C2: Affordable X86-64 Servers | Hacker News Reader

C2: Affordable X86-64 Servers

blog.scaleway.com

448 pointsfooyc224 comments

Avotons are very slow, an 8C SoC will typically be slower than an 8 year old 2C desktop CPU (I ran Go builds as a benchmark on my own 2.4 GHz C2750 vs. a 2008 iMac with 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo).

As for Scaleway, some people seem to like it very much, but I found their policy about spamming their users problematic. They (online.net) mock you at registration with a sleazy checked and disabled box for receiving spam ("product news" etc.), therefore I would consider their offers "ad-supported".

The C2 is advertised as "bare-metal", but since they offer a 4C variant, I doubt that (there's a 4C variant, the C2550, but that doesn't seem to be a sane choice). C2L might be a full dedicated box (or not), but C2S and C2M seem very much VPS/shared. It's likely to be based on SuperMicro MicroBlades: http://www.supermicro.nl/products/MicroBlade/module/MBI-6418... (4 nodes in 1 3U blade!).

I'm happy to run any benchmarks people like (within reason). I can also compare to most AWS instances if you like.

I’d be especially interested in any disk & network speed benchmarks.

I was actually looking at getting a C2750 (the 8 core avoton) a while back for a small low-power home server, and came across someone who'd already done some decent benchmarking: http://www.servethehome.com/intel-atom-c2750-8-core-avoton-r...

TLDR; For the blowfish test suite (multi-threaded), it's almost on par with an m3.2xlarge, for the majority of other multi-threaded tests, it's a little quicker than an m3.xlarge, but for anything that is single-threaded, it's pretty slow.

Please run nbench [1]. I ran it on the C1 in April 2015 and got the following results:

  CPU                 : 4 CPU
  L2 Cache            :
  OS                  : Linux 3.2.34-29
  C compiler          : gcc version 4.8.2 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.8.2-19ubuntu1)
  libc                : libc-2.19.so
  MEMORY INDEX        : 5.859
  INTEGER INDEX       : 8.164
  FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 5.770

For comparison, here are an Intel Atom N450, a Core 2 Duo L7500 and a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B:

  CPU                 : Dual GenuineIntel Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N450   @ 1.66GHz 1667MHz
  L2 Cache            : 512 KB
  OS                  : Linux 3.2.0-23-generic
  C compiler          : gcc version 4.6.3 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5) 
  libc                : libc-2.15.so
  MEMORY INDEX        : 10.845
  INTEGER INDEX       : 9.315
  FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 8.748

  CPU                 : Dual GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     L7500  @ 1.60GHz 1601MHz
  L2 Cache            : 4096 KB
  OS                  : Linux 3.5.0-26-generic
  C compiler          : gcc version 4.6.1 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.1-9ubuntu3) 
  libc                : libc-2.13.so
  MEMORY INDEX        : 18.734
  INTEGER INDEX       : 14.318
  FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 23.178

  CPU                 :
  L2 Cache            :
  OS                  : Linux 3.6.11+
  C compiler          : gcc version 4.6.3 (Debian 4.6.3-14+rpi1)
  libc                : libc-2.13.so
  MEMORY INDEX        : 2.536
  INTEGER INDEX       : 3.159
  FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 2.157

[1] http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/bmark.html

Here are the results on a C2S:

  CPU                 : 4 CPU GenuineIntel Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU  C2550  @ 2.40GHz 2394MHz
  L2 Cache            : 1024 KB
  OS                  : Linux 4.4.4-std-3
  C compiler          : gcc version 4.8.4 (Ubuntu 4.8.4-2ubuntu1~14.04.1) 
  libc                : libc-2.19.so
  MEMORY INDEX        : 22.134
  INTEGER INDEX       : 17.899
  FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 21.522

I have to be honest, they don't look bad at all.

From my experience so far, C1 is like working with a microwave, and VC1 (VPS) is much nicer, for €2.99 let's not forget.

And for comparison here's the VC1 (VPS):

  CPU                 : Dual GenuineIntel Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU  C2750  @ 2.40GHz 2394MHz
  L2 Cache            : 4096 KB
  OS                  : Linux 4.4.4-std-3
  C compiler          : gcc version 5.3.1 20160224 (Debian 5.3.1-10) 
  libc                : libc-2.21.so
  MEMORY INDEX        : 22.474
  INTEGER INDEX       : 17.149
  FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 22.035

The single core performance is pretty much the same as the C2S, but it has half as many cores and one fourth the memory.

More results for comparison: http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/results2.html

Looks like it's around the speed of a 1GHz Pentium III.

But what about the VC1 (VPS)?

C1 (ARM):

    C1 root $ sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 run
    sysbench 0.4.12:  multi-threaded system evaluation benchmark

    Running the test with following options:
    Number of threads: 1

    Doing CPU performance benchmark

    Threads started!
    Done.

    Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 20000


    Test execution summary:
        total time:                          686.1683s
        total number of events:              10000
        total time taken by event execution: 686.1557
        per-request statistics:
             min:                                 68.59ms
             avg:                                 68.62ms
             max:                                 70.83ms
             approx.  95 percentile:              68.62ms

    Threads fairness:
        events (avg/stddev):           10000.0000/0.00
        execution time (avg/stddev):   686.1557/0.00

vs the VPS (VC1):

    VC1 root $ sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 run
    sysbench 0.4.12:  multi-threaded system evaluation benchmark

    Running the test with following options:
    Number of threads: 1

    Doing CPU performance benchmark

    Threads started!
    Done.

    Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 20000


    Test execution summary:
        total time:                          45.9858s
        total number of events:              10000
        total time taken by event execution: 45.9822
        per-request statistics:
             min:                                  4.59ms
             avg:                                  4.60ms
             max:                                  4.98ms
             approx.  95 percentile:               4.61ms

    Threads fairness:
        events (avg/stddev):           10000.0000/0.00
        execution time (avg/stddev):   45.9822/0.00

Here are the results for a Kimsufi KS-1 server which has an Intel Atom N-2800 CPU (1.86Ghz, Dual Core, 4 Threads) and 2GB RAM, 500GB HDD for 6€/month. I'm posting them here because they are competing in the low-end dedicated server space:

nbench:

    CPU                 : 4 CPU GenuineIntel Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N2800   @ 1.86GHz 798MHz
    L2 Cache            : 512 KB
    OS                  : Linux 4.2.0-25-generic
    C compiler          : gcc version 4.8.4 (Ubuntu 4.8.4-2ubuntu1~14.04.1) 
    libc                : libc-2.19.so
    MEMORY INDEX        : 11.834
    INTEGER INDEX       : 11.540
    FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 8.730

openssl speed results at http://pastebin.com/2dfPPx2t

I am still paying £3 a month for one of those! Shame they don't still sell them at those prices.

