19 ms·

C2: Affordable X86-64 Servers

448 points by fooyc 11y ago

kyriakos 11y ago
the prices look sweet. anyone has experience with them? How's the network stability? support response times?
- naggie 11y ago
  I host my blog with a C1. The load hasn't been huge, but I've had zero problems. Provisioning is fast, and the pre-packaged images are well designed.
- fooyc 11y ago
  They are a subsidiary company of Online.net, itself a subsidiary of Iliad/Free, one of the leading ISPs in France. I have over 50 servers at Online since more than a year now, and they have been pretty much flawless. Support is good and reachable by phone. I haven't worked with Scaleway though.
  - Vlaix 11y ago
    >Support is good and reachable by phone Really ? I used them quite a bit years and years ago, and at the time the support was somewhat garbage, which made me move to OVH.
    - elcct 11y ago
      I did the opposite and moved from OVH. I didn't have any problems with Online, but can't say the same about OVH.
- nicolas314 11y ago
  For what it's worth: I created an account to try it out in January, played a bit with a cheap instance, and deleted the instance. Got billed in February (about 1€) while there was strictly no activity going on. Got to wait until end of March for the account to close, and with everything turned off I can see another bill coming in for 0.50€. Cannot remove my credit card details. Don't care much about the undue handful of euros, but I would not trust them for billing.
  - drakenot 11y ago
    Did you release your public IPv4 address? This isn't done automatically and I believe it is billed at 0.50€ per address while you are "holding on" to an unused address.
    - nicolas314 11y ago
      Account was closed a while back. Now I can still log in, but only thing I can do is watch my bill increase and my attached credit card stay attached until they charge it. Online fun!
therealmarv 11y ago
has somebody experience with Scaleway? Especially if you compare to DigitalOcean? First time I see them. Seems for me the biggest difference is that their servers are baremetal and not VMs?!
- adamt 11y ago
  I've been using their ARM Servers for a while as a build/test servers for some embedded Linux stuff. Overall a positive experience and things have 'just worked' with a Digital Ocean style interface. That said I've not been hosting critical websites or similar. Unlike Digital Ocean I like the ability to add flexible storage volumes.
  - mattbee 11y ago
    Our BigV service has done this since 2012, on more traditional KVM-based virtualisation - up to 8 SSD or spinning discs which you can add & remove (as well as RAM & cores). We think vertical scaling has been pretty underserved...
    - byefruit 11y ago
      Does BigV have a web interface yet? The command line interface and need for my physical key essentially put me off the service. It's also reasonably expensive compared to the alternatives these days.
cfallin 11y ago
Prices seem really great but a few paragraphs down they say the servers are based on Avoton SoCs. Intel Avoton is an Atom chip (Silvermont core), so CPU-bound performance will be somewhat lower than the usual Sandy Bridge/Haswell/whatever core that you get on AWS or Google Compute Engine. It's a server SoC though so I/O throughput is probably pretty decent...
- Ambroos 11y ago
  That's what scares me a bit. The multi-core performance is great (considering their pricing), but single-threaded performance is quite a bit below what the competition gets you. If you're running a web server with something single-threaded (like PHP) requests might start taking a bit longer than you're used to.
  - siscia 11y ago
    Well, that is the whole point, you are suppose to have a whole bunch of small, inexpensive, power efficient, cores. If the software you normally use doesn't take advantage of, at least, multi core hardware, then you can obtain more value from other hosting provider... On the other hand if your software can takes advantages of multicore hardware, or -- even better -- multi node architecture, then scaleway is likely the best option.
    - _Codemonkeyism 11y ago
      Nearly no web framework is per request multi core (e.g. multi core HTML / JSON rendering, assuming backend operations already async). So each request will be slow. [Edit:] Not sure for the downvote, would be interested what's wrong in my comment.
      - skj 11y ago
        Go's net/http framework uses a go routine per connection.
        11y ago
tluyben2 11y ago
Invite only.... So you cannot even get them. What's the use of this announcement?
- nikolay 11y ago
  Free advertising, I guess. I also hate the criminal false advertising as "now available".
  - xd1936 11y ago
    Ha. "I can't sign up for a new account and use this service right now, so nobody should care". K.
    - tluyben2 11y ago
      People should care; the current clients of this service should care. It shouldn't be on top of HN for hours IMHO; by far most cannot do anything with this which makes it indeed cheap advertising. Or it should say 'invite only' or 'only for current members'. Then I probably wouldn't have read it and would've checked it when it said 'Signups now open'.
- tiernano 11y ago
  I'm an existing customer of the original c1, I just spun up a box now... Might be invite to new customers only...
  - vmp 11y ago
    I had my account disabled a few months ago and support wouldn't re-enable it, told me to wait in line. :(
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  I think I have a number of invites, but the site is very slow at the moment.
  - 11y ago
ikurei 11y ago
I can see nothing about where the servers are, which can impact latency dramatically in some cases. I have to serve to a chunk of our users in China, and I need to have at least a server in Asia. Am I missing something?
- kyriakos 11y ago
  They are located in France
lazyjones 11y ago
Avotons are very slow, an 8C SoC will typically be slower than an 8 year old 2C desktop CPU (I ran Go builds as a benchmark on my own 2.4 GHz C2750 vs. a 2008 iMac with 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo). As for Scaleway, some people seem to like it very much, but I found their policy about spamming their users problematic. They (online.net) mock you at registration with a sleazy checked and disabled box for receiving spam ("product news" etc.), therefore I would consider their offers "ad-supported". The C2 is advertised as "bare-metal", but since they offer a 4C variant, I doubt that (there's a 4C variant, the C2550, but that doesn't seem to be a sane choice). C2L might be a full dedicated box (or not), but C2S and C2M seem very much VPS/shared. It's likely to be based on SuperMicro MicroBlades: http://www.supermicro.nl/products/MicroBlade/module/MBI-6418A-T7H.cfm http://www.supermicro.nl/products/MicroBlade/module/MBI-6418... (4 nodes in 1 3U blade!).
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  I'm happy to run any benchmarks people like (within reason). I can also compare to most AWS instances if you like.
  - dan1234 11y ago
    I’d be especially interested in any disk & network speed benchmarks.
  - darkr 11y ago
    I was actually looking at getting a C2750 (the 8 core avoton) a while back for a small low-power home server, and came across someone who'd already done some decent benchmarking: http://www.servethehome.com/intel-atom-c2750-8-core-avoton-rangeley-benchmarks-fast-power/ http://www.servethehome.com/intel-atom-c2750-8-core-avoton-r... TLDR; For the blowfish test suite (multi-threaded), it's almost on par with an m3.2xlarge, for the majority of other multi-threaded tests, it's a little quicker than an m3.xlarge, but for anything that is single-threaded, it's pretty slow.
  - networked 11y ago
    Please run nbench [1]. I ran it on the C1 in April 2015 and got the following results: CPU : 4 CPU L2 Cache : OS : Linux 3.2.34-29 C compiler : gcc version 4.8.2 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.8.2-19ubuntu1) libc : libc-2.19.so MEMORY INDEX : 5.859 INTEGER INDEX : 8.164 FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 5.770 For comparison, here are an Intel Atom N450, a Core 2 Duo L7500 and a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B: CPU : Dual GenuineIntel Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N450 @ 1.66GHz 1667MHz L2 Cache : 512 KB OS : Linux 3.2.0-23-generic C compiler : gcc version 4.6.3 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5) libc : libc-2.15.so MEMORY INDEX : 10.845 INTEGER INDEX : 9.315 FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 8.748 CPU : Dual GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU L7500 @ 1.60GHz 1601MHz L2 Cache : 4096 KB OS : Linux 3.5.0-26-generic C compiler : gcc version 4.6.1 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.1-9ubuntu3) libc : libc-2.13.so MEMORY INDEX : 18.734 INTEGER INDEX : 14.318 FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 23.178 CPU : L2 Cache : OS : Linux 3.6.11+ C compiler : gcc version 4.6.3 (Debian 4.6.3-14+rpi1) libc : libc-2.13.so MEMORY INDEX : 2.536 INTEGER INDEX : 3.159 FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 2.157 [1] http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/bmark.html http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/bmark.html
