top | item 5857983

Show HN: Get a Server Instantly

15 points| FriedPickles | 12 years ago |instantserver.io

8 comments

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[+] ichilton|12 years ago|reply
Nifty - useful for quick testing tasks.

The concerns though are the sustainability - if instances are paid for and not free tier + bandwidth, it could not be around for long, particularly if it gets abused.

Also, privacy/security - there is no guarantee that instances are destroyed/erased after use and won't get assigned to someone else or logged into. Probably don't want to put private code/IPR on there just in case.

For quick commands (eg, testing a firewall setup from the outside or checking something from an external ip) then it's very cool indeed.

[+] kennywinker|12 years ago|reply
I'm a bit confused. Are you not paying for this, somehow? I expect it will add up fairly fast, yes? 35min @ 0.060/hour is $0.35 per user. 100 users/day * 31 days/month = >$1k/month. So even at a small scale this will cost you a fair bit, won't it?

Don't get me wrong, it's pretty slick!

[+] FriedPickles|12 years ago|reply
The micro spots I'm using are usually closer to $0.003/hr. Amazon rounds up 35 mins to 1 hour, so typical cost is $0.003 per button click. Least profitable conversion nets ~$3.50, so if I get 0.1% conversion it breaks even.

Of course abuse or market fluctuations could be costly, but there are built in limits. And thanks!

[+] tlongren|12 years ago|reply
Cool. But the flipping/rotating card with the info on it doesn't show very nicely in Chromium on Xubuntu 13.04.

It's transparent, so you can see the text sitting "behind" the front-facing text.