How "reliable" are those numbers in estimating real application performance?

I've run nbench for a 1 CPU VM in EC2, and a 2 CPU VM in DO, and the former is a lot faster ( almost 2x ) than the latter!

    EC2 Ubuntu ( 1 CPU )
    ==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
    CPU                 : GenuineIntel Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40GHz 2400MHz
    L2 Cache            : 30720 KB
    OS                  : Linux 3.13.0-74-generic
    C compiler          : gcc version 4.8.4 (Ubuntu 4.8.4-2ubuntu1~14.04.1)
    libc                : libc-2.19.so
    MEMORY INDEX        : 39.370
    INTEGER INDEX       : 35.426
    FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 53.665

    DO CoreOS ( 2 CPU )
    ==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
    CPU                 : Dual GenuineIntel Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630L 0 @ 2.00GHz 2000MHz
    L2 Cache            : 15360 KB
    OS                  : Linux 4.2.2-coreos-r2
    C compiler          : gcc version 4.9.2 (Debian 4.9.2-10)
    libc                : libc-2.19.so
    MEMORY INDEX        : 20.668
    INTEGER INDEX       : 19.277
    FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 28.370

Edit: Here's also a 2 CPU machine on Azure

    ==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
    CPU                 : Dual GenuineIntel Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2673 v3 @ 2.40GHz 2397MHz
    L2 Cache            : 30720 KB
    OS                  : Linux 4.2.2-coreos-r2
    C compiler          : gcc version 4.9.2 (Debian 4.9.2-10)
    libc                : libc-2.19.so
    MEMORY INDEX        : 28.667
    INTEGER INDEX       : 24.351
    FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 39.950

This is helpful but you're not mentioning what instance type at EC2.. t2 and t1 instances do heavy throttling after you use up your CPU credits[1] so it's likely that you were just using all or most of a full Xeon CPU. I got similar results on even a t2.nano.. until I used up the CPU credits. Then it slowed to a crawl!

Also keep in mind that nbench only tests a single CPU[2].

Apples to apples would probably be a small m3 or m4 against a comparable DO instance. (but let's not go down that cost disparity rabbit hole.. esp EBS vs SSD or bandwidth!)

1. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/t2/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBench#Shortcomings

If nbench only uses 1 core, yes, my comparison is wrong. Is there a similar benchmarking linux tool that can use many cores?

edit: instance is a t2.micro

I don't think the comparison is wrong per se; this actually makes it a bit easier, since you're just comparing one core to another.

The only thing that I think is problematic is comparing a t2 to anything else, since that CPU performance is not sustainable as it might be elsewhere. m3 and m4 (and other instance types @ aws) are not explicitly throttled. (Source: AWS Solutions Architect)

We're running a portion of our workload at Userify[1] on AWS, but not the biggest portion, but this is actually for bandwidth cost reasons, not CPU (even though our workload is almost entirely CPU and bandwidth -- almost zero disk; our infrastructure at AWS would cost 8x more!)

1. https://userify.com (SSH key management)

I assumed nbench uses all the available cores, that's why I said I'm wrong. On a 1 core basis, yes, it's useful, and I get that this t2 instance is not a stable baseline. I only have that available right now, as my free credit.

> Is there a similar benchmarking linux tool that can use many cores?

There is kcbench:

http://linux.die.net/man/1/kcbench

It compiles a kernel.

Just for the lulz, here is nbench running on my Asus Chromebook Flip.

    ==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
    CPU                 : 4 CPU ARMv7 Processor rev 1 (v7l)
    L2 Cache            : 
    OS                  : Linux 3.14.0
    C compiler          : gcc version 5.2.1 20151028 (Debian 5.2.1-23) 
    libc                : libc-2.21.so
    MEMORY INDEX        : 15.111
    INTEGER INDEX       : 14.374
    FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 18.785

Very cool!

Here is mine (desktop PC from 2011):

    ==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
    CPU                 : 4 CPU GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU         540  @ 3.07GHz 3059MHz
    L2 Cache            : 4096 KB
    OS                  : Linux 4.3.0-1-amd64
    C compiler          : gcc version 5.3.1 20160224 (Debian 5.3.1-10) 
    libc                : 
    MEMORY INDEX        : 37.273
    INTEGER INDEX       : 25.801
    FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 47.882

For more comparison, here's a $5 Digital Ocean droplet (VPS)

      ==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
      CPU                 : GenuineIntel Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630L v2 @ 2.40GHz 2400MHz
      L2 Cache            : 15360 KB
      OS                  : Linux 3.13.0-37-generic
      C compiler          : gcc version 4.8.4 (Ubuntu 4.8.4-2ubuntu1~14.04.1) 
      libc                : libc-2.19.so
      MEMORY INDEX        : 35.003
      INTEGER INDEX       : 33.843
      FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 45.870
      Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38

Benchmark from Intel i7 desktop

  CPU                 : 8 CPU GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM)   i7-4790 CPU @ 3.60GHz 3910MHz
  L2 Cache            : 8192 KB
  OS                  : Linux 3.16.0-55-generic
  C compiler          : gcc version 4.8.4 (Ubuntu 4.8.4-  2ubuntu1~14.04.1)
  libc                : libc-2.19.so
  MEMORY INDEX        : 58.235
  INTEGER INDEX       : 52.421
  FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 79.472
  Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38

Here's a Intel Core i5 2.7Ghz on a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) compiled with clang (had to edit the makefile a bit):

    CPU                 :
    L2 Cache            :
    OS                  : Darwin 15.3.0
    C compiler          : Apple LLVM version 7.0.2 (clang-700.1.81)
    libc                :
    MEMORY INDEX        : 49.009
    INTEGER INDEX       : 41.947
    FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 92.671
    Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38

Benchmark for 20 euro Kimsufi(16BG Ram/1tb disk):

CPU : 4 CPU GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570S CPU @ 3.10GHz 3706MHz

L2 Cache : 6144 KB

OS : Linux 3.14.32-xxxx-grs-ipv6-64

C compiler : gcc version 4.8.4 (Ubuntu 4.8.4-2ubuntu1~14.04.1)

libc : libc-2.19.so

MEMORY INDEX : 51.103

INTEGER INDEX : 48.049

FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 68.238

Baseline (LINUX) : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38

Wow, that's really low. I have a low power server at home that must be 6 years old at this point with higher numbers:

    ==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
    CPU                 : CentaurHauls VIA Nano processor U2500@1200MHz 1200MHz
    L2 Cache            : 1024 KB
    OS                  : Linux 4.1.12-gentoo
    C compiler          : x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-gcc
    libc                :
    MEMORY INDEX        : 7.263
    INTEGER INDEX       : 7.365
    FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 9.665
    Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38

How does nbench compare to vpsbench?

