Starter VPS: New Affordable Variants | Hacker News Reader

Starter VPS: New Affordable Variants

blog.scaleway.com

76 pointsRussianCow29 comments

Bare Metal has lots of practical applications: Docker, CI, Databases...

However, I have no idea how Scaleaway is getting away with selling a Bare Metal server with 6 cores, 8GB memory, and 200GB of SSD disk for 10 euros a month. That's just doesn't make any financial sense.

If you're looking for a solid and reputable Bare Metal provider that allows you provision on demand all with a great control panel and API check out https://packet.net.

Took a look at their pricing page. That trend of showing per-hour fraction-of-dollar pricing is really disturbing. Who rents a host for an hour? (Well, I can surely imagine use cases, like spawning a beefy host for a day while getting abnormally high traffic, but I seriously doubt it's common.)

Type 0: $0.05/hour ≈ $36.50/mo; Type 1: $0.40/hour ≈ $292/mo; Type 2: $1.00/hour ≈ $730/mo; Type 3: $1.70/hour ≈ $1277.5/mo

The idea is servers are immutable and throw away. Just because they are bare metal does not mean they have to sustain long lives.

On Amazon AWS you can fire up an expensive server for half an hour or even ten minutes, to do some calculations that would otherwise take days. You can even fire up 100 of those servers for 1/100th of the time if you can do that calculation in parallel.

This all can be scripted, and that makes it very powerful.

Another use case is Streisand, the VPN service that you can install on your laptop. You need an AWS account, keys etc, and then you can start up one small server as vpn for one or two hours, or for twenty minutes, each time with a different IP, from data centers all over the world. Need a server in Asia? In the EU or the US? It can set this up within the minute, if you have it configured properly.

So there are use cases for these services with price per minute. The problem with Scaleway is that they don't have the really expensive servers, and they don't have the scripting if I'm correct. I do have a server running there, cheap and not in the US, and it does its job properly.

I'm not sure the above commenter is unaware of cloud services priced by the hour. The question is more about bare metal hosts being priced in this way, which is somewhat unusual.

For what you're discussing, then a VPS/shared/dedicated VM host is more than appropriate. But generally, when companies are going bare metal, they are not doing so for hours at a time.

So the question still remains, what is the use case for an hourly billed bare metal server?

Howdy - Zac here from Packet.

The clients of ours that leverage the by-the-hour model generally use the same devops tools (Terraform, Docker Machine, Ansible, etc) against our API to provision and orchestrate bare metal that they would against AWS or DO to do the same with VM's.

The use case drivers for those who choose bare metal often seem to be price/performance ratios, network, bring your own hypervisor or not use one, etc.

But generally, when companies are going bare metal, they are not doing so for hours at a time.

But why was that? I'd say it was a problem with the supply rather than with the demand - bare metal providers didn't offer programmable, on-demand machines, and so the type of customers self-selected against those who were looking for those features.

AWS has a similar offering:

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/

I commonly spin up jobs on ~1000 nodes for a fraction of an hour that would take my laptop 3 months to complete. $50 and done. Certainly this is not the web app / service hosting that you appear to be talking about, but I'm equally certain that I'm not the only one doing this.

  > Bare Metal server with 6 cores, 8GB memory,
  > and 200GB of SSD disk for 10 euros a month

Are you sure they are bare metal servers? The blog posts doesn't mention anything like that and the pricing page misses the word "dedicated".

C2s and C1s are bare metal. VC1s are virtual.

They're using Atom-based (old 2008 pre-Silvermont Atom architecture) Avoton "microserver chips" that Intel launched in 2013:

https://blog.scaleway.com/2016/03/08/c2-insanely-affordable-...

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2292691/intel-launches-avoton...

If you want cheap VPS with good performance and reliability you may want to take a look at these as well:

http://vpsdime.com/

https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-ssd.xml

https://www.prometeus.net/site/vps.php

https://www.prometeus.net/site/kvm-vps.php

I don't think either are using Atom. VPSDime is just overselling, but I haven't heard anyone complain about been bottlenecked, so they probably do it in a smart way (taking resources from those who don't use them fully).

I'm just going to nuke this post since the consensus seems to be its offensive somehow. :P

https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/ I'm talk about this pricing (bare metal) not the blog post for VPS. I'd appreciate toning down the douchiness.

> You are attacking someone who has been in business longer than the service you are advocating on the basis of you knowing their financial situation better than they do. Maybe you should consider that isn't a good position to be taking in general rather than resorting to personal attacks?

I think you're seriously overreacting. You could have easily responded to the OP's point without the condescension and calling them "clueless". I didn't think the OP seemed like an attack at all, rather just skepticism. Your response, however, seems very much like an unwarranted personal attack.

>However, I have no idea how Scaleaway is getting away with selling a Bare Metal server with 6 cores, 8GB memory, and 200GB of SSD disk for 10 euros a month. That's just doesn't make any financial sense.

Where are you getting that from? The hardware is ancient and completely worthless. They could very well be building these servers for high double digits. (Although I'd be more inclined to guess around $200, if they're actually buying the parts.)

If they're not just reusing old online.net gear, that is.

So this is a company selling VPS hosting - not sure why it's newsworthy. Their ARM servers were innovative, this not so much so.

Just realize these are basically:

https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-xc

1x Intel® C2750 (Avoton) with 8 cores.

Avoton cores are very weak compared to other cloud providers.

Except these are ARM cores not Intel: https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server/

FTA:

"VC1 cloud servers, based on x86-64 CPUs, again engineered by our eletronics team."

These are virtual x86_64 servers, their non virtual ARM ones seem to be the C1x and C2x.

I had the same opinion initially, but I did some testing to the machines I had available. You can see the benchmarks here : https://docs.google.com/document/d/114A7kl6BHqsZ0qPjG8B8IA_U... I got my site ( https://hack.ernews.info ) up on a C2S machine in Scaleway, and I'm pretty satisfied with it so far as value/money

How is this comparable to Digital Ocean?

Their prices are about 1/5th. So it almost feels like a nobrainer to migrate to DO or am I missing something here?

DO is slightly more reliable and uses substantially more powerful processors so on a low contention host, you can get better performance.

The catch with these are shared Avoton CPUs. So their "large" 9.99 plan is likely 4 VPS on a single 8 core Avoton would be my guess.

Not so sure ... There is a BIG gap and strategy difference between - thousands of VM on 8 or 16 Xeon cores - Scaleway technology with only few VM per node (2 to 6) with dedicated Avoton cores and dedicated memory (no oversubscribing)

Most of clients reports huge performances differences, and it's very easy to measure the difference. That's why VC1x VPS are so so good, constant performances, and for this price, it's really awesome

Wish more guys would take cryptocurrency.

I agree, especially for small amounts like 3 Euros per month.

Lesson learned: Cheap prices imply low quality.

Sounds like the traditional overselling to me. Not sure why this is HN frontpage? No different than 99% of hosting providers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com