constitutes abuse? I imagine certain applications that would be fine with the server going up and down every 2 hours. That would effectively mean that they would have free service indefinitely. For example, a Tor bridge.
    - rounce 10y ago
      Shhhh, you're gonna ruin it for everybody else!
      - oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
        We were all thinking it.
    - wheelerwj 10y ago
      Or bitcoin miners
      - brianwawok 10y ago
        You would mine maybe 1 penny per day. Not worth the click.
        wheelerwj 10y ago
        ....that's not how fraud works. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7490766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7490766 Just google aws bitcoin mining abuse and see what happens when shitty people have access to free servers.
        iancarroll 10y ago
        Pretty sure it only makes sense when you can spin up AWS GPU instances, which you probably cannot do here.
        10y ago
detaro 10y ago
Looks cool, I hope it works out for you! First impressions: From the sub-pages ("how it works" etc) you should add clearer links to the start page/maybe add a login button on those as well? You should have some info about who you/your company are if you want people to maybe give you money (maybe that's even legally required)
- OwainX 10y ago
  Great feedback. The goal was to keep things as clean and basic as possible but the site itself will continue to be improved as we learn more about how people use the service.
cschep 10y ago
how will you deal with abuse? scripts to just spin and mine bit coin etc. cool project!
- OwainX 10y ago
  This initial release is designed to test two things. 1.) Our abuse processes. The goal in this area is to both be very strict in preventing abuse while trying to do so with as little inconvenience for legitimate users as possible and 2.) Testing the ROI. Cloud servers are really inexpensive for short periods and we will be testing conversion rates to see if the project can be self-sustaining through the added time model.
  - nixgeek 10y ago
    At the point someone's wanting something for a month, why wouldn't they go pay $5 to DigitalOcean, vs. $10 to you?
    - hobofan 10y ago
      Why wouldn't Dply just become a DigitalOcean reseller and only cost $5? I could definately see this working out as a customer aquistion channel for DO, eith Dply getting a referral fee.
      - joantune 10y ago
        Because he works for AWS :D. But ditto for AWS
        OwainX 10y ago
        Actually, I work for DO :) But Dply is not a DO project or product. It's my personal side-project and while I have DO's blessing to run it, it's otherwise unrelated and acts like any other DO customer reselling or running an SaaS. Automatic deletion, the built in user-data button system and our acceptance of Bitcoin and Alipay provide options that DO itself currently does not offer. This is the MVP/Initial Beta of Dply and we're hoping to learn a lot from it. One thing we are testing is whether we'll see high enough conversion rates by users adding time to their servers to cover the costs of the free servers and hopefully make a profit. Acting as a DO referrer is a backup option that could add credit to the platform to help cover costs if the current model proves unsustainable.
netrap 10y ago
The server name field might be better suited to be a white box like the rest of the options after you click New Server. Nice idea. Might want to have some kind of vetting of accounts if it gets bigger.
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  Strongly agree. I missed the server name field and got an error about the syntax for server names instead of 'you didn't enter a server name' error. Field should be visually similar to the other fields.
  - lemiffe 10y ago
    Same here
- reledi 10y ago
  Agreed, I completely missed the server name field. Scanned over it thinking it was a horizontal line with a label below and didn't bother to read it.
Tepix 10y ago
That's a pretty cool service, I think I can use that for a github project of mine. You should consider adding a "shutdown and delete" button to get rid of VMs when your users are done with them.
- OwainX 10y ago
  We'll be adding an "expire now" option for servers on the free plan this weekend :)
  - OwainX 10y ago
    We've rolled out an initial version of the "expire now" functionality. Click the [X] in the top right of any free server's box in the dashboard and you'll be taken to a confirmation page letting you expire the server's remaining time immediately
oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
FYI, small typo on https://dply.co/how https://dply.co/how - "it's" should be "its".
- smnc 10y ago
  Also on https://dply.co/help/sshkey https://dply.co/help/sshkey there's mention of "pubic" key instead of a public key.
  - Gruselbauer 10y ago
    Or it signifies the beginning of key-authenticated intercourse. Just saying...
    - ComodoHacker 10y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chastity_belt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chastity_belt
  - OwainX 10y ago
    Haha.. ok that one is hilarious.. and it's been fixed (the typo that is)
Warp__ 10y ago
Thanks a lot, this service looks really useful. Would it be possible to offer a LAMP install for two hours?
- jenskanis 10y ago
  This is already possible. They support Cloud-init: https://dply.co/help/cloud-init https://dply.co/help/cloud-init
  - Warp__ 10y ago
    Ah, didn't read closely enough. Thank You.
adito 10y ago
Suggestion, after the server successfully created, show the command that they can execute to access the server (ssh root@<ip>, with <ip> being replaced with the real ip).
- OwainX 10y ago
  We've had several people suggest making this more prevalent and it's on our todo list :)
  - dividuum 10y ago
    I haven't used your service yet, but if I understand the limitation correctly (only github logins/only one server per login) I think it should also be possible to automatically derive a subdomain name from the github username and have that point to the server. Not sure if that's a good idea, just throwing an idea over the wall :-)
0x54MUR41 10y ago
It's cool project. Well done! OP This is my first try: I tested to create a "dply" button on https://dply.co/button https://dply.co/button. I tried not to fill out the form and clicked "CREATE BUTTON". The page replied with errors and their trace. SQL statements and other Ruby keywords were shown. I think it would be better if there is an error handler, like a warning that form is not filled out completely.
