• From: Orlando
  • Registered: 03/19/10
  • Posts: 92

Topic: Our sister project is LIVE!

Today is a glorious day and you guys are the first to hear about it.

Over the past couple of months, we have been silently working on a Devio.us side project. Some of you expressed some fears and doubts that we would be announcing the move away from OpenBSD or making the service pay-only. Well, we are here to squash the rumors.

During the operation of Devio.us, we have received countless requests for an affordable tunneling service and we decided to tackle this problem.
We'd like to take the time to introduce you to our newest project - Tunnelr.com. We wanted to offer a cheap, reliable tunnel service centered around OpenBSD. We think you guys will dig it. We sure enjoyed working on it.

Accounts start from as little as $5 with unlimited transfer. However, since everyone in the community has been awesome, we thought we'd give a discount to show how much we appreciate all of you. If you signup before February 15th, we'll give you 20% of whatever tunnel flavor you want (OpenSSH or OpenVPN). After signing up, please use the coupon code wolfman and you will get a lifetime 20% discount.

Lastly, we'd love to hear some feedback from you, after all, that is what has made Devio.us the place that it is today.

Talk to you guys soon and while you're idling in #devious on Freenode, feel free to stop by #tunnelr as well.

P.S. We showed some extra love for our premium users. Please check your email inboxes :-)

Daniel's Website

  • Registered: 07/23/10
  • Posts: 5

Re: Our sister project is LIVE!

Great job guys, the service is absolutely amazing, using it every-frikking-where I go, even at work smile

  • Kayla
  • Idea Gardener
  • Offline
  • From: Orlando
  • Registered: 03/16/10
  • Posts: 73

Re: Our sister project is LIVE!

That is awesome to hear! Thanks so much.

  • Registered: 02/16/11
  • Posts: 5

Re: Our sister project is LIVE!

Does this mean you're going to block any tunnelling via devio.us?

I make very seldom, light use of it but it's nice to know if I can when I need to.

I think it's super that you've got something going to bring in some cashflow for you. No doubt you really need that. Last year I would have jumped on this. But things change and even though you offer a decent price compared to other similar monthly offerings the thing is that nowadays it's pretty easy to get reliable tunnelling on-demand for a few cents/hour. So for users who need to tunnel all month long it's still a good deal, but for users like me who only need an hour now and then it's not so effective.

I don't mean to rain on the parade - after all this sounds like a big day judging from the announcement. From my viewpoint to be competitive in the market today you would need to have an account where you can plunk in some cash and then just pay-per-use at about 2 cents/hour and about 10 cents/GB. That's what I'm paying now. I'm not going to post the competition's details here because that wouldn't be nice. But I can explain if requested, just so that you know where the game is at today.

  • From: Orlando
  • Registered: 03/19/10
  • Posts: 92

Re: Our sister project is LIVE!

BkkBonnie wrote:

Does this mean you're going to block any tunnelling via devio.us?

No, we are not planning on blocking tunneling on Devio.us. Where did you get this idea? We started this service because we were getting an absolutely massive amount of requests for tunneling only accounts. As a bonus, we also added OpenVPN services.

Secondly, while I appreciate your input about marketing strategies and competitiveness, I'd like to point out a couple of things to you, that you may have missed:

Our service is geared towards security. I do not know of any well integrated, pure 100% OpenBSD powered tunnel providers out there. Secondly, we are one of a very few select providers that offers OpenSSH based tunneling. And lastly, I am certain that we are providing a much cheaper OpenVPN service than any of our competitors.

If this doesn't fit your bill, that is perfectly fine, however I am also certain that this is exactly the type of service that many other users have been longing for.

Thanks for your feedback.

Daniel's Website

  • Registered: 02/16/11
  • Posts: 5

Re: Our sister project is LIVE!

Daniel wrote:

Where did you get this idea?

Just occurred to me since you were offering a commercial service now.

If someone feels they really need to tunnel via OpenBSD then you probably have that cornered. I haven't tried it but the alternative I was thinking of is apparently available via FreeBSD. I have only used the Linux version of it for SSH tunnels/proxies. Whether OpenSSH or OpenVPN the pricing is the same. But for OpenVPN it is not a "turnkey" service - a user would have to have some knowledge to use it. That is, they would have to install and config the OpenVPN software.

On the other hand they offer a first year free option now. I didn't realize it because I'm a long term user and this new deal is only for new sign-ups.

I'm sure there are lots and lots of users looking for free/low cost tunnelling out there. I know 2 years ago I was in a search for that myself. Eventually I found this method and have used it since. I feel it is at least as secure. In such situations a user is always trusting the folks running the servers and I think that is more of a worry than what OS the tunnel passes thru.

Last edited by BkkBonnie (02/18/11 2:53 AM)

  • Registered: 04/19/11
  • Posts: 1

Re: Our sister project is LIVE!

It's great that you offer this service, but I'm afraid the pricing is too high for SSH tunnel only service, can you maybe offer a tiered structure for people that don't use too much bandwidth? For your current pricing ($60/yr), I can buy a full web hosting account from many shared hosting services (which also provide SSH access). I currently buy SSH only service from edited for $7/yr, which is also unlimited transfer, and multiple server locations to choose from.

8 Reply by Jared

  • Registered: 03/25/10
  • Posts: 15

Re: Our sister project is LIVE!

Sorry you think we're too high priced kokojie, we think $5/month for unlimited transfer is quite reasonable big_smile