pjc50 11y ago
If you want even more affordable (but lower performance), http://lowendspirit.com/ http://lowendspirit.com/
- 8draco8 11y ago
  I would be careful with them. I've bought couple VPSes there and there was always an issues. In one instance provider vanished after 3 months, in another one VPS is still live but it's terrible slow (high ping latency). I am not complaining much because I paid for them ~$7/year (yes, thats year) but still, the same companies offer more expensive options and I wouldn't risk data lost. Use DigitalOcean, I think its very reliable and fairly inexpensive solution, just avoid London datacenter if you are in UK, for some reason Amsterdam is way faster.
  - strongai 11y ago
    Thanks for the intel re the London DO datacentre. I'm glad it's not just me :-)
  - anentropic 11y ago
    oh, curious re London, I'll have to try Amsterdam!
  - networked 11y ago
    I think you are talking about http://lowendbox.com/ http://lowendbox.com/ offers. The GP links to http://lowendspirit.com/ http://lowendspirit.com/, which is an unrelated VPS provider.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
siscia 11y ago
I had a great experience with scaleway. However last time I checked the still have only IPv4 and very few of them, it happens to me that I wanted to spin up an instance for a quick experiment but wasn't possible to have a public IP where to connect, mine was just a simple experiment, nothing important, but still...
- Osiris 11y ago
  The FAQ [1] says that C1 servers don't support IPv6 but C2 servers do. [1] https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server/ https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server/
Vlaix 11y ago
Not surprised to read in the comments they're a subsidiary of Online.net. Ever since they've introduced ultra-cheap dedicated boxes ten years ago, it seems everybody's been sub-renting either them or OVH. I wonder why there aren't more similar offers worldwide, at least in Europe (I can only think of Leaseweb, and they're data capped). The network backbone isn't much different in Britain, Holland or Germany. And the server units aren't really custom.
vardump 11y ago
ECC RAM? Sounds suspicious when this kind of offers don't mention memory type.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
zschallz 11y ago
The blade servers at Delimiter (https://www.delimiter.com/ https://www.delimiter.com/) are even more affordable. I pay $20 a month for a dual Xeon blade with 16gb of ram. They did have a very long downtime this year with no service credit, but uptime has been reasonable over the past year. If you're looking for a hobby box it's a pretty good deal.
- zx2c4 11y ago
  I got super excited at first, but then... The servers are based on: http://ark.intel.com/products/33927/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5420-12M-Cache-2_50-GHz-1333-MHz-FSB http://ark.intel.com/products/33927/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E54... and http://ark.intel.com/products/47927/Intel-Xeon-Processor-L5630-12M-Cache-2_13-GHz-5_86-GTs-Intel-QPI http://ark.intel.com/products/47927/Intel-Xeon-Processor-L56... These are super ancient. If you're looking for affordable north american servers, OVH has the Kimsufi outlet which is cheaper and better hardware. They've got a data center in Canada and will give you American IPs from their AS in Newark, NJ: https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/ https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/ The parent company of scaleway, online.net, also has some inexpensive offerings, but the servers are in France which might be a deal breaker for you. (Delimiter seems to be in Atlanta.)
  - benedikt 11y ago
    For Europe, there's the Hetzner server auction in Germany.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    kimsufi doesn't look bad but I don't find anywhere their cancellation policy
    - lorenzhs 11y ago
      You can choose how many months you pay for (1-12), and sometime before that runs out they email you. Either you pay for some more months or the server goes away.
    - newton10471 11y ago
speakeron 11y ago
I've been testing the performance of the C2. Compared with a Xeon D-1520 (the current hot chip of low-cost cloud computing and actually very nice), single core speed is less than half of the Xeon D (at about the same clock rate of 2.4GHz); multi-thread speed (8 threads running lame encodes) is about 66% of Xeon D. Not bad for the price.
rfreytag 11y ago
I tried Scaleway last year. I was very disappointed with the usability of their offering (I was trying to run a simple Ubuntu Minecraft server - it was unnecessarily complicated to set up everything from ssh keys to snapshots), and stopped the account quickly. That very next day and for the first time ever my card picked up a fraudulent $3000 bar bill in Las Vegas. I don't think it was a coincidence. I cannot recommend Scaleway.
- lubos 11y ago
  How exactly is Scaleway (European company) related to some fraudulent bar bill in Las Vegas? And you didn't say what was wrong with their service.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - rfreytag 11y ago
    Stolen credit cards are sold to "carders" who sell them on to people all over the world. Here is a NYTimes article on how credit cards are stolen and sold: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/card-data-is-stolen-and-sold/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/card-data-is-stolen...
  - Nexxxeh 11y ago
    Not parent poster, but the implication was that his card details had been sold. Geography has nothing to do with it, I'm reliably told that one can cheaply purchase card details on Tor hidden services, paying in BTC. I've not tried it myself, and the only time I've had my card cloned was the other way around. It was cloned IRL, and was then used online for gambling.
codecamper 11y ago
unlimited bandwidth. Is that for real? 300 Mbits. Let's assume you can pump out 100 Mbit sustained. That is about 10 MB/s. or 26,000,000 Megabytes/month. 26,000 GB / month. AWS & google cloud are about $.10/GB. That'd cost 2600 USD to serve. Scaleway claims that'd cost just 12 euro. For realz?
- Aissen 11y ago
  Yes, and it's already the cases for the C1s. It's best effort, you're not guaranteed a sustained I/O if your neighbors are as greedy. But I have a few workloads at OVH and Scaleway that are bandwith-bound, and cloud pricings are just 10 to 100 times more expensive. That's how it is.
- tux3 11y ago
  I have a 3€ C1 server at Scaleway moving some 25-30TB of data per month, so yes, it's very real.
  - codecamper 11y ago
    amazing! very good!
    - muhpirat 11y ago
      With my tor relays I pushed around 150Mbit up and Down. Which is around 45TB per direction and Month.
- pyvpx 11y ago
  "unmetered" is a popular dedicated hosting company marketing trick. things are generally oversubscribed to horrifically oversubscribed and you'll be very hard pressed to sustain 100Mbps 24x7 for a full day, let alone a full month.
  - muhpirat 11y ago
    I pushed on 2 instances around 150Mbit/s with no problems at all :)
imdsm 11y ago
It'd be nice if Docker was supported out of the box. I don't want to be pissing around with kernels just to test them out.
- anentropic 11y ago
  I know nothing about Scaleway, but found these via the link above: https://blog.scaleway.com/tag/docker/ https://blog.scaleway.com/tag/docker/ https://www.scaleway.com/imagehub/docker/ https://www.scaleway.com/imagehub/docker/ what is the problem with kernel? very curious as I would need Docker myself if I was going to use them
pyvpx 11y ago
how easy is it to boot/install your own OS on these bare metal servers? some of these offers look interesting for unikernels.
- morganvachon 11y ago
  I don't have any experience with Scaleway, but Vultr allows you to upload your own ISO and install it (even Windows Server). However, it's purely a VPS at competitive prices, not bare metal. Their bare metal servers start at $60USD/month.
  - pyvpx 11y ago
    thanks. I'm familiar with Vultr and always on the look out for alternatives :)