- OwainX 10y ago
  We found an issue where the stacktrace was originally enabled in our code twice so when it was switched off it was being overridden. That's been fixed. Adding better form validation for the button creation form is also on our list. Our primary focus as we receive bug reports is on issues that directly affect server creation, deletion and billing as those are the highest impact. Since the button form just creates a shortlink and saves some text it's a lower priority but we should have significant improvements in place for that page in the next week or so.
hashin 10y ago
This is a pretty cool service! I have had my moments when I had to set up the AWS free tier a few hours before a very important client meeting. I have this gut feeling that this service will make the cloud technology a bit more accessible for a budding to medium skilled developer. Personally, I have hesitated a lot to try out AWS and other cloud services at college due to the "over billing nightmare" you have every time you sign up with the credit card. This is particularly an issue at the part of the world I come from. Hopefully, this will bring down that barrier and bring more college students in to experimenting with the cloud tech. Also, considering the way client meetings getting rescheduled in many cases might help you in generating a lot of cash. ;) (If they haven't created it to restore state in their yaml or bash user-data script, of course!)
- phamilton 10y ago
  > the part of the world I come from Just curious, is a $5/month DO server cost prohibitive in your neck of the woods?
  - y4mi 10y ago
    Pretty sure he is talking about the people that got hacked (with 2 factor on) and had their acc used to mine bitcoins. I remember reading about that twice one or two years ago Or maybe even less nefarious reports about people accidently ordering a bigger machine and forgetting about it until the month is over. Can result in 1+k bill as well. Or the most talked about problem. Downloading something from the glacier. They're mostly avoidable problems. And they still terrify people with little income
    - OwainX 10y ago
      There are quite a lot of cases where you could find yourself facing a large bill unexpectedly. Forgetting about a server you spun up to try something out, with may platforms having your server hacked (or even DDoSed) could result in huge bills for bandwidth. With Dply you only pay what you pay up-front if you choose to add time to a server. There are no bills racking up. The flip side is that if you forget about it, it could vanish on you. Automating your deployment with something like a user-data script that pulls your code from Github would make this less of a concern. Permanent services on Dply are certainly possible but not the primary use case for most users.
r0muald 10y ago
Excellent project! I wish I had this kind of service available a few years ago. Minor question: are the servers configured for IPv4 only?
- OwainX 10y ago
  Right now they are but if there is enough interest we could enable ipv6 in an update in the near future.
joosters 10y ago
I like the simplicity, well done for getting this up and running! Please be more open about the pricing though. When the service costs are not upfront and are buried in the FAQs, I lose trust in the service. Every real customer of yours will want to know what it costs. Have a simple pricing page at the very least, and link to it from the standard 'how does this work?' and other places. Just saying that you can pay $2 to keep your server running longer is not good enough.
- OwainX 10y ago
  A great suggestion. We've received quite a few suggestions for improvement. As the MVP/First beta we aimed for absolute simplicity in the design and implementation as it's easier to add things than take them away. The homepage and informational sections of the site will receive some improvements over time as we get more feedback like this.
lucb1e 10y ago
> credit card or bitcoin Thank you for allowing Bitcoin. Many people don't have a credit card (everyone who has one gets it only because all the American companies require it, but I never needed one in the Netherlands or Germany, the two countries I have experience with).
- OwainX 10y ago
  You're welcome. Thanks to Stripe there was no extra work required on our end to accept Credit card, bitcoin and alipay. We hope to keep all these options around. There are concerns about having a bitcoin option leading to more abuse so we'll be gathering data over the coming weeks and hopefully the measures we're taking to prevent abuse will allow us to continue to offer the Bitcoin option.
aceperry 10y ago
Cool idea, I love it. Solves all of the probs you mentioned. I'm going to try it out and see how it works for me. Thanks.
diwu1989 10y ago
something that would be awesome is if there was a command line tool to spin one up & it'd have a ticking timer to let me know how much time is left.
- bmh100 10y ago
  I agree with this. It would be much better to annoy users with constant "time remaining" notifications than to unexpectedly delete everything when the time expires. This would also function as an up-sell promotion, a literally "limited time offer" to extend the server's life. I'm not sure it's feasible, but what if you also added a command within the instance to extend its life to the next tier?
- choicenotchance 10y ago
  Yeah. Something along the lines of: dply launch ... bunch of SSH log, logged into instance, see ASCII logo of DPLY like in EC2 servers.. $/home/random-user-11110101010/# AND WE ARE IN
welly 10y ago
Love this. I shall have all kinds of fun destroying various linux distros without a care in the world for the consequences. Looking forward to seeing where you go with this. I understand your reservations about building an API but is something I'll look forward to playing with when/if you do eventually provide one! Good luck with the project, I'll be watching this one closely.
xr09 10y ago
Awesome service! I've been testing it hard these days and I'm very pleased. One small request, could you allow changing the ssh port to 443 from the web?
- xr09 10y ago
  Done! https://dply.co/b/MBKBIJqE https://dply.co/b/MBKBIJqE

