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Comment by stephanheijl | Hacker News Reader

I'm loving this, I've been using scaleway as a host for a few months and they've provided great value during that time. As a Dutch national it would be great for my latency to see scaleway add some capacity to Amsterdam.

Their low end offering allows me to get up and running quickly with a new machine and experiment, without touching any existing instances or firing up a VM myself.

It's a shame transferring machines to the new region apparently isn't supported, but since I'm running on docker it shouldn't be too hard to recreqte my current instances.

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That's another thing i missed, apart from not having ECC RAM.

Why do you think not having ECC Ram is a problem? I'm on scaleway, and I see zero harm coming from that. Different usage?

Row hammer exploits. Someone else running on that server can read and flip your ram and generally pwn you.

ECC only mitigates RowHammer-like exploitations, it doesn't prevents them altogether.

Combined with a working exploit and when not running on the bare metal server that might actually be a valid point. I know when they were released those attacks looked pretty scary, and ECC was supposed to maybe help. I'm not actually sure it does help completely, and that here aren't other measures already in place by now?

For personal use perhaps it doesn't.

For professional news having data corruption is not something that you'd like, especially if you handle client data (as in backup) or even more importantly if you handle payments.

Overall for pro use lack of ECC is just a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Na. There is a bunch of stuff that can go wrong, but there are also a bunch of safeguards that do not rely on ECC. Backups have checksums. TCP has checksums. I mean, if it is the same price I'd have no problem picking ECC, but I see the danger of it having any impact on what I and 99% people on servers are doing at 0.00000001%.

Wait until you get RAM errors, you probably won't notice it until services quietly start to crash and you cannot figure out why because the errors are not logical. So you try to restore a backup - but then the backup won't unpack because the RAM created a corrupt backup. Having a fancy file system like ZFS won't help, but it might give early warnings (if you scrub often).

I guess you get the picture.

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