5 ms·
We are slashing the C1 price by 70 percent
- zinxq 11y agoStorage and VPS systems are becoming (have become) commodity so quickly. It will be interesting to see if this has any effect on open-source Saas businesses. I.e. "We'll host it for you or you can host it yourself for free" - for example, ghost. Hosting it for me has definitely has its level of remove-hassle advantages, but if such software is easy to install and low maint, then it becomes notably cheaper to grab a VPS for it.
- voltagex_ 11y agoScaleWay seem to have some one-click setups - "InstantApps". See https://www.scaleway.com/docs/category/instantapps/ https://www.scaleway.com/docs/category/instantapps/
- weddpros 11y agoAt 3€/m, it's really worth it for some workload...
- bluejellybean 11y ago2015 and they do not accept Discover cards.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago2015 and people still use Discover cards. Why? I can think of several good reasons to use American Express, despite it being somewhat less widely accepted. But Discover doesn't seem to have any obvious value over a MasterCard or Visa.
- bluejellybean 11y agoDiscover support has been top notch in my experience and after having a number of issues with other credit card providers they've been my goto for a number of years now.
- jazzyk 11y agoTheir value is providing competition to Mastercard/Visa. Without Discover, the duopoly would charge even higher transaction costs, etc.
- mikeash 11y agoWhat about American Express? They're doing pretty well. I don't think I've ever seen anyone use Discover, so I don't know how much competition they really provide.
- Nyr 11y agoBecause they are an European company and Discover is just an American thing.
- bluejellybean 11y agoDiscover has pretty great international support[1]. Fair enough if they can't though. [1]https://www.discover.com/credit-cards/help-center/account/international-use.html https://www.discover.com/credit-cards/help-center/account/in...
- _delirium 11y agoAfaik they're mostly accepted in Europe via their partnership with the payment processing network of Diner's Club (vs. directly seeing a "Discover" sign). Diner's Club is moderately widespread but only in certain market segments, like restaurants and higher-end stores. Not many European ecommerce shops will take Discover or Diner's Club, not even big ones like Amazon [1]. [1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=502572 http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId... or http://www.amazon.de/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=504930 http://www.amazon.de/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=50...
- justincormack 11y agoDiner's club is not used much here, it is occasionally accepted, along with the Japanese cards.
- lux 11y agoThis makes them very similar in price to Digital Ocean, even slightly cheaper. I wonder what the performance comparison would be between their equivalent tiers... Their S3-compatible object storage is also quite appealing. Being in North America though, I'd love if they had a data centre option here too.
- jl6 11y agoLooks like you get a lot more memory than on the cheapest Digital Ocean droplet (2gb vs 512mb), and more storage too (50gb vs 20gb).
- voltagex_ 11y agoIt's 180ms from a residential Canadian connection so I'd imagine it's similar from some parts of the US. Expecting ~300ms from my Australian ADSL connection (compared to ~190ms to an LA based DigitalOcean instance). vpsbench on Scaleway: CPU model: ARMv7 Processor rev 2 (v7l) Number of cores: 4 CPU frequency: MHz Total amount of RAM: 2022 MB Total amount of swap: 0 MB System uptime: 10 min, I/O speed: 99.6 MB/s Bzip 25MB: 32.62s Download 100MB file: 70.5MB/s Small DO instance: CPU model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 0 @ 2.30GHz Number of cores: 1 CPU frequency: 2299.998 MHz Total amount of RAM: 494 MB Total amount of swap: 1023 MB System uptime: 40 days, 11:26, I/O speed: 445 MB/s Bzip 25MB: 8.76s Download 100MB file: 25.8MB/s
- akkartik 11y agoWait, what's the CPU frequency on Scaleway? I just created a test instance with them and ran an open source project of mine. It runs just as fast as anywhere else, but compiling it takes 5 times as long. Investigating further to see if it's just something about my (weird) project. Edit: ah pella posted a comment at the same time as me with details on just how slow the ARM CPU is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161307. The benchmarks linked there are 15x slower on single-threaded workloads.
- fapjacks 11y ago
- killercup 11y ago(The title currently just says '2,99 per month'. This should probably be changed "2.99€" instead, since a lot of people would expect HN to default to USD. Even I (living in Germany) was surprised it was in Euro.)
- actionscripted 11y agoAgreed, though the tip-off to me that it wasn't USD was the comma. For anyone else like me 2.99€ is $3.36 USD.
