Scaleway Stardust Instances
scaleway.com
scaleway.com
- Stardust, 0.0025€/h: 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 10GB disk, unlimited 100Mbps network
- Hetzner, 0.004€/h: 1 vCPU, 2GB RAM, 20GB disk, 20TB 10Gbps network
- Azure, 0.005$/h: 1vCPU, 0.5GB RAM, 4GiB disk, per-byte network
- Amazon Lightsail, ~0.005$/h: 1vCPU, 0.5GB RAM, 20GB disk, 1TB ???bps network
- Amazon Lightsail, ~0.007$/h: 1vCPU, 1GB RAM, 40GB disk, 2TB ???bps network
- DigitalOcean, $0.007/h: 1vCPU, 1GB RAM, 25GB disk, 1TB ???bps network
- OVH, 0.008€/h: 1vCPU, 2GB RAM, 10GB disk, unlimited 100Mbps network
- GCP, 0.009$/h: 0.2vCPU, 0.6GB RAM, no disk, per-byte network
I suppose the big question is how well the CPU performs. Their "price/performance" graph naturally makes them look quite good but it has some issues. The biggest one is that the methodology is entirely missing but there are some smaller clear issues like comparing to Amazon's C6g instance (which costs 13x as much) instead of the price-comparable Lightsail instances.
Their small m1s instances are $3.5/month or 0.0045$/hr. 1GB ram, 15GB storage, bandwidth is a little harder to understand exactly but "1TB". No affiliation but they've been around & had good low price tiers for a while now, easy to use, worked great, all with APIs for on demand. I think it's all openstack based? Maybe? Love to see.
Lot of great "lowendbox" providers these days. And some not so great ones! Few offer the array of services you expect from a cloud provider (attachable storage, networking, ipv6, &c). Great to see folks who do!
These days I'm mainly on by-thr-month boxes but I appreciate having some short-term load providers I respect & trust.
Doesn't Hetzner offer a cheaper instance with double the RAM?
On a technical note, seems like ping times from LunaNode to LA are expected to be a bit over 70 ms.
Nuremburg: 85ms from east coast, 156ms from west coast: https://mtr.sh/#ping/8EC5V,MHi1W/nbg.icmp.hetzner.com
Falkenstein: 87ms from east coast, 157ms from west coast: https://mtr.sh/#ping/8EC5V,MHi1W/fsn.icmp.hetzner.com
Helsinki: 107ms from east coast, 163ms from west coast https://mtr.sh/#ping/8EC5V,MHi1W/hel.icmp.hetzner.com
While that's true, Scaleway have an (at best) mixed reputation for IP stability and poor customer support.
Pros:
- often free/unmetered bandwidth - very useful for some projects
- relatively cheap prices
- low downtime in general
- decent support ticket response times
Cons:
- CPU is generally rather slow, very noticeable compared to mainstream providers like AWS, GC, etc
- little selection of some parameters such as location (only Paris, Amsertdam, Warsaw)
- have had some issues with stopping/starting instances being absurdly slow due to how they move the entire disk around in the past
I think they're a decent choice for side projects that are intended to run at a low cost scale, since the unmetered bandwidth can add up to a lot of savings compared to some competitors (they don't lie about unmetered either - I used to have a $4/month instance that sometimes used >10TB/month, and they never complained), but I likely wouldn't use them for a serious or high-growth startup.
That is not unusual on other cloud providers too. It is a opimisation they must choose: keep the vdisks close to the CPU(s) that will be running the VM but have the expense of moving it around to put it in the right place on startup, or let the vdisk be hosted anywhere in the network so startup is almost instant but IO performance suffers while running. Most, though presumably not all, choose to optimise for better performace in active use.
One example of this is C14. Even though they advertised it as a long-term archiving solution, they gave the product a 5-month discontinuation period after which they just delete your data. If you wanted to start using their new storage solution, you had to do the migration work by hand and then ask them to refund you so that they don't invoice you twice.
They seem to have the problem that they had a much larger more expensive dedicated box network and need to switch to a modern setup while not only not losing income but gaining for custom cloud design.
Being the customer of a custom cloud has tragic enough costs without paying extra for its build out.
I have no idea what "1 vCPU" means in this context but severely doubt it even means "1 hyperthread", unless the physical hardware were something like dual 16 core or single 32 core chips.
Definite pass
I don't believe anyone looking into this sort of offering is expecting even or looking for "1 hyperthread". Hell, obviously they aren't looking for performance. I mean, they are marketing this as a node to test scaleway's services and put up small websites. I'm sure that performance-minded customers are planning to run anything performant on a 1vCPU instance with 1GB of RAM.
It might not be _the best_, but for the price, how is that anything but great?
What's a case where you want to (and more importantly can) burst more than that, but only for a very short time, on such hardware?
That’s missing the point. Most folks don’t fully saturate the pipe ~2.6M seconds a month, but it’s trivially easy to max out a 100Mbps pipe for bursts.
But ime scaleway had slower cpu crunching Power and web requests per second than similar hetzner cloud machines, and online. net(parent company) always had routing problems to me which couldn't be resolved in timely manners (1gbit dedicated server only 100mbit arrived at my place)
Currently happy with DO and Hetzner, and increasingly so with the latter. But Hetzner's lack of firewall is a bit annoying, esp. when using Docker (which interferes with iptables).
the cloud offering doesnt has any which is controllable with the webinterface,but the machines are still firewall protected(mostly for ddos/abuse), but i would just use a firewall vm as entry point and keep the production machines in a private network
u could also use the dedicated servers firewall(the Konsole for dedicated servers has firewall rules in the webinterface, u can attach vswitches to cloud instances)
there ads for scaleway on the linkedin page on cloud-mercato, "A week ago, Scaleway release the European VM with the lowest price. This week, place to the biggest machine with 448 CPU and 7.6 TB of RAM aka "#baremetall Ultimate Performance"." they only have 1 employee on linkedin, company location paris
the website is owned by a portugese company called balladscale with 2 employees and generates $56,524 in sales (USD).
unless cloud-mercato is just a buggy mess, it feels like its been put up in last minute, there bugs everywhere
after logging in with a computer
they dont even offer a "price score" for hetzner https://imgur.com/a/ymMUTj0
and dont offer a storage performance for scaleway https://imgur.com/a/3qZuxdK
they do offer to a "compute score" comparison with both in it and the hetzner machine is somehow ~3% slower, but that doesnt make up the price difference metrics on scaleway website
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliad_SA
Edit: Ah, the concern is Cloud Mercato, cited in the benchmark graphs.
[0] https://blog.scaleway.com/a-star-is-born-as-scaleway-launche...
no pre-charging at all
architecture is x86_64
at the scale, does bandwidth cost them or what?
if the costs of such are significant, what would the costs be to someone like youtube?
But yeah, don’t use either. Just go for Hetzner if you know what you are doing.
If so, this is more like a promotional giveaway than a real service. They should have simply said "two lucky customers will be given a tiny VM for almost free".