I am buffled by the relatively low prices. Much, much lower than DigitalOcean. Is this service stable? How can I be sure that they won't go out of business in a few months...?
It's probably a safe assumption that DigitalOcean is in more danger of "going out of business in a few months" than Scaleway is.
0. https://online.net 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliad_SA
Since they are Europe-based they require "secure 3d". My Amex with $65,000 limit that I use personally and for business works flawlessly in USA and outside for last 7 years. But not with those guys.
After back and forth battle with their ticketing system, I was advised by engineer to "finally get a secure 3d card". :) Scaleway should send said engineer for a trip to USA to see we don't use much of Secure 3d here. In fact, my personal account rep said Amex will never implement it because it only adds unnecessary layer and actually doesn't make things safer.
Until Scaleway fix their broken payment system, I will stick with DigitalOcean and few other mature and reliable hosting companies, because how the heck am I supposed to trust them with my mission-critical systems, when they cannot even figure their own payment page.
1) They are based in france, near a source of cheap power.
2) They are not big fat Xeons, they are Xeon-Ds, which are a quarter as hot than a e5-26xx.
3) https://www.supermicro.nl/products/nfo/Xeon-D.cfm
you can fit 12 servers in 3u. Plus they are dirt cheap, I assume ~$400-600 a unit.
http://www.wiredzone.com/supermicro-multi-node-servers-micro...
They are know for cutting the cost by running project with very small and smart team with hacker culture.
Network is stable and fast enough for me (iperf ~500Mbit to 800Mbit to Hetzner / DFN).
CPUs are Intel Atom Avoton - these are slower than a 'real' Xeon Core, not as slow as the dedicated ARM boxes. I'm just serving static content and do some rsync on the box for that it's perfectly fine. If you are on an overbooked Droplet you have similiar/worse performance.
Everything else is pretty much not so great. IPv6 is a joke you get a single address + gateway /127 - Snapshots only work when machine is offline - it's not possible to easily resize or move machines between Paris/Amsterdam.
Storage is over nbd afaik not local but it was always fast enough for me.
You don't have control over your kernel and you have to use what Scaleway offers you - althrough there are some hacks that are not reboot-safe to fiddle with iPXE - so you can even run *BSD - https://community.online.net/t/openbsd-on-a-vc1/1933
But you get worse deals for 2,99€ from most VPN providers. If you want to use it for something serious I'd be careful through and do some throughough testing and benchmarking before.
You can't mount an extra volume on the cheapskate servers - I tried recently (in order to test my contribution to their open source efforts, of all things...) and only found out after it had shutdown, backed up, and created the new volume.
The backup disk, and the extra one I couldn't mount meant my bill went up to ~€5 for the month.
Would've been nice if on creating the extra volume it said "Are you sure? You don't have a server you can attach this too at the moment" or something.