tluyben2 10y ago

Ah! Brilliant, I was looking for this recently but could not find a reason why someone would make this though. Thanks!

libeclipse 10y ago

Doesn't work for me. I seem to be getting a 403 forbidden code when I authorise it.

OwainX 10y ago
This is the only report of this that we've seen and checking our web server we weren't able to find any 403's being returned today. If you see this again, please open a ticket by clicking the question mark in the corner of any page so we can investigate.

echeese 10y ago

Is this from Diply? It uses the same logo font and everything.

tobltobs 10y ago
That is the Pattaya font on Dply, which itself is a version of Lobster, which was/is a very popular font for Logos and websites. You will be very busy if you accuse every project which uses Lobster to be a ripoff of Diply. What do you mean with "everything"? The use of the color blue?
- Exuma 10y ago
  How do you not see the similarity between "Diply" and "dply" that uses the identical font and a similar color...
  - tyingq 10y ago
    It honestly seems like a coincidence to me. Using a popular font (Lobster) for your logo means your logo will look like other people's logos. As for "similar color", the dply logo appears to be black. There is some blue (not the same blue) on the page, I guess?
    - Exuma 10y ago
      Diply's brand color is blue: http://diply.com/ http://diply.com/
      - tobltobs 10y ago
        And don't forget those buttons with round corners. /s
        Exuma 10y ago
        I don't get your sarcasm. A logo matching in wording, font, and color, is different than a generic design aspect.

hellofunk 10y ago

This comes at a time when, as a Linux newbie, I am curious about exploring the range of various Linux distros and GUIs out there. Would this be a nice tool to see the differences in the windowing interface of various Linux distros and learning more about navigating Linux through X windows, KDE, Gnome, etc, vs just using a command line?

Shengbo 10y ago
These are servers, so you most likely won't get a GUI.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 10y ago
  Could definitely set up some script that goes and sets up a gui from a package repository - but the other comment is right, virtualbox is way better for this kind of thing.
afandian 10y ago
You want https://www.virtualbox.org/ https://www.virtualbox.org/
OwainX 10y ago
None of our base images include a GUI by default but by using a user-data script you can automate the setup of one. https://dply.co/b/kUfU1zhk https://dply.co/b/kUfU1zhk ^ This link will let you create an Ubuntu 16.04 server and will install and configure x2go and an XFCE desktop as soon as it boots. I prefer x2go since it runs over ssh and supports ssh-key authentication by default.

darkstar999 10y ago

It could use a 'destroy' button (on the page where it shows "add time", "reboot", "rebuild"). This could save you some money.

andrewthetechie 10y ago
I work with OwainX and he is having some issues with his HN account right now. He wanted to make sure that you know he heard your comment and an Expire Now option is coming for servers on the free plan later today!