  - moreorless 11y ago
    I love Vultr. Support is fantastic!
cateye 11y ago
How would this compare to Hetzner offerings? https://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver https://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver
- tronje 11y ago
  I don't think there's much to compare there. Hetzner's servers are a completely different price range. Unless you get a used one here: https://robot.your-server.de/order/market https://robot.your-server.de/order/market (URL looks suspicious, but it's Hetzner, I promise). These are servers that are fairly old and out-dated and whose users have discontinued their contracts; now they're being auctioned off so Hetzner doesn't have to throw them out. But these, I'd say, are also difficult to compare because of the old hardware vs. the new but low-cost hardware of the scaleway ones.
  - cateye 11y ago
    I was curious about the price to performance ratio comparison of both companies. (Is for example the CPU performance really worth the extra price?)
  - imaginenore 11y ago
    Hetzner has cheap VPSs: https://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_vserver/cx30 https://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_vserver/cx30
    - tronje 11y ago
      I know, but the parent comment was explicitly asking about root servers; I agree, though, that I should've mentioned these, as they fit more into the price range (and I imagine they're quite good, as I've mostly heard positive things about Hetzner).
tokart 11y ago
C1 is a good idea and works well especially while arm distro are maturing. IMHO C1 perfs are quite good for the price (700-900 tps on pg_bench, 1500 req/s on rabbitmq on debian). We are running an ELK server which is performing well enough for us even with 2gb of ram. I was just expecting a low cost (6$/month) 4cores ARM64 server with 8gb of ram, I think it would have been more exciting !
- andybak 11y ago
  > I was just expecting a low cost (6$/month) 4cores ARM64 server with 8gb of ram, I think it would have been more exciting ! In case anyone doesn't spot it the closest is this: > Our Starter VPS comes with 2GB of ram, 2 x86-64 Cores, > 50GB of LSSD and 200 Mbit/s of unmetered bandwidth. > It's available at the insane price of €2.99 per month > or €0.02 per hour.
nonuby 11y ago
A real x86/64 bare metal server for ~ us$3.30/mo inclusive, wow, it seems like only yesterday people were drooling at $99/mo 300mhz Cobalt RAQs at ev1servers (it was more like 15yrs ago). I was able to spin one up in <1min however I was previously registered at scaleway due to their last offering.
- vruiz 11y ago
  Indeed, I remember perfectly well how "die of success" was a thing when sites that became popular could not keep up with the hosting costs.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
netforay 11y ago
Just yesterday tried to install Gitlab-ce in C1 then realized that there is no ARM build for it. Went to digitalocean just for x86. And today they introduced x86, great news.
- jfreax 11y ago
  You could install it manually or even use the provided image - it's really just a few clicks. I run Gitlab on a C1 in a docker container since around half a year. Just a few dozens repos and a few users. Works flawless :)
throwaway21816 11y ago
>invite required Great way to drive away customers
vbit 11y ago
Any support for FreeBSD?
rogeryu 11y ago
I've tried the C1 to run JSPWiki on Tomcat, but it didn't work. I guess too little RAM. I'm sorry to see that there is nothing inbetween a C1 and a C2.
- favadi 11y ago
  4GB is too little?
thenomad 11y ago
Dammit. Cheap - very cheap - for everything but storage. It seems impossible to find a low-cost server with some big, slow spinning disks on it at the moment. I'm really not sure why. Anyone got any recommendations there? Where would I look, if anywhere, for, say, 4Tb of storage attached to a low-cost virtual or dedicated server, for less than Google Nearline or equivalent?
- theknarf 11y ago
  I guess you best bet would be Amazon S3?
- danohuiginn 11y ago
  Hetzner will give you a server with 24TB for €82/month, or 5TB FTP space at €26/month
  - thenomad 11y ago
    I didn't know about the latter! Interesting - thanks.
- earlz 11y ago
  There is So You Start[1] which offers 2x3TB with soft RAID.. Dedicated server, so you might be able to pay some amount and get them to add more space to it 1: https://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/ https://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/
- nwilkens 11y ago
  We just introduced an SSD cached storage solution at MNX.io $15/TB -- scalable to 40T. https://mnx.io/pricing https://mnx.io/pricing
  - thenomad 11y ago
    Hmm, very interesting. Thanks!
- icebraining 11y ago
topbanana 11y ago
Anything similar in the UK?
driverdan 11y ago
How does the CPU performance of Avoton compare to a Pi 2? How do they perform on single threaded encryption, eg for a Tor relay?
- icebraining 11y ago
  I can't actually test it, but considering nbench shows the Avoton is faster on regular CPU operations, and that on top of that it comes with native AES-NI support (unlike the ARM CPU used by the Pi), it's probably much faster at Tor encryption.
muhpirat 11y ago
CPU:model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU C2750 @ 2.40GHz Network: root@scw-4e7977:~# ./speedtest-cli Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Testing from Free SAS (212.47.234.38)... Selecting best server based on latency... Hosted by NEOTELECOMS (Paris) [1.59 km]: 2.652 ms Testing download speed........................................ Download: 881.83 Mbit/s Testing upload speed.................................................. Upload: 513.56 Mbit/s
fermigier 11y ago
"Avoton" sounds very close to "Avorton", which is not what you want powering your computer. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/avorton https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/avorton
imaginenore 11y ago
Meh. I just got a 4-core / 6GB RAM / 150GB HDD / 1Gbps VPS for $6/month.
- bluhue 11y ago
  Where from?
woolinsilver 11y ago
Why did they not call it "Scale Away"? That makes more sense in English ("you can scale away to your heart's content"), and you get free advertising each time Enya's Orinoco Flow is played ("scale away, scale away, scale away...").
iofur 11y ago
I've just tried it, but did not found how to resize/scale... And a bit disappointed about snapshot: you have to power-off your server before snapshot/backup.
LogicX 11y ago
I've been very pleased with http://packet.net http://packet.net and their typo 0 server. It's bare metal, but much more performant than here. They have an amazing network, it's by the hour, and it's < $40/mo. Bandwidth is not included: $.05/GB, but that's half AWS. Also they're based in the US, so less latency for those of us with primary customer bases here. We use them at DNSFilter in NYC as part of our anycast network, for the last two months. Looking forward to their San Jose and Amsterdam datacenter expansions coming soon.
- storrgie 11y ago
  Can you do custom iso install?
- BrandonBradley 11y ago
  Free data in? (Like AWS)
  - hackerboos 11y ago
    Yes https://www.packet.net/resources/kb/how-does-packet-bill-for-bandwidth-transfer/ https://www.packet.net/resources/kb/how-does-packet-bill-for...
- vdaniuk 11y ago
  >typo 0 server. It's bare metal, but much more performant than here Packet's 0 server is Atom C2550 and costs 36$/month. Scaleway C2S server is the same Atom C2550 but it costs ~$13/month. Scaleway C2M is C2750 which has twice as much cores and costs ~20/month, so I am not seeing how it is possible for Packet 0 server to be "much more performant" when in fact Packet's offering is so much weaker.
- yyin 11y ago
  Why do you use http://packet.net http://packet.net as a URL in your comment when this only redirects to a www.packet.net subdomain, on Cloudflare? Why not just use http://www.packet.net http://www.packet.net? From the perspective of the user, wouldn't it be "more performant" to skip the gratuitous redirect, extra GET request and DNS lookups? Maybe this is just marketing? Setting referrer, cookies? Fear of a thundering herd arising from an HN comment? Inadvertence? I don't understand. Apologies for being so naive.
reynoldsbd 11y ago
Where are Scaleway's data centers located? I found mention on their site that they're a Paris-based company, but is this the only geographical location for their offerings?
- ThePhysicist 11y ago