What does "openssl speed" say? Thanks!

Gandi.net (another french co.) offer VPS starting at 3.5 euros / months:

  ==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
  CPU                 : GenuineIntel Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650L 0 @ 1.80GHz 1800MHz
  L2 Cache            : 20480 KB
  OS                  : Linux 3.18.26-guest-4-4751b4a-x86_64
  C compiler          : gcc version 4.9.2 (Debian 4.9.2-10)
  libc                : libc-2.19.so
  MEMORY INDEX        : 28.985
  INTEGER INDEX       : 25.890
  FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 39.868
  Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38

> I doubt that

Just tried for a few minutes all 3 of them. The C2S is a C2550, and the C2M and C2L are C2750. They each appear to be bare metal, and not virtualized. The VPS offering, which is advertised as a VPS, appears to be virtualized inside of a C2750. The C1 is a Marvell Armada 370/XP, a bare metal ARMv7l board.

> I would consider their offers "ad-supported".

This also is not my experience. I haven't ever received spam from them, nor received advertising.

> Avotons are very slow

This part of what you wrote is true, unfortunately. :(

> They each appear to be bare metal, and not virtualized

How can you tell?

This can usually be determined heuristically:

* loaded drivers may be named after the virtualization platform (VMware)

* CPUs can be reported as "Virtual" in /proc/cpuinfo

* Special files in /proc (for instance "vz" for OVZ)

* Kernel name

* etc.

Yes and VMware provides an additional method with the "hypervisor port":

https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?langu...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10843206

I can confirm that, i've also tested 8 core one, it's avoton, very slow cpu, which i've tested some time ago also on their normal offer. But for 8.3 addditional euro you get 24 GB of ram and 120 GB more SSD if you compare it with their normal dedicated offer with avoton.

Not based on SuperMicro MicroBlades, home R&D design : https://twitter.com/scaleway/status/707617919434412034

Are you sure ?

I'm not sure why I'm replying to what look like sockpuppets, but that photo looks nothing like Supermicro equipment. (Of course, "100% designed by our R&D teams" can mean "we sent the ODM a Powerpoint with some diagrams in it".)

I can tell you we did design them because I worked on the hardware as part of the R&D team. We designed the PCBs & software, as we did for the C1.

I wish you'd sell servers to other hosting facilities.

Prices seem really great but a few paragraphs down they say the servers are based on Avoton SoCs. Intel Avoton is an Atom chip (Silvermont core), so CPU-bound performance will be somewhat lower than the usual Sandy Bridge/Haswell/whatever core that you get on AWS or Google Compute Engine. It's a server SoC though so I/O throughput is probably pretty decent...

That's what scares me a bit. The multi-core performance is great (considering their pricing), but single-threaded performance is quite a bit below what the competition gets you. If you're running a web server with something single-threaded (like PHP) requests might start taking a bit longer than you're used to.

Well, that is the whole point, you are suppose to have a whole bunch of small, inexpensive, power efficient, cores.

If the software you normally use doesn't take advantage of, at least, multi core hardware, then you can obtain more value from other hosting provider...

On the other hand if your software can takes advantages of multicore hardware, or -- even better -- multi node architecture, then scaleway is likely the best option.

Nearly no web framework is per request multi core (e.g. multi core HTML / JSON rendering, assuming backend operations already async). So each request will be slow.

[Edit:] Not sure for the downvote, would be interested what's wrong in my comment.

Go's net/http framework uses a go routine per connection.

For my understanding: One request is executed on serveral cores?

I don't know about Go but Elixir/Erlang has a concurrency model that spreads one request workload over several cores.

No. There's a certain amount of basic serialism in a single HTTP request. Go, Erlang, Haskell, a few others make it really easy to write handlers that may themselves be running on multiple cores, but the HTTP handling itself is essentially serialized by the fact that you have to get the request, then send the headers, then send the body, which itself probably has order constraints (such as HTML, which certainly does, at least unless you really go out of your way to write yourself a CSS framework that would render chunks of the HTML order-independent). Most of the required bits of handling a request, like header parsing, header generation, etc. have been made so efficient in the implementations that care about that that any attempt to multithread that would lose on coordination costs to a single-threaded implementation, I think... at least, I'd need to see a benchmark to the contrary before I'd believe in a win.

(You can play a lot of games in how a lot of requests are handled, even going to the HTTP2 extreme of interleaving responses to different requests on the underlying network stream, but what I said will be true on a per-request basis.)

every http server does that. it's still one routine/process/thread per request. and that's what the comment you're replying to said.

Almost all modern frameworks allow a request to be executed on multiple cores, though if all you're doing is HTML/JSON rendering there would very rarely be any performance advantage to doing so (though if there's an async point it will probably happen, i.e. one core will execute the part up until the call to the backend and then a different core may well pick up the continuation when the result comes back). The actual compute time to render HTML/JSON is utterly minimal (even if you're doing it in a super-slow language like Ruby or Python that requires a hashtable lookup for every function call); if you're doing linear algebra in your web frontend then you'll notice slowness (especially as a lot of SoCs may not have much FPU), but for typical frontend workloads the CPU usage is just utterly irrelevant compared to the cost of the backend I/O.

I understand how to use async for backends, I wrote quite a little bit about it [1]

"one core will execute the part up until the call to the backend and then a different core may well pick up the continuation when the result comes back"

This surely helps for one request if your backend or all your microservices are all on one machine, and you have several cores. But if you have your microservices on different machines, multi core will not help you speed up one request if it does not break down rendering of a page in chunks and distribute them to cores (and e.g. combine them with something like Facebook BigPipe (2010 tech)).