- susi22 11y agoI didn't check if they do, but they should not charge VAT for customers located in the USA. Which means that the price will actually end up being $2.80 (as of right now 2.99/1.2 EUR to USD).
- germanier 11y agoThe displayed price already is without VAT.
- dheera 11y agoI'd say the currency should be always specified even if it was USD. I don't see why the US should be the "default" for everything.
- pmontra 11y agoThey are French so they bill in Euro. Btw, does anybody has news about that data center intercept bill passed in France in May? http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/05/france-is-one-step-closer-to-adopting-extensive-surveillance-law/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/05/france-is-one-step-closer-t...
- lordlarm 11y agoScaleway is a highly interesting player in the IaaS market as they're one of the few currently that are offering ARM based servers. Will we see more ARM servers the next couple of years from more vendors?
- rmac 11y agoWhy is ARM interesting? Running android natively is one of the few things I can come up with...
- ikawe 11y agoLower power consumption makes it possible to offer very cheap service. In some cases this will just save a few bucks, not very interesting. But the interesting point is what kind of previously economically unviable projects are now viable.
- api 11y agoTotal isolation is also interesting for some high-security applications. I Tweeted to them and suggested that they offer -- at a possibly much higher price point -- a physically isolated server that must be manually provisioned by a human being. Any access would require multi-factor authentication followed by the actual dispatch of a person to retrieve the device. This would be interesting for things like CA master signing servers, etc.
- ajb 11y agoAlmost certainly. There is another generation of ARM SoC's coming out with more and beefier cores, specifically designed for servers. One thing I'm curious about is whether this price reduction from Scaleway means they are close to announcing availability of those.
- ddoscampaign 11y agoThis is brilliant because the main cost of running gear is power draw (PDUs / electrical circuits). Having OEM/ODM blade ARM setup a-la sgi cloudrack/supermicro is the way to drive costs to the floor, in a Backblaze/Google way. Unfortunately, it's a "Dell/Walmart model" hypercommodity where such a business has to maintain massive customer subscriptions to stay cash positive and still just trickles in $. It's an interesting space, but if I were launching a cloud IaaS/VPS, I would probably optimize for the other extreme of "Apple model" premium/full-service expensive hosting that has fantastic uptime, gear and sales/support for enterprise/startup and IT/web operations... There's some more money in that and less headaches. (The most money seems to be in the upper-middle pricepoint area.)
- toomuchtodo 11y ago> I would probably optimize for the other extreme of "Apple model" premium/full-service expensive hosting that has fantastic uptime, gear and sales/support for enterprise/startup and IT/web operations... There's some more money in that and less headaches. (The most money seems to be in the upper-middle pricepoint area.) A few weeks ago, I'd say "You mean AWS", but after this morning, and a few other incidents over the last few weeks, I don't think anyone can do fantastic uptime in a virtualized/cloud environment. There's the rub, isn't it? Companies want to compete on quality, but if you're supposed to architect your application(s) for failure, uptime becomes a lot less important. You then only have price to compete on. I know Twilio runs in both AWS and Rackspace, depending on various KPIs for shifting load. Seems to be the way the world is headed. I'm curious if containerization like Docker predicts CDNs running your containers for you at the edge...
- azinman2 11y agoI have fantastic uptime on linode. Averages probably 9 months?
- organsnyder 11y agoIs that just uptime as reported by the OS, or actual time between outages? The server can be happily churning away even if its network connection goes down. I've been on Linode for a while, and have also had a decent experience. However, I wouldn't use uptime as my only metric.
- ay 11y agoI don't see how big of an IPv6 prefix do they allocate per server...
- taneliv 11y agoFrom https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server/ https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server/ : "Do you offer IPv6? Not yet, this is in our mid term roadmap. We developed our own routers and switches to get as many features as possible. Some work is still needed to integrate IPv6 with all security features."
- sz4kerto 11y ago"Today, we are announcing a huge price cut for Scaleway compute services. We believe that cloud computing is an amazing technology and that everybody should be able to benefit from its advantages. That's why we decided to reduce the price of the C1 to €2.99 per month or €0.006 per hour, effectively reducing the price by 70% compared to the previous price (€9.99 per month)." Why must you say that? This is definitely untrue.
- ketralnis 11y agoWhat is untrue about it?