Ivoah 10y ago

Is it possible to destroy a server before it's time is up? What if I made a server, but now want to try out a different one without waiting 2 hours.

nixgeek 10y ago
I think DigitalOcean probably bills Dply for one hour minimum so if you could immediately destroy and recreate then you'd quickly add up to a lot more OpEx.
- OwainX 10y ago
  DigitalOcean does it's billing based on a per-minute basis based on their hourly rates. We have already implemented a feature in our backend code to allow users to "expire" free servers and are working on adding that to the dashboard UI and this option should be available this weekend.
  - nixgeek 10y ago
    That's not what their website claims. How am I billed? Each Droplet is billed per hour up to its monthly cap. Do I have to pay the cost of the server every time I create a new one? No—you only need to pay for 1 hour of usage. For example, spinning up a new 512MB server just to test something for a couple of minutes will only cost you $0.0074 https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#business https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#business
Nullabillity 10y ago
There seems to be a "Rebuild" button that allows you to recreate the server from another base image.
- Ivoah 10y ago
  Yeah, I didn't notice that you could change the OS when rebuilding a server. It should also let you edit the cloud-init script thing.

AndrewVos 10y ago

I kept on getting the "Server name must be etc.". Took me a while to realise that there's a server name field at the top of the page. Maybe make it look like the other fields?

JorgeGT 10y ago
I also fell for this. The input field should probably be made more obvious (lighter background) because at first it looks like a cosmetic spacing rule.
- oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
  It's sort-of using material design, but in this context the text field should probably have a 'placeholder' to make it clearer.
OwainX 10y ago
One of the biggest pieces of feedback we've received and near the top of the list to fix. To start with, we'll be giving this field a white background so it's not so easy to miss.

jcrawfordor 10y ago

I've seen a number of services just like this that come and go because of the persistent abuse problems this kind of thing attracts. Perhaps using github for authentication will help but I'm skeptical of how far it will get you. Do you have any other novel strategies to reduce the abuse problem?

jpalomaki 10y ago
What kind of abuse has caused problems for the other services?
- tomcam 10y ago
  First, it can cost way too much money for the service to be sustainable. Second, it opens up many liability issues. Third, your upstream provider can stop the service when they feel there's any kind of a problem at all – even if you work for Amazon.
- jcrawfordor 10y ago
  A very obvious case would be people sending email - spammers are always hunting to find ways to get their traffic out from IPs without reputation problems. They'll send email from this service and then the services IP addresses will become blacklisted - or more likely the underlying service provider will kick them out to protect their IP space. That's just the most trivial issue, though, and can be part way resolved by host blocking outbound in 25. You'll also get botnet C&C, hosting of illegal content, use to mask scanning traffic, etc. All of these are sometimes operated by people who do not have a problem with ephemeral services and will happily automate creating new accounts and setting up new "temporary" servers. Using github for authentication will partially help as github no doubt has mechanisms in place to limit automatic account creation, but I'd only trust that so far.
  - onetwotree 10y ago
    Looks like they already do that according to the FAQ.

robputt796 10y ago

Really wanted to give this a go but unfortunately when I try and create a server it doesn't do anything, just refreshes to the main dashboard. No error or any other detail is shown. But overall nice idea, would probably use it to provide demos of a script / project for a fixed 2 hour window.

robputt796 10y ago
ok, seems to be fixed now... it's simple, and effective.

andrewthetechie 10y ago

I work with OwainX and he is having some issues with his HN account right now (he's blocked from commenting?). He wants to make sure that everyone knows he's heard your suggestions and comments and is working on them. An Expire Now option for free servers should be coming later today!

creullin 10y ago

Pretty cool! Spun up a new server in like 30 seconds. I can see this being helpful for small POC's and the like. I'd say a good next step would be to add some more user-data example scripts for common setups. Awesome job!

OwainX 10y ago
We may create a community repository of user-data scripts allowing you to check a "Share this with the community" option on the Dply button creation page. For now, DigitalOcean has a nice Github repository of user-data scripts you can use: https://github.com/digitalocean/do_user_scripts/ https://github.com/digitalocean/do_user_scripts/

Filligree 10y ago

Would it be possible to add NixOS as an option? I'd find that very useful for demonstrating it to people, which... okay, might not be why you're running this. Nowadays I'm handing out shell accounts to my own server, which is mostly fine, but misses out on some of the functionality.