And yes multiple cores help with SEDA architectures but request and url parsing (which might be a SEDA stage) is too fast to have any real impact.

[1] http://codemonkeyism.com/a-little-guide-on-using-futures-for...

So what is it that you think is going to make a web app perform poorly on these cheap servers? They're slow, but they're nowhere near slow enough that the time taken to render HTML for a realistic page on one of these cores is going to be a bottleneck. Each individual core has poor throughput, but there are a lot of cores. Doing a bunch of backend calls in series for a single page will make your webapp slow but that's always true, don't do that (likewise microservices). If you're doing heavy compute for a single request then yes your system will perform poorly on these servers, but that's not usual for a web workload.

You add parallelism yourself.

Though if CPU is the bottleneck in your networked application, you've probably already looked into that.

Correct me if I'm wrong but you can spin up multiple PHP worker processes to take advantage of those cores?

That means you can process more requests at once (across several threads/cores), but per request timings will be slower because each core is slower than the cores on the competitions CPUs.

Can confirm. Dual core Atom loading bare Wordpress is a nightmare without caching, and still barely acceptable with caching.

I found the issue. Wordpress.

Agreed. Still sucky though, it is easy to manage if you want to run a blog without knowing how to build websites.

Though really, running Wordpress without caching is just asking for trouble regardless of your server configuration.

Hm, a single PHP request is single threaded, but multiple threads are multithreaded, so this shouldn't be an issue for most apps.

How much time are you spending in php per request? I would think the time spent in PHP per request would be low compared to network latency and io.

Most languages yes not PHP.

Modern PHP is much more performant than it used to be, and more so than other similar higher level dynamic web languages. Unless you're doing something wrong (like using Wordpress) or something unusual, network, db, file io etc. will dwarf PHP time.

I've been testing the performance of the C2.

Compared with a Xeon D-1520 (the current hot chip of low-cost cloud computing and actually very nice), single core speed is less than half of the Xeon D (at about the same clock rate of 2.4GHz); multi-thread speed (8 threads running lame encodes) is about 66% of Xeon D.

Not bad for the price.

Using this for a remote backup server would be cool. Start the server, copy over backup, take their "storage snapshot", and turn off the server.

Lets do some napkin math: (In USD)

  - $0.01/hr USD
  - 10hr of backups each day (Heavy Usage)
  - 10 cents/day, $3/month, $36/year

You can also take snapshots. So that's extra cool.

Edit: Calculations for 150GB storage instances:

  - €0.01/hr (@ 150GB of storage)
  - 20hr of backups each day (Heavy Usage and more data transferred)
  - $0.24/day, $7.27/month, $87.29/year

Just did these for my own needs so thought everyone else might enjoy having them too.

> take their "storage snapshot", and turn off the server

Or rather, turn off the server and then take the storage snapshot, which is the order you have to do it. And you have to snapshot and reincarnate just in order to attach or detach a volume, which means adding some more storage space requires several hours downtime, which is a nuisance.

Although apart from that, I have found them very good.

For this usecase several hours of downtime is not much of a problem. In fact, the server will be off for more time then it's not. If you want to upgrade: wait until the backups are done and you should have 12hr till your next backup.

I'd hope that's more than enough time to expand a snapshot.

Also, how does pricing work for hourly servers? Is it still a quid a month?

I don't think that's right if there's really a fixed cost per each snapshot. The website says this in the pricing FAQ:

> Each snapshot is billed €0.50 per creation and €0.002 per 50GB/h up to 500 continuous hours.

Why is the snapshot billed per-rate instead of per-time or per-capacity?

I think there is a cost for the initial provisioning, not for loading the snapshot each time. I might be wrong though.

I've been very pleased with http://packet.net and their typo 0 server. It's bare metal, but much more performant than here. They have an amazing network, it's by the hour, and it's < $40/mo. Bandwidth is not included: $.05/GB, but that's half AWS.

Also they're based in the US, so less latency for those of us with primary customer bases here. We use them at DNSFilter in NYC as part of our anycast network, for the last two months. Looking forward to their San Jose and Amsterdam datacenter expansions coming soon.

Can you do custom iso install?

Free data in? (Like AWS)

Yes

https://www.packet.net/resources/kb/how-does-packet-bill-for...

>typo 0 server. It's bare metal, but much more performant than here

Packet's 0 server is Atom C2550 and costs 36$/month.

Scaleway C2S server is the same Atom C2550 but it costs ~$13/month.

Scaleway C2M is C2750 which has twice as much cores and costs ~20/month, so I am not seeing how it is possible for Packet 0 server to be "much more performant" when in fact Packet's offering is so much weaker.

Why do you use http://packet.net as a URL in your comment when this only redirects to a www.packet.net subdomain, on Cloudflare?

Why not just use http://www.packet.net?

From the perspective of the user, wouldn't it be "more performant" to skip the gratuitous redirect, extra GET request and DNS lookups?

Maybe this is just marketing? Setting referrer, cookies? Fear of a thundering herd arising from an HN comment? Inadvertence? I don't understand.

Apologies for being so naive.

I don't work for them, just a customer. It just happened to be what I typed for their URL. I'm not intimately familiar with how every site I visit does their redirects.

You're way overthinking this.. it's easier to type without the wwws. It'd be easier to type without the http:// too but HN might not autolink it

If you need something US side, one of my ventures, microservers.io offers C2750 using Supermicro MicroBlades starting at $25/mo (with coupon code LAUNCH) out of Seattle. Includes full KVM over IP access so you can install any OS you like. Most popular distros are available via local samba.

We soft launched over a year ago and have a number of hosting industry insiders for customers, but are still working on the main, public facing website (domain just goes directly to an ordering page) as well as automation on the back end for near-instant provisioning. We'll be doing our official launch after that.

$0.05/GB may be cheaper than Amazon, but is rather expensive for bandwidth these days (would work out to approximately $10/Mb 95th percentile using a 200GB:1Mbps conversion ratio). With us, 2TB of bandwidth is included, and additional bandwidth is $0.002/GB or $0.40/Mb using a GTT/Tinet, Hurricane Electric, and Cogent bandwidth blend provided by my main hosting company's secondary/value network (AS63213).

