Hacker News Reader

Comment by napsterbr | Hacker News Reader

Nice. The only thing keeping me away from Scaleway are several bad reviews about Online.net network. Anyone got any experience on this?

Their arm offerings are nice but unfortunately they are always out of stock. When I contacted support to ask if they have plans to mitigate this, their full response was "sometimes we are victims of our own success" (nice, good for them, but some real information would be useful).

Another major problem for anyone considering Scaleway is several reports of not being able to launch an instance from control panel, or completely bricking a working instance by simply restarting it.

View on HN

I've been a customer of theirs for less than a month. In that time I've had several problems.

For example I rebooted a host, and it didn't come back. For 10 hours it was down. After getting in touch with their support I was told "Oh yeah, there is a problem with the hypervisor, we'll fix it". Meanwhile their status-site showed "zero problems". (The next day it came back.)

Provisioning a stock (Debian) system results in a host with no working serial console, which makes it hard to rescue.

You can't make outgoing SMTP (25/587) access without giving them copies of passports, etc. Though if you enable IPv6 you'll soon discover outgoing SMTP works ;) Only downside there is you can't set reverse DNS for your IPv6 address.

(Reverse DNS? They require the forward address to point to you before they'll let you set it, as a "security measure".)

I'm using the host for offsite monitoring, but we'll see if it stays. Cheap, but perhaps too cheap.

> (Reverse DNS? They require the forward address to point to you before they'll let you set it, as a "security measure".)

Many hosters I've dealt with have required this to prevent abuse from someone reading the rDNS and assuming the IP address is related to someone it is not.

I've heard this argument before, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

(Perhaps more annoyingly there is no ability to set reverse DNS for IPv6 the address allocated to a server.)

> You can't make outgoing SMTP (25/587) access without giving them copies of passports, etc.

That's odd, I simply opened a ticket and they enabled it for me.

I got in touch and their reply was as follows:

According to a security issue about your account, we would like to verify your identity to unlock the situation.

For this we will need you to send to this mail address XXXX the following document :

If you are are an Individual , we invite you to send :

        * A copy of your ID
         * A picture of yourself holding your ID

If you are are a company, we invite you to send :

        * A business Certificate

We will process your document as soon as we received them and will make contact with you.

Why asking you these documents ?

As you know some swindler steal the identity of other people and use their credit card number getting them in unscrupulous way. By asking you these proof, we will be all protected from these people.

The process link to this identification request as a goal to fight against fraud and unpaid bill.

All the document which will be sent will be received by departement taking care of fraud.

Hm, I wonder if it's some fraud heuristic situation where depending on your "risk level" they'll either approve/request more into.

It's interesting how most of the companies where I've heard of them asking for ID/passport (e.g. Hetzner, Online.net, Scaleway) are European.

Most American companies (e.g. DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, Vultr) will let you just create an account (often with free credit) and do whatever you want.

ID for outgoing SMTP is anti-spam measurement. Many other cloud have their IP blacklisted by different spam list.

Other ID works too. If you are using a credit card, just ask their support

I've been a customer for 3 years. During the first year, I had some annoying problems, like instances that wouldn't restart (got "frozen") or disks that wouldn't attach to my instance. But their support fixed those issues a few hours after creating the tickets.

However, for the last 2 years or so, I've had no issues at all and the platform seems to be evolving constantly. Their prices are insanely competitive.

If you learn just a little bit of Ansible and Terraform, you can easily setup a Kubernetes cluster there.

I can totally recommend them.

Disclaimer: just a happy customer :)

I use them to run ArchiveTeam[1] projects (which consist of downloading data and then uploading it again, usually to the Internet Archive). For that purpose they work very well.

When I initially set up my servers a few years ago I did have an issue where I was getting randomly corrupted packets on a few of my instances. I spent about a week going back and forth with their support about it and they eventually determined it was a hardware fault with the VM host and had me migrate them to a different physical server. I haven't had any problems with them since.

[1] https://www.archiveteam.org/

> When I initially set up my servers a few years ago I did have an issue where I was getting randomly corrupted packets on a few of my instances.

I had the exact same issue, and found at least two reports of similar issues on public sources. This was very frustrating, as configuring the server over SSH was basically impossible since the sshd would drop the connection as soon as it detected a corrupt packet (invalid MAC), resulting in dropped SSH shell every couple of minutes.