  Seems the data centers are also hosted in the Paris area: https://www.scaleway.com/faq/general/ https://www.scaleway.com/faq/general/ "The service is hosted in our own datacenters, Iliad’s datacenters, DC2 and DC3. Both are located near Paris, France." I have to say this is quite an interesting offer, especially for private/side projects. Currently I rent a virtual server at Hetzner, which costs me 23 € / month and is way below the specs mentioned on the Scaleways page, so I am compelled to switch, provided reliablity is good.
  - mromanuk 11y ago
    The problem is the latency (if your customers are in America).
  - sspiff 11y ago
    Interesting. I'm currently using servers by OVH, which compete in the same low-end segment using their Kimsufi[1] offering, and have datacenters in France, Canada and Germany. Paris is close to me, so these might be interesting for VNC or other low-latency applications. [1] http://kimsufi.com http://kimsufi.com
    - Sami_Lehtinen 11y ago
      Nope, OVH doesn't have data center in Germany afaik.
      - sspiff 11y ago
        I was mistaken, I thought they had one in Frankfurt, but it seems the closest they get is Strassbourgh, Near the French/German/Belgian border.
Marazan 11y ago
I would like them to make their S3 replacement available to new signups.
dvfjsdhgfv 11y ago
insanely cheap? For this price you can get a real i7 from Hetzner instead of Atom...
- sspiff 11y ago
  Do you mean through their server bidding? Because those old pieces of junk are known for being stacked with near-failing hard drives.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 11y ago
    I got a dozen of them an in the last 5 years only one drive failure, quickly replaced, no data lost thanks to RAID.
sspiff 11y ago
Hosted in the same datacenters, with similar low-end offerings: https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server#perso https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server#perso.
ctstover 11y ago
Are they still offering the C1? It's absent from the pricing page.
earlz 11y ago
Their support isn't great, and they're only in Canada and EU, but Kimsufi[1] is my goto for beefy but cheap dedicated servers. Their cheapest offering is $5/month for an Atom, 2G RAM, and 500G harddrive. But where the value really lies is a step up to about $25 where you start getting non-Atom processors, 16+G of RAM, and 1+TB harddrives. Also free bandwidth. It's a real dedicated server so you can install whatever on it, but KVM access is expensive if you break it into not booting. You can deploy a fairly good set of distros through their built-in wizard for free 1: https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/ https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/
- techdragon 11y ago
  Charging for KVM access.... Sounds extremely unpleasant. Why would you want a provider like the that, who is going to kick you in the genitals when you're down?
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    Just to put it into perspective, both Azure and AWS don't allow KVM access at all, at any price, period. If your VM doesn't boot then only THEIR support can restore it (and both of their support is expensive).
    - mynameisvlad 11y ago
      Is it even possible to have a KVM for a VM? Don't you need it to be bare metal for that? In which case, it would make sense why neither AWS nor Azure offer it, since they don't offer bare metal hosting.
      - Someone1234 11y ago
        > Is it even possible to have a KVM for a VM? Yes? It isn't called a KVM, but most hypervisors have a management tool which allows you to act as if you're sitting in front of a physical machine. This is how most allow you to install operating systems (aside from images). > Don't you need it to be bare metal for that? In which case, it would make sense why neither AWS nor Azure offer it, since they don't offer bare metal hosting. It is more a logistical problem. The hypervisor viewer isn't security aware yet, so in order to provide "KVM"-like access to a single VPS they'd need to alter how the viewer and interface works.
kazinator 11y ago
If you do CPU-intensive work on these servers, might not the electricity cost surpass the 0.02/hour income? Example: if a kWh costs 0.10, then to have something burning 200W costs 0.02 per hour. (Someone substitute real-ish numbers.)
- aidenn0 11y ago
  These are Atom based chips with integrated graphics and SSDs. You're not going to pull 200W from them no matter how hard you try.
- ropiku 11y ago
  These are low-end devices, the system-on-chip uses at most 20W. Add in memory, etc and you don't get that far. I'm sure they've run their numbers.
z3t4 11y ago
I can't wait for the day when it's actually cheaper to host in the cloud then hosting the servers yourself, electric, bandwidth, and storage costs included. This is a step in the right direction!
gravypod 11y ago
Using this for a remote backup server would be cool. Start the server, copy over backup, take their "storage snapshot", and turn off the server. Lets do some napkin math: (In USD) - $0.01/hr USD - 10hr of backups each day (Heavy Usage) - 10 cents/day, $3/month, $36/year You can also take snapshots. So that's extra cool. Edit: Calculations for 150GB storage instances: - €0.01/hr (@ 150GB of storage) - 20hr of backups each day (Heavy Usage and more data transferred) - $0.24/day, $7.27/month, $87.29/year Just did these for my own needs so thought everyone else might enjoy having them too.
- hanoz 11y ago
  > take their "storage snapshot", and turn off the server Or rather, turn off the server and then take the storage snapshot, which is the order you have to do it. And you have to snapshot and reincarnate just in order to attach or detach a volume, which means adding some more storage space requires several hours downtime, which is a nuisance. Although apart from that, I have found them very good.
  - gravypod 11y ago
    For this usecase several hours of downtime is not much of a problem. In fact, the server will be off for more time then it's not. If you want to upgrade: wait until the backups are done and you should have 12hr till your next backup. I'd hope that's more than enough time to expand a snapshot. Also, how does pricing work for hourly servers? Is it still a quid a month?
- wyldfire 11y ago
  I don't think that's right if there's really a fixed cost per each snapshot. The website says this in the pricing FAQ: > Each snapshot is billed €0.50 per creation and €0.002 per 50GB/h up to 500 continuous hours. Why is the snapshot billed per-rate instead of per-time or per-capacity?
  - gravypod 11y ago
    I think there is a cost for the initial provisioning, not for loading the snapshot each time. I might be wrong though.
ino 11y ago
How do they handle DoS?
stcredzero 11y ago
Right now I'm developing on Amazon EC2, because of the low ping times and because I have a range of options in terms of being hosted around the world to minimize low ping times for potential customers. I would like to know what options would I have at scaleway.com, but I can't find that information easily. All I found was: How are my servers positioned in terms of network proximity and resiliency? -- The ability to group your servers to create placement preferences is already integrated in the core of our system. We will expose it to you in the coming months.
aidenn0 11y ago
$13/mo for 8GB of ram is the big thing for me here; most of my servers are not cpu bound, but require a lot of tuning to fit in the smaller VM instances.
ab4275 11y ago
I already have Scaleway account. I just finished some benchmarks on their starter vps and looks very interesting price per performances. Cores are dedicated, based on Intel C2750 (on /proc/cpuinfo). I have approx 23% more performances on cpu and iops than DO $20 plan. For equivalent $2.70 price, its 8-9 times less expansive for more performances. It's time for me to think about migration :-)
sofaofthedamned 11y ago
I'd still like to know where I can buy the new Xeon D variants at an affordable price. The Avoton variants are okay but the availability is not good, certainly in the UK.
tempodox 11y ago
What is “unmeted bandwidth”?
Sami_Lehtinen 11y ago
I just run ServerBear tests and results for the VPS (VC1) are here. http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2016/03/13/sd7vRARnHCYhDa5S http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2016/03/13/sd7vRARnHCYhDa5S
- mortare 11y ago
  Interesting. I have an invite and so I have thought about buying Scaleways for long. Their storage space fits what I need at an unbeatable price. May be that a better choice for me is the VC1 over the C1, as the CPU seems to be much better (Atom C2750) there. The cores will, however, be shared right? What kind of virtualization are they using, hardware-based? Very happy if you can make a response. This server looks really promising.