Their support isn't great, and they're only in Canada and EU, but Kimsufi[1] is my goto for beefy but cheap dedicated servers. Their cheapest offering is $5/month for an Atom, 2G RAM, and 500G harddrive. But where the value really lies is a step up to about $25 where you start getting non-Atom processors, 16+G of RAM, and 1+TB harddrives. Also free bandwidth. It's a real dedicated server so you can install whatever on it, but KVM access is expensive if you break it into not booting. You can deploy a fairly good set of distros through their built-in wizard for free

1: https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/

Charging for KVM access.... Sounds extremely unpleasant. Why would you want a provider like the that, who is going to kick you in the genitals when you're down?

Just to put it into perspective, both Azure and AWS don't allow KVM access at all, at any price, period. If your VM doesn't boot then only THEIR support can restore it (and both of their support is expensive).

Is it even possible to have a KVM for a VM? Don't you need it to be bare metal for that? In which case, it would make sense why neither AWS nor Azure offer it, since they don't offer bare metal hosting.

> Is it even possible to have a KVM for a VM?

Yes? It isn't called a KVM, but most hypervisors have a management tool which allows you to act as if you're sitting in front of a physical machine. This is how most allow you to install operating systems (aside from images).

> Don't you need it to be bare metal for that? In which case, it would make sense why neither AWS nor Azure offer it, since they don't offer bare metal hosting.

It is more a logistical problem. The hypervisor viewer isn't security aware yet, so in order to provide "KVM"-like access to a single VPS they'd need to alter how the viewer and interface works.

You can attach to a KVM or Xen instance with vnc, generally speaking, which allows access to the BIOS, grub, and other stages of the boot. It's generally how I would troubleshoot a non-booting VM.

Yes, a number of VPS providers offer it. Well not precisely KVM, since that's for bare-metal machines, but a similar kind of console access. For example https://prgmr.com/ does.

Ah, yes, you're right. I even used this once when I was on Linode with Lish. I think I was a bit too focused on the KVM naming and it didn't click.

> KVM access is expensive

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I got the impression that KVM access on KimSufi or SoYouStart requires somebody to walk over to your machine and plug a USB key into your machine. That would explain why it costs $30.

Not really in a data center. They have embedded firmware for KVM e.g. Dell's DRAC, HP's ILO, Oracle's ILOM, Intel's RMM2, and IPMI. Plugging and unplugging things into a server can be operationally hazardous and is definitely tedious.

OVH's more expensive servers do use IPMI and include free KVM. Their cheaper kimsufi and soyoustart offerings use a USB KVM to ethernet device, and charge for its usage.

In my experience online.net/scaleway support is better than ovh/kimsufi. Also, the scaleway offers have some sort of API at https://developer.scaleway.com in addition to web ui.

Why would you need KVM access, you can activate their rescue image to boot from, which allows you to mount your hard drive and inspect the system?

If you install a custom kernel and it crashes or hangs before it gets far enough to write the logs to the disk, the rescue image doesn't help figure out why the custom kernel isn't booting up.

"only in Canada and EU". Some regard that as a feature :)

The blade servers at Delimiter (https://www.delimiter.com/) are even more affordable. I pay $20 a month for a dual Xeon blade with 16gb of ram.

They did have a very long downtime this year with no service credit, but uptime has been reasonable over the past year. If you're looking for a hobby box it's a pretty good deal.

I got super excited at first, but then...

The servers are based on: http://ark.intel.com/products/33927/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E54... and http://ark.intel.com/products/47927/Intel-Xeon-Processor-L56...

These are super ancient.

If you're looking for affordable north american servers, OVH has the Kimsufi outlet which is cheaper and better hardware. They've got a data center in Canada and will give you American IPs from their AS in Newark, NJ:

https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/

The parent company of scaleway, online.net, also has some inexpensive offerings, but the servers are in France which might be a deal breaker for you. (Delimiter seems to be in Atlanta.)

For Europe, there's the Hetzner server auction in Germany.

kimsufi doesn't look bad but I don't find anywhere their cancellation policy

You can choose how many months you pay for (1-12), and sometime before that runs out they email you. Either you pay for some more months or the server goes away.

It's in the FAQ, under "When can I ask for a service to be cancelled?": https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/faq/

Kimsufi is good (used to be with them), but there are a few drawbacks: 1. Only one IP allowed. No way to request more. 2. No KVM access-- Delimiter has HP iLO

I have to disagree about the better hardware as well because even the slower Delimiter offering is faster than Kimsufi's fastest offering: https://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5420+%40+2.... vs http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5504+%40...

OVH's SoYouStart is also a good choice, but it is pricy in comparison.

Both Kimsufi/Delimiter/Et al should really only be used where support or downtime doesn't matter.

I'm running a pair of L5639's in my main server. Perfectly usable. Yes, the cores are relatively slow, but you get plenty of them.

> OVH has the Kimsufi outlet which is cheaper and better hardware

I see one dual socket Westmere Xeon that's actually slower than the two you're complaining about (1/3rd as much cache, 5-20% slower clock), and a bunch of similarly ancient consumer-level junk.

I even spy an i7 920 in there. A 2008 first-gen Nehalem. That's a 130W CPU with terrible power management, how on Earth is that economical for them to deploy?!

> I'm running a pair of L5639's in my main server. Perfectly usable.

Disclaimer: I run Delimiter

That's absolutely what we're going for with our offerings. Gear that's off lease and long paid for, which allows us to slap some new drives in it and rack it at a low monthly price. But we only use proper server gear - so that means HP blade servers, ECC memory, dedicated ILO/KVM with each box, etc.

To be fair though: I'm a big fan of Kimsufi stuff, along with OVH's SYS lineup. Great for backups/testing/etc. The guys at OVH are great.

That's correct, we offer largely older gear. We had a stack of E3-1225v3's at $39 recently though. We primarily offer services in Atlanta right now, but we're expanding to Los Angeles & NYC this month.

We have a few customers who purchase servers by the chassis (16 blades) to use for crawlers and other applications where they can scale horizontally. When you compare the E5420's at $20/month to even a lot of cloud hosts, you're getting quite a bit of dedicated resources vs. smaller allocations on newer shared gear.

Totally depends on what you're running though.