OwainX 10y ago
Dply is built on the DigitalOcean cloud which doesn't allow custom OSes so we are somewhat limited in that regard. As others have written scripts to convert a DigitalOcean droplet to Arch and Alpine we are experimenting with making those options available. It appears this exists: https://github.com/jeaye/nixos-in-place https://github.com/jeaye/nixos-in-place which might make NixOS possible as well. We will be carefully reviewing these options as just because there is a hacky way to convert a droplet on DO doesn't mean it'll result in something suitable for re-use or work as expected with cloud-init and ssh key insertion on Dply.

tiger3 10y ago

This is great but a "destroy" button would be good.

accnt 10y ago

First, on the FAQ's section "How do I connect to the ssh service on my server?" is a typo: > An ssh-key is required to connnect to your server. Second, any plan other login/signup methods? Cool idea, I'll play with it.

OwainX 10y ago
No plans for different login methods anytime soon. The Github integration also handles the ssh key management so we don't have to store anyone's keys in our database or worry about updates on their key in Github not being immediately reflected. We'll get that typo fixed :)

AWildDHHAppears 10y ago

Amazon has a "free tier" for a microinstance. You need a cc to make an account,though.

emilburzo 10y ago

Very nice project, a lot of times I wished there was something to start a server for a quick ssh/ping/traceroute/debug from outside my network. Well done! A few security aspects that I've noticed so far: - calling the action(s) with an id that doesn't exist will show a pretty useful stacktrace, it should probably be disabled for production - calling the action(s) with ids close to my server, I can do things to other people's servers (presumably, I didn't confirm the action for any of those, but I can at a minimum see what others have named their servers) Not trying to be abusive, I just want to make sure we find the security bugs before the bad guys do, because I really like what you've built here.

OwainX 10y ago
Thanks. We also received a ticket about these issues and have deployed fixes. You discover all kinds of things when you go from 15 users to 700 in a matter of an hour or two :)

emcrazyone 10y ago

"Dply blocks common SMTP ports by default in order to prevent abuse of the platform and be able to provide servers for free." Why do this over simpler bandwidth throttling say after a certain threshold has been met?

giosch 10y ago
Because no spam is better than a low volume of spam
- OwainX 10y ago
  Absolutely. Keeping costs low is key to having this model work. Each paid server can cover the costs of a lot of free ones but abuse policy enforcement takes people and that's much more expensive. There are quite a few transactional mail providers who offer APIs that can be used for most purposes where mail sending is needed.

ovao 10y ago

Nice service! I could see this being really useful for web scraping or for offloading compilation. (Or any relatively short computation, really.) I caught a bit of an awkward sentence on the FAQ though: "Unless specifically specified otherwise.." Just "specified" will do :)

vidyesh 10y ago
Wouldn't web scraping be considered abusive usage as it is frowned upon by most websites?
- ovibos 10y ago
  IMO scraping is only abusive if the site explicitly asks to not be scraped (via the site's robots.txt)
- tedmiston 10y ago
  There are plenty of ways to scrape responsibly.
- ovao 10y ago
  It could be done in an abusive way, certainly.
- OwainX 10y ago
  Scraping, when done responsibly (respecting robots.txt and not overloading a server with requests) wouldn't be considered abusive in most cases. While we will be strict in enforcing abuse policies, when it's obvious a user acted with good intentions we can work on a case by case basis.
robotresearcher 10y ago
The compiler tool chain is not installed by default on the Ubuntu 16.04 image I used. GCC installs in a few seconds. You'd need to automate the setup. So startup is a bit costly (in time) for compiling, CI, etc. Maybe dlpy could add a dev-ready image one day. edit: the init scripts make setup easy: https://dply.co/help/cloud-init https://dply.co/help/cloud-init

staticelf 10y ago

Cool idea and service, however, I would think this is going to be used a lot for abuse and since you are targeting people who only need a server for a very short span of time I doubt many will continue and actually paying for the service. But I hope you will succeed because there will probably come a time when I need something like this.

kingosticks 10y ago

Is the paid version supposed to work yet? I just tried to create a 2 day instance and clicking the "pay with card" button doesn't do anything. On a related note, does anyone know a good way to pay USD for things like this with a foreign (e.g. UK) bank account. If I use my UK VISA I get stung by my bank's criminal conversion change/rate. This is rarely something I need to do but it has arisen a few times now.