- coreyp_1 11y agoI would love to have a server with them, but I can't think of any projects to put on it (that I have time for). :(
- jo909 11y agoFor every comparison we should take into account that scaleway offers dedicated hardware, not a VPS. Also I think its important to note that they (currently) only offer one very "small" server model, so your whole application would have to be able to scale horizontally really well to be able to run on such infrastructure. So you can't have a few big database servers and a lot of small stateless application servers, which I belive is a very typical architecture today.
- weddpros 11y agoBut... Scaleway is a spinoff of Online.net which offers fine (and cheap) dedicated Intel servers. I don't know (yet) the ping between Scaleway and online.net but it's probably low enough to allow scaling "workers" on ARM servers, while DBs are kept on 64bits dedicated Intel servers. Also if you want to scale horizontally, you probably want to scale on more than one datacenter (online provides that too).
- sgentle 11y agoBy the look of it they use the same DCs (Iliad DC2 & DC3): https://www.scaleway.com/faq/general/ https://www.scaleway.com/faq/general/
- cuonic 11y agoScaleway servers are hosted in Online.net's DC2, you can get dedicated servers in the same DC, or in another one of their DCs which are all directly linked to one another.
- jo909 11y agoYou are correct that you maybe can combine that with dedicated servers from online.net, but managing that might be a headache. Scaleway presents itself as a cloud service after all, where easy/automated management, quick scaling, rapid deployment etc is an important part of the equation. Good point that they seem to be missing multiple availability zones. A lot can be forgiven at that price.
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- Tinyyy 11y agoI wonder if it is effective to run Tor nodes on this, given the unmetered bandwidth. I suspect that CPU is going to be a huge bottleneck here. Does anyone mind trying it out?
- dublinben 11y agoDon't bother trying to run an exit relay. The operators of the company will assume you're a terrible person and forward your information to law enforcement. [0] [0] https://forum.online.net/index.php?/topic/4642-do-you-allow-tor/#entry24618 https://forum.online.net/index.php?/topic/4642-do-you-allow-...
- siscia 11y agoIt seems to me a very nice deal for the Erlang/Elixir developer... Cheap, multicore, server...
- jedisct1 11y agoScaleway kindly donated a node to host a DNSCrypt public resolver. Zero problems since January. This hardware is perfect to host a DNS server. Unlike a VM, the performance is predictable, and setting up the server couldn't be any easier. Not a bad choice to host Docker containers (Docker works fine on this architecture) that don't require tons of memory. They have quite a lot of Linux distributions available, but I'm even more excited about the Bitrig port which is being worked on.
- cwyers 11y ago> We believe that cloud computing is an amazing technology and that everybody should be able to benefit from its advantages. That's why we decided to reduce the price of the C1 Am I the only person who is turned off by that kind of marketing copy? You lowered prices because you thought you could sell more nodes, gain economy of scale, serve as a loss-leader, your costs went down, something. You didn't lower the prices because you wanted to do something nice for everybody.
- atrus 11y agoThe world isn't black and white, you can want to help and make money at the same time.
- kbenson 11y agoI think the point is the disbelief in the cause and effect relationship as presented. I too find it a little hard to swallow that the reason the price was lowered is because they want everyone to be able to benefit from cloud computing advantages. More likely in my estimation is that the cause and effect are reversed, and they wanted to lower prices (to gain market share, users and an advertising blurb) and that has the nice effect of opening cloud computing up to more people.
- mikeash 11y agoWhat's really odd is that if you take it at face value, the statement implies that they didn't care about helping people beforehand, or else the price would have been lower from the start.
- fapjacks 11y agoWell, having just now tried this out, I have to say I'm happy with their interface and the experience getting a server started. I'm excited to see what the uptime is like on this new box and if the unmetered bandwidth is truly unmetered bandwidth.
- pixiez 11y agoC1 is probably not an extremely performant machine, so what is the preferred solution for database hosting? I guess the latency will be too high if we host the database remotely i.e. outside Scaleway but the C1 instance might be not good enough to host a database which is normally the main bottleneck?
- axaxs 11y agoHost it on a real host at online.net, they're in the same DC and owned by the same company.
- vbezhenar 11y agoThat's very interesting. I wonder how those ARMs can deal with encryption (VPN). Also OpenBSD image or, better, ability to install anything from ISO would be very nice.
- jedisct1 11y agoDirectly installing from an ISO image is unlikely to work, due to the NBD devices. Changes might be backported to OpenBSD later, but Bitrig might be available soon: https://github.com/bitrig/bitrig/issues/65 https://github.com/bitrig/bitrig/issues/65