How long was the "very long downtime"?

Hours, days, weeks?

They were down for 4 or 5 days last month. Was due to a power issue in their DC's building.

They kept everyone in the loop, and it's the only downtime I've noticed from them.

It's the only downtime we plan to have. I get Nam flashbacks just thinking about it.

Baptism by fire, huh? :) I guess I was one of the unlucky ones, but it hasn't put me off. Hoping you guys expand to the UK (datacenter-wise) eventually!

It was my second week on the job, not a fun way to start things off...

I don't know if we'll have UK dedi offerings (power + space are at a premium), but we're looking at rapidly pushing out our cloud offering.

~50% of customers were back online within 14 hours. 96% were online within 24-28 hours. There were a few that stretched approximately 3.5 days due to disk/psu failures, etc. It was our first (and hopefully only) large outage.

We released a full RFO to our customers, but it was a really unfortunate series of events involving losing phase, burning out compressors/pumps for HVAC equipment, overnighting replacement parts from up and down the east coast and some from LA.

We had to keep ~10 racks of blades (doesn't sound like much, but that's over 500 customers) offline to manage heat as we brought up the HVAC equipment and added more spot coolers.

unlimited bandwidth. Is that for real?

300 Mbits. Let's assume you can pump out 100 Mbit sustained. That is about 10 MB/s. or 26,000,000 Megabytes/month. 26,000 GB / month.

  AWS & google cloud are about $.10/GB.    That'd cost 2600 USD to serve.

Scaleway claims that'd cost just 12 euro.

For realz?

Yes, and it's already the cases for the C1s. It's best effort, you're not guaranteed a sustained I/O if your neighbors are as greedy. But I have a few workloads at OVH and Scaleway that are bandwith-bound, and cloud pricings are just 10 to 100 times more expensive. That's how it is.

I have a 3€ C1 server at Scaleway moving some 25-30TB of data per month, so yes, it's very real.

amazing! very good!

With my tor relays I pushed around 150Mbit up and Down. Which is around 45TB per direction and Month.

"unmetered" is a popular dedicated hosting company marketing trick. things are generally oversubscribed to horrifically oversubscribed and you'll be very hard pressed to sustain 100Mbps 24x7 for a full day, let alone a full month.

I pushed on 2 instances around 150Mbit/s with no problems at all :)

Because they aren't oversubscribed...yet.

Amazon bandwidth prices are utterly insane. Pretty much every reasonably hosting provider out there will be below 20% of Amazon on bandwidth prices even with metered bandwidth, and going down to around 2% of AWS bandwidth prices (still for metered).

Basically, if you're shifting lots of data out of AWS, it very often pays to rent some cheap boxes elsewhere to use as caching proxies. Every TB of AWS bandwidth you can cut trivially finances an extra server and still leaves you with savings.

Downloading from my c1 will regularly max out my 100 megabit fiber at home.

Their mother company (Online/Iliad/Free) does this to balance out their incoming/outgoing traffic in order to avoid to pay for transit, which is why they provide these services at/near cost.

nope, our network (Online.net/Scaleway) is AS12876, Free/Iliad is AS12322 neither of them reannounce the other AS to the internet, they are both independant and separated

The main reason is vendor lockin. As long as you stay within AWS you will pay barely anything but if you want to use both AWS and Google Cloud then it will start getting expensive.

Yes, AWS is insanely expensive.

I have a quad core i7, 64 GB RAM, 3 x 4TB hard drives, and a 1 Gbps pipe with OVH for around $100/mo. Unfortunately it is not in the US. The closest they have is near Montreal. They are expanding to the West Coast though I hear.

Dammit. Cheap - very cheap - for everything but storage.

It seems impossible to find a low-cost server with some big, slow spinning disks on it at the moment. I'm really not sure why.

Anyone got any recommendations there? Where would I look, if anywhere, for, say, 4Tb of storage attached to a low-cost virtual or dedicated server, for less than Google Nearline or equivalent?

I guess you best bet would be Amazon S3?

Hetzner will give you a server with 24TB for €82/month, or 5TB FTP space at €26/month

I didn't know about the latter! Interesting - thanks.

There is So You Start[1] which offers 2x3TB with soft RAID.. Dedicated server, so you might be able to pay some amount and get them to add more space to it

1: https://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/

We just introduced an SSD cached storage solution at MNX.io

$15/TB -- scalable to 40T.

https://mnx.io/pricing

Hmm, very interesting. Thanks!

I'm really happy with TransIP. You can get a cheap VPS with an SDD, and attach a multi-TB network disk to it. That said, it's not the same as having them locally attached, I get ~35Mbps on writes.

CPU:model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU C2750 @ 2.40GHz Network: root@scw-4e7977:~# ./speedtest-cli Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Testing from Free SAS (212.47.234.38)... Selecting best server based on latency... Hosted by NEOTELECOMS (Paris) [1.59 km]: 2.652 ms Testing download speed........................................ Download: 881.83 Mbit/s Testing upload speed.................................................. Upload: 513.56 Mbit/s

Not surprised to read in the comments they're a subsidiary of Online.net. Ever since they've introduced ultra-cheap dedicated boxes ten years ago, it seems everybody's been sub-renting either them or OVH. I wonder why there aren't more similar offers worldwide, at least in Europe (I can only think of Leaseweb, and they're data capped). The network backbone isn't much different in Britain, Holland or Germany. And the server units aren't really custom.

I had a great experience with scaleway.

However last time I checked the still have only IPv4 and very few of them, it happens to me that I wanted to spin up an instance for a quick experiment but wasn't possible to have a public IP where to connect, mine was just a simple experiment, nothing important, but still...

The FAQ [1] says that C1 servers don't support IPv6 but C2 servers do.

[1] https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server/

How would this compare to Hetzner offerings? https://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver

I don't think there's much to compare there. Hetzner's servers are a completely different price range. Unless you get a used one here: https://robot.your-server.de/order/market (URL looks suspicious, but it's Hetzner, I promise). These are servers that are fairly old and out-dated and whose users have discontinued their contracts; now they're being auctioned off so Hetzner doesn't have to throw them out. But these, I'd say, are also difficult to compare because of the old hardware vs. the new but low-cost hardware of the scaleway ones.