I contacted support multiple times. I even pointed them to resources showing that this was likely an issue with their hardware, and some other guy had had the issue resolved by moving the instance to a different rack. Their support's reply was basically telling me to try to re-start the server as many times that it would spawn on a working rack.

Needless to say I had very little interest to continue working with them after this experience.

One thing that is annoying about Scaleway is that their underlying infrastructure relies on niche things like NBD storage, in-house odd ball booting, etc. So, if you want to run something other than their fixed list of Linux distros, you're in for a lot of hurt. BSD variants are especially frustrating there. Even if you get it working, they will change something to the point where you can't reboot.

To be fair, their standard images work fine, and you can't beat the price.

Their modern VPS instances use regular local drives. There is a local boot option too… but it's broken for now on the ThunderX ARMv8 instances. The docs say "will be enabled in a few days" but they still haven't done it. My FreeBSD/aarch64 install can't boot right now :(

I am a happy customer of their cheapest baremetal arm server since 2015. Maybe they could publish the number or available servers of each kind so that clients could organize accordingly.

> bad reviews about Online.net network. Anyone got any experience on this?

I have never had any network issues.

I use Scaleway Amsterdam-based instances for more than two years. I used to run about a dozen of permanent servers: from small ARM-based, to bare-bone, to "X64 Pro Workload intensive" VPS (which are now apparently replaced with EPYC); and countless amount of short-lived instances. I did have the only single serious issue when production server was completely gone, including LSSD data, due to underlying "hypervisor critical failure". Unfortunately, I had no server snapshot that time, but that's another story and it's on me.

> reports of not being able to launch an instance from control panel

They do occasionally (quite rarely) have minor issues. Just recently I was unable to remove their "X64 Pro" instance neither within web interface nor scaleway-cli client. However, this issue was resolved within a couple of hours after reporting the ticket (with no paid support).

In general, I am very pleased with the Scaleway, considering the quality/price ratio. If only they'd have servers in Scandinavia/Northern Europe region, I wouldn't look for other offers such as Hetzner/Helsinki.

I confess I wonder if the switch to EPYC is cost based or speculative execution bug based.

> Nice. The only thing keeping me away from Scaleway are several bad reviews about Online.net network. Anyone got any experience on this?

I never had any issue with my Online.net servers (one at a time, but I upgrade it from time to time) nor my Scaleway one.

> When I contacted support to ask if they have plans to mitigate this, their full response was "sometimes we are victims of our own success" (nice, good for them, but some real information would be useful).

The two datacenters they use for public hosting (DC2 and DC3) are full. They recently finished building a new one (DC5) and commissionned a first room a few months ago.

I've been customer of Online, since it opened back 10 years ago or something (was called dedibox back then), and customer of scaleway since beta.

Bandwidth has always been vastly superior to any competitor, not sure if this has something to do with the fact that the mother company Iliad also contains a famous french ISP (Free). Not to mention another sister company that sells domains without making a marging on it.

I have restarted thousand of instances, never had a problem that was not a PEBKAC. Actually, I even have a production site there since the beta and never had a problem.

online.net themselves (proper dedicated servers) are fine, and their network is reliable, fast and they have good uptime.

Scaleway's hardware and software is a huge problem, it's unreliable to the point of being unusable. I'd only use it for cheap hosting of build server workers. Their disks for example have no RAID, you're expected to mount multiple volumes and perform software raid yourself, except that there's no easy way to do that and also you often run into limits for how many disks you can attach to a VM!

Having just switched from Online.net to Hetzner, I vastly preferred the Online.net service.

However they were none too pleased when my machine Tor Exit node was listed in some email spam list, so I had to move.

The customer support has sucked most of the times that I have been in contact with them.

The C14 cold storage product seems to have a ton of bugs in it, like how you'll open up an archive and you can't connect to it for an hour.

I already moved my small servers to Digital Ocean and I'm thinking of replacing C14 with Glacier.

It's not a bug, it's a feature, you just don't understand what C14 is and the problem it's trying to solve.

It's not a feature. Once the archive has been created for the first time, you should be able to connect to it immediately once it says "Available", not an hour after you created it and it went to status "Available".

active customer for like 2 years, no issues with my 3 euro/mo instances

Besides the comment I left... I've seen successful ARP poison attempts and lots of junk broadcast traffic (people running PLEX) on Online.

> full response was "sometimes we are victims of our own success"

A very French reply

Reply on news.ycombinator.com