...providing that they can actually and predictably supply the servers.
My experience with Scaleway was essentially this: they advertise that you can have virtual servers with up to 10 150GB SSD volumes, so I signed up and created a virtual server with two 150GB volumes. After several attempts over three days, the server wouldn't start at all; it never actually started.
Scaleway's support told me that "it's because there are no available nodes matching your configuration." and "If our stock is low then there is more chance that the only free nodes are "default" ones, with 200GB available only". The solution, according to their support, would be to "keep trying to start the server until it works".
So, they'll sell you a vServer but can't guarantee when you'll be able to spin up the machine.
For me, it was a terrible experience, and Scaleway's "customer support" forums will give you a good grasp of what you're in for if you buy their service.
I also found that in addition to that even when the server was available I had a bunch of problems even getting it to start. Their customised images just seemed to not work that day.
Once I finally got the image started I then attempted a basic update && dist-upgrade and find myself looking at a bunch of errors, they had reconfigured the entirity of their image to point at their own caches, but thoses caches weren't there.
I finally contacted support and their answer was that this was my fault for choosing an old Ubunutu instance (I hadn't it was new ish). I went to the forums and all I found was people with major stability issues, problems with availability and broken images. They are cheap but awful both in basic delivery and in customer support. It is not worth wasting your time with. It cost me 5 cent just to mess around and not get anywhere and that was mostly a ridiculous bill after they wasted my time so incredibly and I never got a working box.
hello, my personal website is running on a scaleway C1 (dirt cheap baremetal arm) since 3 oct 2015. There were some network issues the first months. No problem since. My main administrative task is: apt-get update/upgrade every week and backup of my site every couple of month.
FWIW I have had a positive experience with their super low cost small ARMv8 instances, which help me test PostgreSQL patches-in-development on that architecture. (It'd be even better if they had a FreeBSD image available.)
That is horrifying... Don't sell me a virtual server if the hardware isn't remotely close to being available. I understand fronting me a bit on resources other than storage, but dang.
The annoying thing about that is when you create a server they ask money for reserved IPs (and if I remember correctly the HDDs) even if the server isn't being used or never spun up. I paid my 26 cents to them for nothing and those were the last cents they saw from me.
A terrible experience for you, but our business model was validated as demand has been above capacity for years! Take that SI valley. La baleine échouée est maintenant la nôtre!
On the "sell you a server but can't guarantee when you'll be able to spin up" part, they also don't charge you till it is running. It's not like they say: sing up, spend $x on a machine, but there's a 50/50 change it won't start, but Your charged anyway...
I checked them out after using GCP, AWS and its unbelievable how much slower their servers are. I some times wonder how anyone other than AWS/GCP/Azure even survive in this competitive market.
If you only want a server, OVH/Hetzner are much cheaper for the same performance. To me, AWS/GCP/Azure only really make sense if you start using the whole ecosystem. Otherwise you can get the same for half the price..
I've spent the last 3 years doing AWS stuff at work and agree 100%. If all you're using is EC2 then it's not a great value. Where it's worthwhile are the other services you can tie in to really easily. At work we're using:
It's spendy, no question. None of this is stuff you can't do yourself on cheap instances. We'd just need an additional 2-3 FTEs to maintain the homegrown jungle of crap that would replace the managed services. Oops, there went my savings.
Price - traffic is included (while GCP/AWS charge a lot for it, and a sudden surge in traffic could lead to an unexpected bill), and the server costs a fraction of what a small server would cost on GCP/AWS (except for the shared-CPU instances which I found to be slower than Scaleway once the throttling hit).
If you want to run a business, Scaleway's lack of reliability (servers often sell out etc.) may be a problem. If you're a hobbyist, the potential bandwidth bill from GCP/AWS is a show-stopper, and the Scaleway servers are more than good enough for many applications.
Regarding the slowness, are you talking about CPU speed, I/O, or network?
I’m using it for personal hosting and it’s way cheaper than others. The speed isn’t a big deal for a Nextcloud or Gogs server since I am the only user.
I wouldn’t use it for any large web service though.
Is one still required to submit all their personal information (ID card details, proof of address, etc.) before the servers can be useful? Previously you had to do it, or SMTP ports (etc.) would be blocked until you did.
If that's still the case, is it at least made known that the servers are crippled, prior to starting your account creation process (previously it wasn't, which I found shady)?
My experience so far is that the servers are okay, but the website's UI could be clunky-ish, support to be unresponsive and the aforementioned shady business with requesting personal-information to enable services.
While spam is a real issue and it's well justifiable for a company to request some identity confirmation, it is also not particularly wrong to label not disclosing the requirements upfront to be a sort of a dark pattern. It surely can be somewhat frustrating if you've signed up only to see that there are some extra requirements you haven't anticipated.
What's the catch with the unlimited traffic? Can I use their servers to deliver large content files to a large group of users, with only the advertised bandwidth as the limitation? Or do they decrease bandwidth after a certain amount of traffic?
I ran 173TB combined up/down last month without ever being throttled on their C2L instance.
I've run 583TB through it in the last 5 months. It even bursts to 2.2Gbps every few minutes.
I guess for every person that uses 100 TB a month, there's the person who runs an IRC bouncer. I know that at least my Scaleway instance only has one single-user Django app, a static website and an IRC bouncer, so the traffic amounts must be tiny.