Hetzner has cheap VPSs:

https://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_vserver/cx30

I know, but the parent comment was explicitly asking about root servers; I agree, though, that I should've mentioned these, as they fit more into the price range (and I imagine they're quite good, as I've mostly heard positive things about Hetzner).

I was curious about the price to performance ratio comparison of both companies. (Is for example the CPU performance really worth the extra price?)

Invite only.... So you cannot even get them. What's the use of this announcement?

Free advertising, I guess. I also hate the criminal false advertising as "now available".

Ha. "I can't sign up for a new account and use this service right now, so nobody should care".

People should care; the current clients of this service should care. It shouldn't be on top of HN for hours IMHO; by far most cannot do anything with this which makes it indeed cheap advertising. Or it should say 'invite only' or 'only for current members'. Then I probably wouldn't have read it and would've checked it when it said 'Signups now open'.

I'm an existing customer of the original c1, I just spun up a box now... Might be invite to new customers only...

I had my account disabled a few months ago and support wouldn't re-enable it, told me to wait in line. :(

I think I have a number of invites, but the site is very slow at the moment.

Can you please send me an invite? We are building something that's going to be heavy on the server side and this looks like a really good deal. My email is visible on my profile. Thanks!

if you have one more invite, i've sent you an email with request :) thx

Invitations won't get too far : "Send an invitation to your friend to try Scaleway! Your invitation will get queued and sent when enough capacity is available."

If the free-invite-train hasn't left the station, please count me in!

So that existing customers* (who will have higher retention rates) could order them before they become "victims of their success".

* I am one of them, but would really appreciate Scaleway to accept people that have invited faster.

Hosted in the same datacenters, with similar low-end offerings: https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server#perso.

C1 is a good idea and works well especially while arm distro are maturing. IMHO C1 perfs are quite good for the price (700-900 tps on pg_bench, 1500 req/s on rabbitmq on debian). We are running an ELK server which is performing well enough for us even with 2gb of ram.

I was just expecting a low cost (6$/month) 4cores ARM64 server with 8gb of ram, I think it would have been more exciting !

> I was just expecting a low cost (6$/month) 4cores ARM64 server with 8gb of ram, I think it would have been more exciting !

In case anyone doesn't spot it the closest is this:

> Our Starter VPS comes with 2GB of ram, 2 x86-64 Cores, > 50GB of LSSD and 200 Mbit/s of unmetered bandwidth. > It's available at the insane price of €2.99 per month > or €0.02 per hour.

Where are Scaleway's data centers located? I found mention on their site that they're a Paris-based company, but is this the only geographical location for their offerings?

Seems the data centers are also hosted in the Paris area:

https://www.scaleway.com/faq/general/

"The service is hosted in our own datacenters, Iliad’s datacenters, DC2 and DC3. Both are located near Paris, France."

I have to say this is quite an interesting offer, especially for private/side projects. Currently I rent a virtual server at Hetzner, which costs me 23 € / month and is way below the specs mentioned on the Scaleways page, so I am compelled to switch, provided reliablity is good.

The problem is the latency (if your customers are in America).

Interesting. I'm currently using servers by OVH, which compete in the same low-end segment using their Kimsufi[1] offering, and have datacenters in France, Canada and Germany.

Paris is close to me, so these might be interesting for VNC or other low-latency applications.

[1] http://kimsufi.com

Nope, OVH doesn't have data center in Germany afaik.

I was mistaken, I thought they had one in Frankfurt, but it seems the closest they get is Strassbourgh, Near the French/German/Belgian border.

Bummer, if they had (or if they eventually open) something here in the states, this would begin to look very attractive.

+1 I was looking for DC locations, too.

$13/mo for 8GB of ram is the big thing for me here; most of my servers are not cpu bound, but require a lot of tuning to fit in the smaller VM instances.

the prices look sweet. anyone has experience with them? How's the network stability? support response times?

I host my blog with a C1. The load hasn't been huge, but I've had zero problems. Provisioning is fast, and the pre-packaged images are well designed.

They are a subsidiary company of Online.net, itself a subsidiary of Iliad/Free, one of the leading ISPs in France.

I have over 50 servers at Online since more than a year now, and they have been pretty much flawless. Support is good and reachable by phone. I haven't worked with Scaleway though.

>Support is good and reachable by phone

Really ? I used them quite a bit years and years ago, and at the time the support was somewhat garbage, which made me move to OVH.

I did the opposite and moved from OVH. I didn't have any problems with Online, but can't say the same about OVH.

For what it's worth: I created an account to try it out in January, played a bit with a cheap instance, and deleted the instance. Got billed in February (about 1€) while there was strictly no activity going on. Got to wait until end of March for the account to close, and with everything turned off I can see another bill coming in for 0.50€. Cannot remove my credit card details. Don't care much about the undue handful of euros, but I would not trust them for billing.

Did you release your public IPv4 address?

This isn't done automatically and I believe it is billed at 0.50€ per address while you are "holding on" to an unused address.

Account was closed a while back. Now I can still log in, but only thing I can do is watch my bill increase and my attached credit card stay attached until they charge it. Online fun!

ECC RAM? Sounds suspicious when this kind of offers don't mention memory type.

has somebody experience with Scaleway? Especially if you compare to DigitalOcean? First time I see them. Seems for me the biggest difference is that their servers are baremetal and not VMs?!

I've been using their ARM Servers for a while as a build/test servers for some embedded Linux stuff. Overall a positive experience and things have 'just worked' with a Digital Ocean style interface. That said I've not been hosting critical websites or similar.

Unlike Digital Ocean I like the ability to add flexible storage volumes.

Our BigV service has done this since 2012, on more traditional KVM-based virtualisation - up to 8 SSD or spinning discs which you can add & remove (as well as RAM & cores). We think vertical scaling has been pretty underserved...

Does BigV have a web interface yet?

The command line interface and need for my physical key essentially put me off the service.

It's also reasonably expensive compared to the alternatives these days.

A real x86/64 bare metal server for ~ us$3.30/mo inclusive, wow, it seems like only yesterday people were drooling at $99/mo 300mhz Cobalt RAQs at ev1servers (it was more like 15yrs ago). I was able to spin one up in <1min however I was previously registered at scaleway due to their last offering.

Indeed, I remember perfectly well how "die of success" was a thing when sites that became popular could not keep up with the hosting costs.