448 points by fooyc 11y ago

kyriakos 11y ago

the prices look sweet. anyone has experience with them? How's the network stability? support response times?

naggie 11y ago
I host my blog with a C1. The load hasn't been huge, but I've had zero problems. Provisioning is fast, and the pre-packaged images are well designed.
fooyc 11y ago
They are a subsidiary company of Online.net, itself a subsidiary of Iliad/Free, one of the leading ISPs in France. I have over 50 servers at Online since more than a year now, and they have been pretty much flawless. Support is good and reachable by phone. I haven't worked with Scaleway though.
- Vlaix 11y ago
  >Support is good and reachable by phone Really ? I used them quite a bit years and years ago, and at the time the support was somewhat garbage, which made me move to OVH.
  - elcct 11y ago
    I did the opposite and moved from OVH. I didn't have any problems with Online, but can't say the same about OVH.
nicolas314 11y ago
For what it's worth: I created an account to try it out in January, played a bit with a cheap instance, and deleted the instance. Got billed in February (about 1€) while there was strictly no activity going on. Got to wait until end of March for the account to close, and with everything turned off I can see another bill coming in for 0.50€. Cannot remove my credit card details. Don't care much about the undue handful of euros, but I would not trust them for billing.
- drakenot 11y ago
  Did you release your public IPv4 address? This isn't done automatically and I believe it is billed at 0.50€ per address while you are "holding on" to an unused address.
  - nicolas314 11y ago
    Account was closed a while back. Now I can still log in, but only thing I can do is watch my bill increase and my attached credit card stay attached until they charge it. Online fun!

therealmarv 11y ago

has somebody experience with Scaleway? Especially if you compare to DigitalOcean? First time I see them. Seems for me the biggest difference is that their servers are baremetal and not VMs?!

adamt 11y ago
I've been using their ARM Servers for a while as a build/test servers for some embedded Linux stuff. Overall a positive experience and things have 'just worked' with a Digital Ocean style interface. That said I've not been hosting critical websites or similar. Unlike Digital Ocean I like the ability to add flexible storage volumes.
- mattbee 11y ago
  Our BigV service has done this since 2012, on more traditional KVM-based virtualisation - up to 8 SSD or spinning discs which you can add & remove (as well as RAM & cores). We think vertical scaling has been pretty underserved...
  - byefruit 11y ago
    Does BigV have a web interface yet? The command line interface and need for my physical key essentially put me off the service. It's also reasonably expensive compared to the alternatives these days.

cfallin 11y ago

Prices seem really great but a few paragraphs down they say the servers are based on Avoton SoCs. Intel Avoton is an Atom chip (Silvermont core), so CPU-bound performance will be somewhat lower than the usual Sandy Bridge/Haswell/whatever core that you get on AWS or Google Compute Engine. It's a server SoC though so I/O throughput is probably pretty decent...

Ambroos 11y ago
That's what scares me a bit. The multi-core performance is great (considering their pricing), but single-threaded performance is quite a bit below what the competition gets you. If you're running a web server with something single-threaded (like PHP) requests might start taking a bit longer than you're used to.
- siscia 11y ago
  Well, that is the whole point, you are suppose to have a whole bunch of small, inexpensive, power efficient, cores. If the software you normally use doesn't take advantage of, at least, multi core hardware, then you can obtain more value from other hosting provider... On the other hand if your software can takes advantages of multicore hardware, or -- even better -- multi node architecture, then scaleway is likely the best option.
  - _Codemonkeyism 11y ago
    Nearly no web framework is per request multi core (e.g. multi core HTML / JSON rendering, assuming backend operations already async). So each request will be slow. [Edit:] Not sure for the downvote, would be interested what's wrong in my comment.
    - skj 11y ago
      Go's net/http framework uses a go routine per connection.
      - 11y ago

tluyben2 11y ago

Invite only.... So you cannot even get them. What's the use of this announcement?

nikolay 11y ago
Free advertising, I guess. I also hate the criminal false advertising as "now available".
- xd1936 11y ago
  Ha. "I can't sign up for a new account and use this service right now, so nobody should care". K.
  - tluyben2 11y ago
    People should care; the current clients of this service should care. It shouldn't be on top of HN for hours IMHO; by far most cannot do anything with this which makes it indeed cheap advertising. Or it should say 'invite only' or 'only for current members'. Then I probably wouldn't have read it and would've checked it when it said 'Signups now open'.
tiernano 11y ago
I'm an existing customer of the original c1, I just spun up a box now... Might be invite to new customers only...
- vmp 11y ago
  I had my account disabled a few months ago and support wouldn't re-enable it, told me to wait in line. :(
voltagex_ 11y ago
I think I have a number of invites, but the site is very slow at the moment.
- 11y ago

ikurei 11y ago

I can see nothing about where the servers are, which can impact latency dramatically in some cases. I have to serve to a chunk of our users in China, and I need to have at least a server in Asia. Am I missing something?

kyriakos 11y ago
They are located in France

lazyjones 11y ago

Avotons are very slow, an 8C SoC will typically be slower than an 8 year old 2C desktop CPU (I ran Go builds as a benchmark on my own 2.4 GHz C2750 vs. a 2008 iMac with 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo). As for Scaleway, some people seem to like it very much, but I found their policy about spamming their users problematic. They (online.net) mock you at registration with a sleazy checked and disabled box for receiving spam ("product news" etc.), therefore I would consider their offers "ad-supported". The C2 is advertised as "bare-metal", but since they offer a 4C variant, I doubt that (there's a 4C variant, the C2550, but that doesn't seem to be a sane choice). C2L might be a full dedicated box (or not), but C2S and C2M seem very much VPS/shared. It's likely to be based on SuperMicro MicroBlades: http://www.supermicro.nl/products/MicroBlade/module/MBI-6418A-T7H.cfm http://www.supermicro.nl/products/MicroBlade/module/MBI-6418... (4 nodes in 1 3U blade!).

voltagex_ 11y ago
I'm happy to run any benchmarks people like (within reason). I can also compare to most AWS instances if you like.
- dan1234 11y ago
  I’d be especially interested in any disk & network speed benchmarks.
- darkr 11y ago
  I was actually looking at getting a C2750 (the 8 core avoton) a while back for a small low-power home server, and came across someone who'd already done some decent benchmarking: http://www.servethehome.com/intel-atom-c2750-8-core-avoton-rangeley-benchmarks-fast-power/ http://www.servethehome.com/intel-atom-c2750-8-core-avoton-r... TLDR; For the blowfish test suite (multi-threaded), it's almost on par with an m3.2xlarge, for the majority of other multi-threaded tests, it's a little quicker than an m3.xlarge, but for anything that is single-threaded, it's pretty slow.
- networked 11y ago
  Please run nbench [1]. I ran it on the C1 in April 2015 and got the following results: CPU : 4 CPU L2 Cache : OS : Linux 3.2.34-29 C compiler : gcc version 4.8.2 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.8.2-19ubuntu1) libc : libc-2.19.so MEMORY INDEX : 5.859 INTEGER INDEX : 8.164 FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 5.770 For comparison, here are an Intel Atom N450, a Core 2 Duo L7500 and a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B: CPU : Dual GenuineIntel Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N450 @ 1.66GHz 1667MHz L2 Cache : 512 KB OS : Linux 3.2.0-23-generic C compiler : gcc version 4.6.3 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5) libc : libc-2.15.so MEMORY INDEX : 10.845 INTEGER INDEX : 9.315 FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 8.748 CPU : Dual GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU L7500 @ 1.60GHz 1601MHz L2 Cache : 4096 KB OS : Linux 3.5.0-26-generic C compiler : gcc version 4.6.1 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.1-9ubuntu3) libc : libc-2.13.so MEMORY INDEX : 18.734 INTEGER INDEX : 14.318 FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 23.178 CPU : L2 Cache : OS : Linux 3.6.11+ C compiler : gcc version 4.6.3 (Debian 4.6.3-14+rpi1) libc : libc-2.13.so MEMORY INDEX : 2.536 INTEGER INDEX : 3.159 FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 2.157 [1] http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/bmark.html http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/bmark.html

pjc50 11y ago

If you want even more affordable (but lower performance), http://lowendspirit.com/ http://lowendspirit.com/

