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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Now if only someone provided colo or leased versions of these. I imagine this is a better value prop than most VPS's.

Scaleway has a 3 euro/month ARM baremetal (and Intel VPS) offering that is higher end than a raspberry pi 3, at least in terms of ram, network + storage -- didn't check CPU.

https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/

[edit: baremetal arm, not vps arm...]

But are they actually available now? The original batch were all rented out within weeks, and they hadn't got any new ones any time I checked.

any feedback on using this service?

I use it currently. It's mostly good. They have SAN storage, so you are not limited by what's attached to the thing directly and you also get reliability. The control panel is mostly good. The boxes are speedy and bandwidth is good.

The bad: their ARM boxes don't get IPv6. At all. The VPS's get 16 IPv6 addresses, which is really dumb.

The badder: their ARM boxes and their VPS boxes can't be shut down. You can reboot them, or you can save their local state into block storage, which even for a small box takes many hours (up to a day in one instance for me). You also can't force-detach a volume from a box, so if say your box/VPS got borked, but you had a data volume you want to save, you are SOL.

Can you at least halt?

I don't believe so. They just boot back up.

IO has been a big problem for the Raspberry Pi and cheap ARM boards in general. Until a board comes out with gigabit ethernet* and SATA/USB3* you'll probably get better value for money with conventional mobos.

* Note: A couple boards already have better IO... but lack the amount of software support that the Pi gets. e.g. Mainline Kernel support

Best all-round ARM SBC (in terms of bang for your buck) is probably the Odroid-C2:

http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/review-odroid-c2-compa...

Don't know if it has mainline kernel support, but it's a good option otherwise.

You can probably still find Allwinner A20 boards with real gigabit ethernet, SATA and mainline kernel support. I think graphics support is still a little limited though.

There's also miniNodes. They offer Pi, Pi 3 and other options, but they are more expensive than Scaleway: https://www.mininodes.com/hosted-arm-servers/

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