If you do CPU-intensive work on these servers, might not the electricity cost surpass the 0.02/hour income? Example: if a kWh costs 0.10, then to have something burning 200W costs 0.02 per hour. (Someone substitute real-ish numbers.)

These are Atom based chips with integrated graphics and SSDs. You're not going to pull 200W from them no matter how hard you try.

These are low-end devices, the system-on-chip uses at most 20W. Add in memory, etc and you don't get that far. I'm sure they've run their numbers.

Right now I'm developing on Amazon EC2, because of the low ping times and because I have a range of options in terms of being hosted around the world to minimize low ping times for potential customers. I would like to know what options would I have at scaleway.com, but I can't find that information easily.

All I found was: How are my servers positioned in terms of network proximity and resiliency? -- The ability to group your servers to create placement preferences is already integrated in the core of our system. We will expose it to you in the coming months.

Just yesterday tried to install Gitlab-ce in C1 then realized that there is no ARM build for it. Went to digitalocean just for x86. And today they introduced x86, great news.

You could install it manually or even use the provided image - it's really just a few clicks.

I run Gitlab on a C1 in a docker container since around half a year. Just a few dozens repos and a few users. Works flawless :)

I already have Scaleway account. I just finished some benchmarks on their starter vps and looks very interesting price per performances. Cores are dedicated, based on Intel C2750 (on /proc/cpuinfo). I have approx 23% more performances on cpu and iops than DO $20 plan. For equivalent $2.70 price, its 8-9 times less expansive for more performances. It's time for me to think about migration :-)

How does the CPU performance of Avoton compare to a Pi 2? How do they perform on single threaded encryption, eg for a Tor relay?

I can't actually test it, but considering nbench shows the Avoton is faster on regular CPU operations, and that on top of that it comes with native AES-NI support (unlike the ARM CPU used by the Pi), it's probably much faster at Tor encryption.

I just run ServerBear tests and results for the VPS (VC1) are here. http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2016/03/13/sd7vRARnHCYhDa5S

Interesting. I have an invite and so I have thought about buying Scaleways for long. Their storage space fits what I need at an unbeatable price. May be that a better choice for me is the VC1 over the C1, as the CPU seems to be much better (Atom C2750) there. The cores will, however, be shared right? What kind of virtualization are they using, hardware-based? Very happy if you can make a response. This server looks really promising.

"Avoton" sounds very close to "Avorton", which is not what you want powering your computer.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/avorton

I can't wait for the day when it's actually cheaper to host in the cloud then hosting the servers yourself, electric, bandwidth, and storage costs included. This is a step in the right direction!

I can see nothing about where the servers are, which can impact latency dramatically in some cases. I have to serve to a chunk of our users in China, and I need to have at least a server in Asia.

Am I missing something?

They are located in France

I would like them to make their S3 replacement available to new signups.

I'd still like to know where I can buy the new Xeon D variants at an affordable price. The Avoton variants are okay but the availability is not good, certainly in the UK.

I've just tried it, but did not found how to resize/scale... And a bit disappointed about snapshot: you have to power-off your server before snapshot/backup.

I've tried the C1 to run JSPWiki on Tomcat, but it didn't work. I guess too little RAM. I'm sorry to see that there is nothing inbetween a C1 and a C2.

4GB is too little?

If you want even more affordable (but lower performance), http://lowendspirit.com/

I would be careful with them. I've bought couple VPSes there and there was always an issues. In one instance provider vanished after 3 months, in another one VPS is still live but it's terrible slow (high ping latency). I am not complaining much because I paid for them ~$7/year (yes, thats year) but still, the same companies offer more expensive options and I wouldn't risk data lost. Use DigitalOcean, I think its very reliable and fairly inexpensive solution, just avoid London datacenter if you are in UK, for some reason Amsterdam is way faster.

Thanks for the intel re the London DO datacentre. I'm glad it's not just me :-)

oh, curious re London, I'll have to try Amsterdam!

I think you are talking about http://lowendbox.com/ offers. The GP links to http://lowendspirit.com/, which is an unrelated VPS provider.

how easy is it to boot/install your own OS on these bare metal servers? some of these offers look interesting for unikernels.

I don't have any experience with Scaleway, but Vultr allows you to upload your own ISO and install it (even Windows Server). However, it's purely a VPS at competitive prices, not bare metal. Their bare metal servers start at $60USD/month.

thanks. I'm familiar with Vultr and always on the look out for alternatives :)

I love Vultr. Support is fantastic!

Are they still offering the C1? It's absent from the pricing page.

What is “unmeted bandwidth”?

insanely cheap? For this price you can get a real i7 from Hetzner instead of Atom...

Do you mean through their server bidding? Because those old pieces of junk are known for being stacked with near-failing hard drives.

I got a dozen of them an in the last 5 years only one drive failure, quickly replaced, no data lost thanks to RAID.

Anything similar in the UK?

Any support for FreeBSD?

How do they handle DoS?

>invite required

Great way to drive away customers

Meh. I just got a 4-core / 6GB RAM / 150GB HDD / 1Gbps VPS for $6/month.

Where from?

It'd be nice if Docker was supported out of the box. I don't want to be pissing around with kernels just to test them out.

I know nothing about Scaleway, but found these via the link above: https://blog.scaleway.com/tag/docker/ https://www.scaleway.com/imagehub/docker/

what is the problem with kernel? very curious as I would need Docker myself if I was going to use them

I tried Scaleway last year. I was very disappointed with the usability of their offering (I was trying to run a simple Ubuntu Minecraft server - it was unnecessarily complicated to set up everything from ssh keys to snapshots), and stopped the account quickly. That very next day and for the first time ever my card picked up a fraudulent $3000 bar bill in Las Vegas. I don't think it was a coincidence.

I cannot recommend Scaleway.

How exactly is Scaleway (European company) related to some fraudulent bar bill in Las Vegas?

And you didn't say what was wrong with their service.

Stolen credit cards are sold to "carders" who sell them on to people all over the world. Here is a NYTimes article on how credit cards are stolen and sold: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/card-data-is-stolen...

Not parent poster, but the implication was that his card details had been sold.

Geography has nothing to do with it, I'm reliably told that one can cheaply purchase card details on Tor hidden services, paying in BTC.

I've not tried it myself, and the only time I've had my card cloned was the other way around. It was cloned IRL, and was then used online for gambling.

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