8draco8 11y ago
I would be careful with them. I've bought couple VPSes there and there was always an issues. In one instance provider vanished after 3 months, in another one VPS is still live but it's terrible slow (high ping latency). I am not complaining much because I paid for them ~$7/year (yes, thats year) but still, the same companies offer more expensive options and I wouldn't risk data lost. Use DigitalOcean, I think its very reliable and fairly inexpensive solution, just avoid London datacenter if you are in UK, for some reason Amsterdam is way faster.
- strongai 11y ago
  Thanks for the intel re the London DO datacentre. I'm glad it's not just me :-)
- anentropic 11y ago
  oh, curious re London, I'll have to try Amsterdam!
- networked 11y ago
  I think you are talking about http://lowendbox.com/ http://lowendbox.com/ offers. The GP links to http://lowendspirit.com/ http://lowendspirit.com/, which is an unrelated VPS provider.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

siscia 11y ago

I had a great experience with scaleway. However last time I checked the still have only IPv4 and very few of them, it happens to me that I wanted to spin up an instance for a quick experiment but wasn't possible to have a public IP where to connect, mine was just a simple experiment, nothing important, but still...

Osiris 11y ago
The FAQ [1] says that C1 servers don't support IPv6 but C2 servers do. [1] https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server/ https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server/

Vlaix 11y ago

Not surprised to read in the comments they're a subsidiary of Online.net. Ever since they've introduced ultra-cheap dedicated boxes ten years ago, it seems everybody's been sub-renting either them or OVH. I wonder why there aren't more similar offers worldwide, at least in Europe (I can only think of Leaseweb, and they're data capped). The network backbone isn't much different in Britain, Holland or Germany. And the server units aren't really custom.

vardump 11y ago

ECC RAM? Sounds suspicious when this kind of offers don't mention memory type.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

zschallz 11y ago

The blade servers at Delimiter (https://www.delimiter.com/ https://www.delimiter.com/) are even more affordable. I pay $20 a month for a dual Xeon blade with 16gb of ram. They did have a very long downtime this year with no service credit, but uptime has been reasonable over the past year. If you're looking for a hobby box it's a pretty good deal.

zx2c4 11y ago
I got super excited at first, but then... The servers are based on: http://ark.intel.com/products/33927/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5420-12M-Cache-2_50-GHz-1333-MHz-FSB http://ark.intel.com/products/33927/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E54... and http://ark.intel.com/products/47927/Intel-Xeon-Processor-L5630-12M-Cache-2_13-GHz-5_86-GTs-Intel-QPI http://ark.intel.com/products/47927/Intel-Xeon-Processor-L56... These are super ancient. If you're looking for affordable north american servers, OVH has the Kimsufi outlet which is cheaper and better hardware. They've got a data center in Canada and will give you American IPs from their AS in Newark, NJ: https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/ https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/ The parent company of scaleway, online.net, also has some inexpensive offerings, but the servers are in France which might be a deal breaker for you. (Delimiter seems to be in Atlanta.)
- benedikt 11y ago
  For Europe, there's the Hetzner server auction in Germany.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  kimsufi doesn't look bad but I don't find anywhere their cancellation policy
  - lorenzhs 11y ago
    You can choose how many months you pay for (1-12), and sometime before that runs out they email you. Either you pay for some more months or the server goes away.
  - newton10471 11y ago

speakeron 11y ago

I've been testing the performance of the C2. Compared with a Xeon D-1520 (the current hot chip of low-cost cloud computing and actually very nice), single core speed is less than half of the Xeon D (at about the same clock rate of 2.4GHz); multi-thread speed (8 threads running lame encodes) is about 66% of Xeon D. Not bad for the price.

rfreytag 11y ago

I tried Scaleway last year. I was very disappointed with the usability of their offering (I was trying to run a simple Ubuntu Minecraft server - it was unnecessarily complicated to set up everything from ssh keys to snapshots), and stopped the account quickly. That very next day and for the first time ever my card picked up a fraudulent $3000 bar bill in Las Vegas. I don't think it was a coincidence. I cannot recommend Scaleway.

lubos 11y ago
How exactly is Scaleway (European company) related to some fraudulent bar bill in Las Vegas? And you didn't say what was wrong with their service.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- rfreytag 11y ago
  Stolen credit cards are sold to "carders" who sell them on to people all over the world. Here is a NYTimes article on how credit cards are stolen and sold: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/card-data-is-stolen-and-sold/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/card-data-is-stolen...
- Nexxxeh 11y ago
  Not parent poster, but the implication was that his card details had been sold. Geography has nothing to do with it, I'm reliably told that one can cheaply purchase card details on Tor hidden services, paying in BTC. I've not tried it myself, and the only time I've had my card cloned was the other way around. It was cloned IRL, and was then used online for gambling.

codecamper 11y ago

unlimited bandwidth. Is that for real? 300 Mbits. Let's assume you can pump out 100 Mbit sustained. That is about 10 MB/s. or 26,000,000 Megabytes/month. 26,000 GB / month. AWS & google cloud are about $.10/GB. That'd cost 2600 USD to serve. Scaleway claims that'd cost just 12 euro. For realz?

Aissen 11y ago
Yes, and it's already the cases for the C1s. It's best effort, you're not guaranteed a sustained I/O if your neighbors are as greedy. But I have a few workloads at OVH and Scaleway that are bandwith-bound, and cloud pricings are just 10 to 100 times more expensive. That's how it is.
tux3 11y ago
I have a 3€ C1 server at Scaleway moving some 25-30TB of data per month, so yes, it's very real.
- codecamper 11y ago
  amazing! very good!
  - muhpirat 11y ago
    With my tor relays I pushed around 150Mbit up and Down. Which is around 45TB per direction and Month.
pyvpx 11y ago
"unmetered" is a popular dedicated hosting company marketing trick. things are generally oversubscribed to horrifically oversubscribed and you'll be very hard pressed to sustain 100Mbps 24x7 for a full day, let alone a full month.
- muhpirat 11y ago
  I pushed on 2 instances around 150Mbit/s with no problems at all :)

imdsm 11y ago

It'd be nice if Docker was supported out of the box. I don't want to be pissing around with kernels just to test them out.

anentropic 11y ago
I know nothing about Scaleway, but found these via the link above: https://blog.scaleway.com/tag/docker/ https://blog.scaleway.com/tag/docker/ https://www.scaleway.com/imagehub/docker/ https://www.scaleway.com/imagehub/docker/ what is the problem with kernel? very curious as I would need Docker myself if I was going to use them

pyvpx 11y ago

how easy is it to boot/install your own OS on these bare metal servers? some of these offers look interesting for unikernels.

morganvachon 11y ago
I don't have any experience with Scaleway, but Vultr allows you to upload your own ISO and install it (even Windows Server). However, it's purely a VPS at competitive prices, not bare metal. Their bare metal servers start at $60USD/month.
- pyvpx 11y ago
  thanks. I'm familiar with Vultr and always on the look out for alternatives :)
- moreorless 11y ago
  I love Vultr. Support is fantastic!

