Show HN: Shellmates – Rent bare metal and divide into VMs with firecracker
Hello devs, weekend passion project here. It started with this burning desire I've have for a while to rent a bare metal server from Hetzner. Sure it's all the way in Germany and I'm in the USA but the price! $34 a month for 64 GB RAM, 4 core cpu, 512 GB SSD. That's like 90% less from AWS ec2 instance of same specs.
How shellmates works:
1. Rent a powerful bare metal server from providers like Hetzner or OVH at prices starting from $34.50/month 2. We help you setup Firecracker VMs to divide your server into smaller VMs 3. Keep what you need and rent out the rest to other developers at fair prices 4. Save up to 90% compared to cloud providers like AWS while building relationships with other developers
So I'm eating my own dogfood with:https://shellmates.andrewarrow.dev/spots/c8f3c470-f353-4804-bd5c-a5c30bba7dbb
Looking for someone to share the cost with me. There is a real stripe link for $18.07 a month. (Exactly half my actual cost + stripe fees.)
Learned a ton about Firecracker and Firecracker's jailer and how to setup everything with iproutes.
The homepage tries to explain everything:
https://shellmates.andrewarrow.dev
Thanks for checking it out! And I'm totally serious about sharing this server.
[video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNcnoMVRC68]
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This is a cool idea. I also like the website, very clean looking, congrats.
I do have some questions: can the owner of a server split it any way they want ? For example if I have a 64 GB server with 16 cores (something OVH provides IIRC) can I split it into 32 2GB/0.5CPU VM ? (assuming firecracker can handle fractions of a CPU, I don’t know). This could make for some really cheap VM compared to even OVH’s offering.
For that matter do you only support certain types of server or can the owner choose any server they want from Hetzner or OVH ?