ryanlol 10y ago
Switching to a better bank will do it, but debit cards with free international transactions might be a bit of a fringe product. Credit cards tend to get much better deals.
lexalizer 10y ago
There are a number of UK credit cards offering 0 fee payments overseas(Aqua, Post Office, I think AMEX). There is also a credit card from Halifax offering a good deal on withdrawals, but apparently, it's hard to get. In addition to that, there are a number of companies offering prepaid cards such as Revolut and another one which I can't remember now.
- Deathmax 10y ago
  The other prepaid card company you're thinking of is probably Monzo.
- kingosticks 10y ago
  I've not heard of Revolut so I'll look into them, thanks. I had a look at Monzo before but there was (and still is) a huge waiting list.
tedmiston 10y ago
Is it a debit card? My credit card doesn't charge any extra fees for international transactions run in the local currency. Some shady merchants will try to claim they have to run in USD or can't take a US credit card but so far I've always been able to insist when abroad.
10y ago

fenollp 10y ago

CircleCI gives you 30 minutes of playtime on a 32 cores, 60GB RAM VM. All you have to do is log in with GitHub, start a build of any of your public repo & click "Rebuild with SSH". (No affiliations, I just find this mind blowing)

tedmiston 10y ago
Great tidbit. Perhaps it's just not well known. Edit: Multiple machines if your build is in parallel. Nice. > Parallelism and SSH Builds > If your build has parallel steps, we launch more than one VM to perform them. Thus, you’ll see more than one ‘Enable SSH’ and ‘Wait for SSH’ section in the build output. [1]: https://circleci.com/docs/ssh-build/#parallelism-and-ssh-builds https://circleci.com/docs/ssh-build/#parallelism-and-ssh-bui...
mortar 10y ago
I love this feature about CircleCI - Pretty sure your builds are limited to 4GB per container however.

martin-adams 10y ago

Sounds pretty cool. I was confused where to get the pricing with the text "Keep it longer for as little as $2 via Credit Card or Bitcoin". I had to go to the FAQ to know how much time $2 gave me. This is definitely for work you could live without, i.e. don't use it for production services. The automatically deleted approach as the first message does lower the trust of stuff not disappearing under your feet. I think the homepage could do with explaining who it's intended for.

mSparks 10y ago
I actually think its a great model. easy to deploy, easy to clean up afterwards. exactly how "Cloud" should be.

paradite 10y ago

I am not sure what's the use case for this. For deployment of small web apps, you have heroku, GAE and now, all of which offer "permanent" hosting.

brianwawok 10y ago
Ditto. Or I can spin up a paid VM for an hour for a penny or less.
jimmytee 10y ago
It seems to be great to host Demos for open source projects on there!

antouank 10y ago

Great. Free VPN on demand :)

therockspush 10y ago
Exactly what I did. Good practice for getting a server setup quickly. https://medium.com/@therockspush/setting-up-a-free-cloud-based-vpn-d2f35f893515#.yk3onrgys https://medium.com/@therockspush/setting-up-a-free-cloud-bas...
- antouank 10y ago
  It can be more automated. Here's what I do. https://gist.github.com/AntouanK/190a8e255f0d370ec875f80eaa3fc9f4 https://gist.github.com/AntouanK/190a8e255f0d370ec875f80eaa3... Lines 1-9 can be the cloud-init you pass to the server. Lines 12-15, run them one by one. Done.

gravypod 10y ago

> Your new server's first two hours are FREE. Keep it longer for as little as $2 via Credit Card or Bitcoin. Your server is deleted automatically when its time runs out, never incur unexpected bills. How much longer? This can't be $1/HR

pkd 10y ago
2 Days: $2 1 Week: $3 1 Month: $10 6 Months: $50 From https://dply.co/help/faq https://dply.co/help/faq

d--b 10y ago

Aren't you guys worried that this is going to be used for hacking?