cateye 11y ago

How would this compare to Hetzner offerings? https://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver https://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver

tronje 11y ago
I don't think there's much to compare there. Hetzner's servers are a completely different price range. Unless you get a used one here: https://robot.your-server.de/order/market https://robot.your-server.de/order/market (URL looks suspicious, but it's Hetzner, I promise). These are servers that are fairly old and out-dated and whose users have discontinued their contracts; now they're being auctioned off so Hetzner doesn't have to throw them out. But these, I'd say, are also difficult to compare because of the old hardware vs. the new but low-cost hardware of the scaleway ones.
- cateye 11y ago
  I was curious about the price to performance ratio comparison of both companies. (Is for example the CPU performance really worth the extra price?)
- imaginenore 11y ago
  Hetzner has cheap VPSs: https://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_vserver/cx30 https://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_vserver/cx30
  - tronje 11y ago
    I know, but the parent comment was explicitly asking about root servers; I agree, though, that I should've mentioned these, as they fit more into the price range (and I imagine they're quite good, as I've mostly heard positive things about Hetzner).

tokart 11y ago

C1 is a good idea and works well especially while arm distro are maturing. IMHO C1 perfs are quite good for the price (700-900 tps on pg_bench, 1500 req/s on rabbitmq on debian). We are running an ELK server which is performing well enough for us even with 2gb of ram. I was just expecting a low cost (6$/month) 4cores ARM64 server with 8gb of ram, I think it would have been more exciting !

andybak 11y ago
> I was just expecting a low cost (6$/month) 4cores ARM64 server with 8gb of ram, I think it would have been more exciting ! In case anyone doesn't spot it the closest is this: > Our Starter VPS comes with 2GB of ram, 2 x86-64 Cores, > 50GB of LSSD and 200 Mbit/s of unmetered bandwidth. > It's available at the insane price of €2.99 per month > or €0.02 per hour.

nonuby 11y ago

A real x86/64 bare metal server for ~ us$3.30/mo inclusive, wow, it seems like only yesterday people were drooling at $99/mo 300mhz Cobalt RAQs at ev1servers (it was more like 15yrs ago). I was able to spin one up in <1min however I was previously registered at scaleway due to their last offering.

vruiz 11y ago
Indeed, I remember perfectly well how "die of success" was a thing when sites that became popular could not keep up with the hosting costs.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

netforay 11y ago

Just yesterday tried to install Gitlab-ce in C1 then realized that there is no ARM build for it. Went to digitalocean just for x86. And today they introduced x86, great news.

jfreax 11y ago
You could install it manually or even use the provided image - it's really just a few clicks. I run Gitlab on a C1 in a docker container since around half a year. Just a few dozens repos and a few users. Works flawless :)

throwaway21816 11y ago

>invite required Great way to drive away customers

vbit 11y ago

Any support for FreeBSD?

rogeryu 11y ago

I've tried the C1 to run JSPWiki on Tomcat, but it didn't work. I guess too little RAM. I'm sorry to see that there is nothing inbetween a C1 and a C2.

favadi 11y ago
4GB is too little?

thenomad 11y ago

Dammit. Cheap - very cheap - for everything but storage. It seems impossible to find a low-cost server with some big, slow spinning disks on it at the moment. I'm really not sure why. Anyone got any recommendations there? Where would I look, if anywhere, for, say, 4Tb of storage attached to a low-cost virtual or dedicated server, for less than Google Nearline or equivalent?

theknarf 11y ago
I guess you best bet would be Amazon S3?
danohuiginn 11y ago
Hetzner will give you a server with 24TB for €82/month, or 5TB FTP space at €26/month
- thenomad 11y ago
  I didn't know about the latter! Interesting - thanks.
earlz 11y ago
There is So You Start[1] which offers 2x3TB with soft RAID.. Dedicated server, so you might be able to pay some amount and get them to add more space to it 1: https://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/ https://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/
nwilkens 11y ago
We just introduced an SSD cached storage solution at MNX.io $15/TB -- scalable to 40T. https://mnx.io/pricing https://mnx.io/pricing
- thenomad 11y ago
  Hmm, very interesting. Thanks!
icebraining 11y ago

topbanana 11y ago

Anything similar in the UK?

driverdan 11y ago

How does the CPU performance of Avoton compare to a Pi 2? How do they perform on single threaded encryption, eg for a Tor relay?

icebraining 11y ago
I can't actually test it, but considering nbench shows the Avoton is faster on regular CPU operations, and that on top of that it comes with native AES-NI support (unlike the ARM CPU used by the Pi), it's probably much faster at Tor encryption.

muhpirat 11y ago

CPU:model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU C2750 @ 2.40GHz Network: root@scw-4e7977:~# ./speedtest-cli Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Testing from Free SAS (212.47.234.38)... Selecting best server based on latency... Hosted by NEOTELECOMS (Paris) [1.59 km]: 2.652 ms Testing download speed........................................ Download: 881.83 Mbit/s Testing upload speed.................................................. Upload: 513.56 Mbit/s

fermigier 11y ago

"Avoton" sounds very close to "Avorton", which is not what you want powering your computer. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/avorton https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/avorton

imaginenore 11y ago

Meh. I just got a 4-core / 6GB RAM / 150GB HDD / 1Gbps VPS for $6/month.

bluhue 11y ago
Where from?

woolinsilver 11y ago

Why did they not call it "Scale Away"? That makes more sense in English ("you can scale away to your heart's content"), and you get free advertising each time Enya's Orinoco Flow is played ("scale away, scale away, scale away...").

iofur 11y ago

I've just tried it, but did not found how to resize/scale... And a bit disappointed about snapshot: you have to power-off your server before snapshot/backup.

LogicX 11y ago

I've been very pleased with http://packet.net http://packet.net and their typo 0 server. It's bare metal, but much more performant than here. They have an amazing network, it's by the hour, and it's < $40/mo. Bandwidth is not included: $.05/GB, but that's half AWS. Also they're based in the US, so less latency for those of us with primary customer bases here. We use them at DNSFilter in NYC as part of our anycast network, for the last two months. Looking forward to their San Jose and Amsterdam datacenter expansions coming soon.

storrgie 11y ago
Can you do custom iso install?
BrandonBradley 11y ago
Free data in? (Like AWS)
- hackerboos 11y ago
  Yes https://www.packet.net/resources/kb/how-does-packet-bill-for-bandwidth-transfer/ https://www.packet.net/resources/kb/how-does-packet-bill-for...
vdaniuk 11y ago
>typo 0 server. It's bare metal, but much more performant than here Packet's 0 server is Atom C2550 and costs 36$/month. Scaleway C2S server is the same Atom C2550 but it costs ~$13/month. Scaleway C2M is C2750 which has twice as much cores and costs ~20/month, so I am not seeing how it is possible for Packet 0 server to be "much more performant" when in fact Packet's offering is so much weaker.
yyin 11y ago
Why do you use http://packet.net http://packet.net as a URL in your comment when this only redirects to a www.packet.net subdomain, on Cloudflare? Why not just use http://www.packet.net http://www.packet.net? From the perspective of the user, wouldn't it be "more performant" to skip the gratuitous redirect, extra GET request and DNS lookups? Maybe this is just marketing? Setting referrer, cookies? Fear of a thundering herd arising from an HN comment? Inadvertence? I don't understand. Apologies for being so naive.

reynoldsbd 11y ago

Where are Scaleway's data centers located? I found mention on their site that they're a Paris-based company, but is this the only geographical location for their offerings?

