I can definitely see why you would say that! ngrok uses tunnels to connect to your computer, this uses websockets to load and serve the requested documents.

The reason for this is that I wanted this to be a distributed solution. You can shard up the different routes across as many computers as you like and the front end will route and patchwork it together at the front end.

Along with that you can run the client over any number of computers and they will act as backups for eachother. So, if you turn off one computer, one of the others will pick up the slack.

I'm not super familar with ngrok, but if it does all that then I guess, beyond the technology, there isn't a massive amount of difference :)

ngrok doesn't have the distributed routing you're talking about, but (b/c its a tunnel?) it can forward non-http traffic (which I use to host a local proxy service to MITM debug mobile apps).

the non http traffic is really really powerful. I feel like currently lohost is limited in serving static content too. its definitely something I would like to improve on in the future!