OwainX 10y ago
Of course we are. The two things this MVP/Beta is testing are: 1.) Our backend abuse procedures and methods for profiling abusive users to keep them from coming back. 2.) Whether enough people will choose to keep a server by adding more time to pay for the free ones. Each paid server covers the cost of over 100 free 2 hour servers. We will continue to adjust things based on what we learn and in the future we may add things like a requirement of a certain level of activity and history on Github. Combined with being able to profile abusers this would create a high barrier to entry for anyone wanting to abuse the service without adding a big barrier for legitimate users.

kentwistle 10y ago

I selected the wrong SSH key to add to my server and now have to wait 2 hours to rectify my mistake. Cool service though!

wheelerwj 10y ago

You should disable bitcoin somehow, or this will end very, very badly for you.

OwainX 10y ago
Part of the goal in the beta is to improve the abuse processes and profiling abusive users based on the small amount of data we collect (Github account/ssh keys) with the goal of creating a process that lets us effectively block abusive users without creating higher barriers for others to get started. We'll be tweaking things as we go and whether to keep the Bitcoin option will depend on what the measurable effect of it turns out to be. In the future if abuse becomes a problem we may consider things like requiring a certain amount of history in the Github account.
- wheelerwj 10y ago
  If that's the angle you are going to take, you should send me a message, will at the company I work for, bitaccess.co We have a lot of experience mitigating fraud and identifying fraudulent accounts. Might be able to give you a few pointers and save you some time.

nik736 10y ago

I am not really sure how this works exactly but since they are receiving my email and ssh keys from GitHub, can't they simply use it for malicious purpose?

transitorykris 10y ago
They have access to the public key, not the private key. If you're sufficiently paranoid you could imagine someone acquiring gtihub.com and waiting for `git origin add` typos (let's hope you're also paranoid enough to not ignore new/unknown server keys being added to your known_hosts file).
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- vuanotine 10y ago
  https://github.com/transitorykris.keys https://github.com/transitorykris.keys
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
darkstar999 10y ago
The SSH key that github has is considered public. The public key can't be used maliciously. The private key is on your machine. The two keys have to be used together to make anything happen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSIDS_lvRv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSIDS_lvRv4

traviswingo 10y ago

Well done!

OwainX 10y ago
Thanks!

throwaway123dse 10y ago

Do you support freeBSD?

peatmoss 10y ago
The landing page suggests so, but the option to start a server with FBSD seems to be missing.
- OwainX 10y ago
  The "How it works" page has been updated to remove this reference until we include the FreeBSD image.
OwainX 10y ago
We'll be enabling FreeBSD soon
- _paulc 10y ago
  Was just about to ask for this - thanks for supporting. Very cool service btw.

djent 10y ago

Great service! I needed a free host to demo a class project. Works great, but the user script didn't setup right... maybe I just didn't know how to use it but I tried to follow your example. Would be great to be able to test that before running up a server. Edit: http://198.199.73.132:8080 http://198.199.73.132:8080 if you want to check it out in the next hour and a half

p4bl0 10y ago

If like me you are wondering about the prices, I finally found the FAQ (link in small font at the bottom of the page) and there is the relevant information: 2 Days: $2 1 Week: $3 1 Month: $10 6 Months: $50 So, if you need a long term server (which is not what this service is intended for) it's a lot more expensive than other cheap VPSs (it's easy to find OpenVZ VPSs for as little as $15/yr).

http-teapot 10y ago
The price reinforces the idea of free temporary Linux servers with short TTL. I think it's smart and the price point could possibly make up for the money lost providing a free service. I am curious as to how it'll turn out financially.
- OwainX 10y ago
  That's the real test here. A 2 hour instance is dirt cheap and each paid server covers the cost of at least 100 free ones but until the data starts rolling in we don't know what the base conversion rate will be and whether this can be self-sustaining in the long run.
- p4bl0 10y ago
  I totally agree with that, that's why I explicitly said "which is not what this service is intended for". My point was to inform people who might be looking for the same information as me, not at all to criticize this service.

kordless 10y ago

I did something very similar a few years ago with http://stackmonkey.com http://stackmonkey.com. Note the site's cert is currently invalid and there are no pool controllers running, so you can't start a server until someone starts a pool controller. The idea was to tie starts of instances to something decentralized (Bitcoin) and then securely fetch the configuration data from somewhere you control. Thinking IPFS for that in the next iteration.

maerF0x0 10y ago

if i can pay with bitcoin, whats to stop me from doing bad things with these servers?