ThePhysicist 11y ago
Seems the data centers are also hosted in the Paris area: https://www.scaleway.com/faq/general/ https://www.scaleway.com/faq/general/ "The service is hosted in our own datacenters, Iliad’s datacenters, DC2 and DC3. Both are located near Paris, France." I have to say this is quite an interesting offer, especially for private/side projects. Currently I rent a virtual server at Hetzner, which costs me 23 € / month and is way below the specs mentioned on the Scaleways page, so I am compelled to switch, provided reliablity is good.
- mromanuk 11y ago
  The problem is the latency (if your customers are in America).
- sspiff 11y ago
  Interesting. I'm currently using servers by OVH, which compete in the same low-end segment using their Kimsufi[1] offering, and have datacenters in France, Canada and Germany. Paris is close to me, so these might be interesting for VNC or other low-latency applications. [1] http://kimsufi.com http://kimsufi.com
  - Sami_Lehtinen 11y ago
    Nope, OVH doesn't have data center in Germany afaik.
    - sspiff 11y ago
      I was mistaken, I thought they had one in Frankfurt, but it seems the closest they get is Strassbourgh, Near the French/German/Belgian border.

Marazan 11y ago

I would like them to make their S3 replacement available to new signups.

dvfjsdhgfv 11y ago

insanely cheap? For this price you can get a real i7 from Hetzner instead of Atom...

sspiff 11y ago
Do you mean through their server bidding? Because those old pieces of junk are known for being stacked with near-failing hard drives.
- dvfjsdhgfv 11y ago
  I got a dozen of them an in the last 5 years only one drive failure, quickly replaced, no data lost thanks to RAID.

sspiff 11y ago

Hosted in the same datacenters, with similar low-end offerings: https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server#perso https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server#perso.

ctstover 11y ago

Are they still offering the C1? It's absent from the pricing page.

earlz 11y ago

Their support isn't great, and they're only in Canada and EU, but Kimsufi[1] is my goto for beefy but cheap dedicated servers. Their cheapest offering is $5/month for an Atom, 2G RAM, and 500G harddrive. But where the value really lies is a step up to about $25 where you start getting non-Atom processors, 16+G of RAM, and 1+TB harddrives. Also free bandwidth. It's a real dedicated server so you can install whatever on it, but KVM access is expensive if you break it into not booting. You can deploy a fairly good set of distros through their built-in wizard for free 1: https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/ https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/

techdragon 11y ago
Charging for KVM access.... Sounds extremely unpleasant. Why would you want a provider like the that, who is going to kick you in the genitals when you're down?
- Someone1234 11y ago
  Just to put it into perspective, both Azure and AWS don't allow KVM access at all, at any price, period. If your VM doesn't boot then only THEIR support can restore it (and both of their support is expensive).
  - mynameisvlad 11y ago
    Is it even possible to have a KVM for a VM? Don't you need it to be bare metal for that? In which case, it would make sense why neither AWS nor Azure offer it, since they don't offer bare metal hosting.
    - Someone1234 11y ago
      > Is it even possible to have a KVM for a VM? Yes? It isn't called a KVM, but most hypervisors have a management tool which allows you to act as if you're sitting in front of a physical machine. This is how most allow you to install operating systems (aside from images). > Don't you need it to be bare metal for that? In which case, it would make sense why neither AWS nor Azure offer it, since they don't offer bare metal hosting. It is more a logistical problem. The hypervisor viewer isn't security aware yet, so in order to provide "KVM"-like access to a single VPS they'd need to alter how the viewer and interface works.

kazinator 11y ago

If you do CPU-intensive work on these servers, might not the electricity cost surpass the 0.02/hour income? Example: if a kWh costs 0.10, then to have something burning 200W costs 0.02 per hour. (Someone substitute real-ish numbers.)

aidenn0 11y ago
These are Atom based chips with integrated graphics and SSDs. You're not going to pull 200W from them no matter how hard you try.
ropiku 11y ago
These are low-end devices, the system-on-chip uses at most 20W. Add in memory, etc and you don't get that far. I'm sure they've run their numbers.

z3t4 11y ago

I can't wait for the day when it's actually cheaper to host in the cloud then hosting the servers yourself, electric, bandwidth, and storage costs included. This is a step in the right direction!

gravypod 11y ago

Using this for a remote backup server would be cool. Start the server, copy over backup, take their "storage snapshot", and turn off the server. Lets do some napkin math: (In USD) - $0.01/hr USD - 10hr of backups each day (Heavy Usage) - 10 cents/day, $3/month, $36/year You can also take snapshots. So that's extra cool. Edit: Calculations for 150GB storage instances: - €0.01/hr (@ 150GB of storage) - 20hr of backups each day (Heavy Usage and more data transferred) - $0.24/day, $7.27/month, $87.29/year Just did these for my own needs so thought everyone else might enjoy having them too.

hanoz 11y ago
> take their "storage snapshot", and turn off the server Or rather, turn off the server and then take the storage snapshot, which is the order you have to do it. And you have to snapshot and reincarnate just in order to attach or detach a volume, which means adding some more storage space requires several hours downtime, which is a nuisance. Although apart from that, I have found them very good.
- gravypod 11y ago
  For this usecase several hours of downtime is not much of a problem. In fact, the server will be off for more time then it's not. If you want to upgrade: wait until the backups are done and you should have 12hr till your next backup. I'd hope that's more than enough time to expand a snapshot. Also, how does pricing work for hourly servers? Is it still a quid a month?
wyldfire 11y ago
I don't think that's right if there's really a fixed cost per each snapshot. The website says this in the pricing FAQ: > Each snapshot is billed €0.50 per creation and €0.002 per 50GB/h up to 500 continuous hours. Why is the snapshot billed per-rate instead of per-time or per-capacity?
- gravypod 11y ago
  I think there is a cost for the initial provisioning, not for loading the snapshot each time. I might be wrong though.

ino 11y ago

How do they handle DoS?

stcredzero 11y ago

Right now I'm developing on Amazon EC2, because of the low ping times and because I have a range of options in terms of being hosted around the world to minimize low ping times for potential customers. I would like to know what options would I have at scaleway.com, but I can't find that information easily. All I found was: How are my servers positioned in terms of network proximity and resiliency? -- The ability to group your servers to create placement preferences is already integrated in the core of our system. We will expose it to you in the coming months.

aidenn0 11y ago

$13/mo for 8GB of ram is the big thing for me here; most of my servers are not cpu bound, but require a lot of tuning to fit in the smaller VM instances.

ab4275 11y ago

I already have Scaleway account. I just finished some benchmarks on their starter vps and looks very interesting price per performances. Cores are dedicated, based on Intel C2750 (on /proc/cpuinfo). I have approx 23% more performances on cpu and iops than DO $20 plan. For equivalent $2.70 price, its 8-9 times less expansive for more performances. It's time for me to think about migration :-)

sofaofthedamned 11y ago

I'd still like to know where I can buy the new Xeon D variants at an affordable price. The Avoton variants are okay but the availability is not good, certainly in the UK.

tempodox 11y ago

What is “unmeted bandwidth”?

Sami_Lehtinen 11y ago

I just run ServerBear tests and results for the VPS (VC1) are here. http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2016/03/13/sd7vRARnHCYhDa5S http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2016/03/13/sd7vRARnHCYhDa5S

mortare 11y ago
Interesting. I have an invite and so I have thought about buying Scaleways for long. Their storage space fits what I need at an unbeatable price. May be that a better choice for me is the VC1 over the C1, as the CPU seems to be much better (Atom C2750) there. The cores will, however, be shared right? What kind of virtualization are they using, hardware-based? Very happy if you can make a response. This server looks really promising.