Last I looked at Scaleway what put me off was the fact that their storage was not backed by RAID [1].
Compared to other, comparably priced providers like Hetzner and OVH that do use RAID this is a big caveat IMHO. Of course important data should be backed up remotely but disks fail and I'm not willing to deal with the hassle of restoring data simply because a single disk failed.
Different use cases. If your servers are sufficiently redundant, then RAID is a waste of money, and you might be better off getting more capacity for your money.
But for critical data, or data where you can't scale out as easily, of course, that's another matter.
I won't use RAID for services I have 10 identical copies of and health checks, but I will for the database server that is a pain if I have to fail over or restore, in other words.
From my experience Scaleway is awfully slow and you can't really scale your project as you like as there is often no stock. There is also that weird IP thing where you need to bind to private IP instead of the public. This causes a lot of problems - for example using custom dns for Kubernetes doesn't really work with that setup.
Only thing good about it is the network.
Another thing - if your instance has a fault and there is no stock you'll have downtime, sometimes even a day or so until there is something in stock.
Personally, I don't think Scaleway servers are good enough to be used in production like you describe it. However, because of the low prices, they are ideal (for me at least) for hosting small web apps.
They are known for overselling a bit. They admit it in this very blog post. Nice technical, leading edge concepts, good prices. But then they might struggle with fulfilling the promises.
They had big announcements for IPv6. After a long wait they had to admit that their C1 infra has HW limitations and IPv6 would never come. On their other infra they do have IPv6, but I understand the implementation is awkward (not an IPv6 expert myself).
They had big plans for ARM. Nowadays they do mostly Intel.
Yes, I like them for pioneering, but I would not like to have my business heavily relying on their promises.
Readit News
My experience with Scaleway was essentially this: they advertise that you can have virtual servers with up to 10 150GB SSD volumes, so I signed up and created a virtual server with two 150GB volumes. After several attempts over three days, the server wouldn't start at all; it never actually started.
Scaleway's support told me that "it's because there are no available nodes matching your configuration." and "If our stock is low then there is more chance that the only free nodes are "default" ones, with 200GB available only". The solution, according to their support, would be to "keep trying to start the server until it works".
So, they'll sell you a vServer but can't guarantee when you'll be able to spin up the machine.
For me, it was a terrible experience, and Scaleway's "customer support" forums will give you a good grasp of what you're in for if you buy their service.
Once I finally got the image started I then attempted a basic update && dist-upgrade and find myself looking at a bunch of errors, they had reconfigured the entirity of their image to point at their own caches, but thoses caches weren't there.
I finally contacted support and their answer was that this was my fault for choosing an old Ubunutu instance (I hadn't it was new ish). I went to the forums and all I found was people with major stability issues, problems with availability and broken images. They are cheap but awful both in basic delivery and in customer support. It is not worth wasting your time with. It cost me 5 cent just to mess around and not get anywhere and that was mostly a ridiculous bill after they wasted my time so incredibly and I never got a working box.
This is not a company worth dealing with.
Deleted Comment
If you want to run a business, Scaleway's lack of reliability (servers often sell out etc.) may be a problem. If you're a hobbyist, the potential bandwidth bill from GCP/AWS is a show-stopper, and the Scaleway servers are more than good enough for many applications.
Regarding the slowness, are you talking about CPU speed, I/O, or network?
I wouldn’t use it for any large web service though.
If that's still the case, is it at least made known that the servers are crippled, prior to starting your account creation process (previously it wasn't, which I found shady)?
My experience so far is that the servers are okay, but the website's UI could be clunky-ish, support to be unresponsive and the aforementioned shady business with requesting personal-information to enable services.
Don't try to normalize this stuff, there's no reason hosting companies should need scans of their customers IDs.
I am using Scaleway for hosting my own mail server and never sent them an ID. They have my credit card info, of course, but that’s it.
Compared to other, comparably priced providers like Hetzner and OVH that do use RAID this is a big caveat IMHO. Of course important data should be backed up remotely but disks fail and I'm not willing to deal with the hassle of restoring data simply because a single disk failed.
[1] https://www.scaleway.com/faq/servers/volumes/#-Local-Volumes
But for critical data, or data where you can't scale out as easily, of course, that's another matter.
I won't use RAID for services I have 10 identical copies of and health checks, but I will for the database server that is a pain if I have to fail over or restore, in other words.
They had big announcements for IPv6. After a long wait they had to admit that their C1 infra has HW limitations and IPv6 would never come. On their other infra they do have IPv6, but I understand the implementation is awkward (not an IPv6 expert myself).
They had big plans for ARM. Nowadays they do mostly Intel.
Yes, I like them for pioneering, but I would not like to have my business heavily relying on their promises.
With UnixBench single thread:
--------------------------------------
Old VC1: Intel Atom C2750 @ 2.40GHz
Dhrystone 2: 12029634 lps
Double-Precision Whetstone: 1984 MWIPS
--------------------------------------
New Start1: Intel Atom C3955 @ 2.10GHz
Dhrystone 2: 22143815 lps
Double-Precision Whetstone: 3165 MWIPS
--------------------------------------
Other tests that I performed also showed a ~60% performance increase, except for some compression tests that only gained ~45%.