OwainX 10y ago
Without going into too much detail we keep track of users, profiling things like ssh keys and github accounts, IP addresses and activity in order to make sure that abusers, once identified cannot come back. All payments are non-refundable (though if we break something we'll credit the time back in almost all cases) so if you pay with bitcoin and abuse the service you'd be out the money with no server left to show for it. The ephemeral nature of Dply servers means that verified cases of abuse will usually result in server deletion and account locking. If even with the processes we have in place, abuse becomes an issue we could require that the Github account used has a certain amount of history and activity (doing more to profile the user that way). All these things combined with no API and automation of creation being disallowed makes for a low ROI on an abuser's time compared to other services already available.

achr2 10y ago

The pricing seems very fair, you should make it more prevalent.

OwainX 10y ago
For the initial release we focused on extreme simplicity in our design. It's easier to add things than remove them. We'll be making updates to the homepage and informational pages in the coming weeks to make information more prevalent and respond to feedback and suggestions like this one.

wyldfire 10y ago

This is a really neat service. Thanks, I probably will get some leverage out of this.

hoschicz 10y ago

Have you evaluated using containers for this type of workloads? You could save a fuckton of money this way.

OwainX 10y ago
Containers and container services are great but sometimes you need a full server and doing a PaaS with containers has it's own challenges to ensure isolation, have network setup work easily and other factors. I use containers for some of my own stuff but other things are just better with a full VM.

homerguy69 10y ago

Is there no way to manually delete an instance?

OwainX 10y ago
There will be soon. We've already implemented an "expire now" function in the backend for servers on the free plan and are working on adding it to the UI. We're hopeful that this feature will be available this weekend.

djhworld 10y ago

I'm wondering what the digital ocean terms and conditions are around this, Dply looks like it is subcontracting their infrastructure, is that allowed?

OwainX 10y ago
DO absolutely allows (and encourages) resellers and SaaS platforms on their service. My day job is with DO and Dply was built as a side project to meet some needs I have heard from developers, students, and open source projects. Dply operates with DO's blessing but is otherwise unrelated in any official sense. We launched under a credit like those offered in the Hatch program for startups: https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/ https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/

Procrastes 10y ago

First impressions: * I love this idea. This is basically what I use Digital Ocean for, and this reduces the steps. * I would like to see bitbucket sign-in and keys support. * I missed the server name field on my first pass. My eyes were drawn to the drop-downs. So when I hit the submit I got an error and, even then, it took me a moment to see where the servername should go. * I probably wouldn't have noticed the "create a button" if I hadn't read about it here. * I agree with others that a "destroy" option would be nice. * The button is cool. This whole approach makes me want to start embedding cloud-init scripts in all my repositories. But then I loose using cloud-init for pulling down my personal dotfiles and preferred packages. I'll have to think about how to solve that. Great idea! I hope this takes off.

OwainX 10y ago
Thanks. A lot of this feedback I've been hearing from others today. We'll be updating the serer name field to stand out visually better and doing updates to the home page and informational pages to both highlight the button capability and better present details like pricing. An "expire now" option for servers on the free plan will be in place this weekend which will allow you to delete a free server before it expires.

VertexRed 10y ago

The biggest issue that I can see with this is abuse. Do you have a way of preventing email spam and outgoing DoS attacks?

OwainX 10y ago
SMTP ports are blocked and we recommend using a transactional mail service if your server needs to send mail. We're implementing a number of things to profile abusers and prevent abuse on the platform and will be strictly enforcing policies against abuse. The lack of an API and prohibition on automating the creation of servers combined with required Github profile for ssh keys help to make the service unattractive for most abuse cases. Our goal is to use these methods to prevent abuse while keeping a very low barrier to entry for legitimate users.

znpy 10y ago

If you need temporary linux servers, check out linuxacademy.com. I have a paid account and besides accessing the content, i can spin up to six virtual machine to test stuff, at no extra cost besides the montly fee.

PetahNZ 10y ago

Ever wanted to find out what happens when you rm -rf / --no-preserve-root Well now you can find out.

welly 10y ago
brb, off to rm -rf / --no-preserve-root. Edit. ls -al / ls: command not found etc.
- ben0x539 10y ago
  That's what echo * is for!

debt 10y ago

this is awesome! great work.

petters 10y ago

Just tried this and I really like it. I hope this is here to stay. The Dply button could be huge!

kaizoku111 10y ago

For those who want Arch Linux, you can just run this script: https://github.com/gh2o/digitalocean-debian-to-arch https://github.com/gh2o/digitalocean-debian-to-arch