
Scaleway Global Expansion Starts in Amsterdam - Sami_Lehtinen
https://blog.online.net/2016/10/27/scaleway-global-expansion-starts-in-amsterdam/
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stephanheijl
I'm loving this, I've been using scaleway as a host for a few months and
they've provided great value during that time. As a Dutch national it would be
great for my latency to see scaleway add some capacity to Amsterdam.

Their low end offering allows me to get up and running quickly with a new
machine and experiment, without touching any existing instances or firing up a
VM myself.

It's a shame transferring machines to the new region apparently isn't
supported, but since I'm running on docker it shouldn't be too hard to
recreqte my current instances.

~~~
tmikaeld
That's another thing i missed, apart from not having ECC RAM.

~~~
onli
Why do you think not having ECC Ram is a problem? I'm on scaleway, and I see
zero harm coming from that. Different usage?

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chillydawg
Row hammer exploits. Someone else running on that server can read and flip
your ram and generally pwn you.

~~~
onli
Combined with a working exploit and when not running on the bare metal server
that might actually be a valid point. I know when they were released those
attacks looked pretty scary, and ECC was supposed to maybe help. I'm not
actually sure it does help completely, and that here aren't other measures
already in place by now?

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jo909
I'm using Scaleway for some experimental stuff, and it's great value for that.

I did not like that I am bound to their kernel on bare metal. There are setups
that require kernel modules they don't provide, like DRBD. I got the modules
to compile and work in the end, but it was not fun and will probably break on
some future update. This is not how I expected it to be on "bare metal".

Also that prevents you from using the Xen hypervisor, which again I would not
expect from "bare metal".

You only get a single IPv4-Adress per system, which not only is a burden to
virtualization, but also larger container-setups.

So I found little value in the "bare metal"-part, but it's still great value
if you compare it to other VM offerings.

If you treat it like a VM (or use one of their VMs), you need to be aware that
disks are not redundant and their content (or at least the changes since the
last boot) are gone on a crash or hardware failure. You need to mirror or
replicate it yourself, or design around it on a higher level of the stack.
There is no option to attach a persistent disk that would survive a hardware
failure and could be attached to a replacement host/VM.

So in the end scaleway is a weird mix for me: for rented VMs I expect the
platform/provider to take care of some basic reliability and redundancy stuff.
For bare metal I expect to be able to setup all of that myself without
trouble.

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tscs37
Scaleway is probably my new favorite VPS provider atm.

It's console is way simpler than AWS.

The only things that bother me are the limited availability of ARM nodes and
being unable to ~~experiment~~ use SIS.

But even with that it's still way more fun.

~~~
tmikaeld
Except AWS have ECC RAM, Scaleway doesn't.

~~~
tscs37
Well, for one I don't care much, I run my hobby stuff on there, not my mission
critical services, so cheap is good, even with some really minor drawbacks.

Secondly, I could not find a source if Scaleway uses ECC or not...

~~~
IAmTheMarrow
I actually asked them directly, and they told me their ram doesn't have ECC

Furthermore if you look at what CPUs they use, especially for the x86
solutions, the cpus themselves don't support ECC.

~~~
tscs37
Interesting...

I guess I'll use more hashes.

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IgorPartola
I was really excited about Scaleway until shit started going wrong with my
test C1 box there. They sent an email asking me to update my "boot script"
(kernel version). You can only do this, it seems, when the box is shut down,
except there is no power management on the box. The only option they have is
to copy the contents of the box to cold storage. Great. It took 4 hours or so.

When I brought the box back online it would stay online for about a day and
then lock up for no reason. I spun up a new one, copied the data from the old
volume to the new one. Why can't I clone or detach a volume from a running
box? It was a read-only data-only volume. The copying between two boxes was at
12Mbps... In the end, the new box had the same lockup problem. Not it's not my
software. It had been running without changes for 6 months prior with no
downtime. Oh and in the end it locked up again and when it came back online in
rescue mode, it was basically a brand new install. My home directory was gone,
root password had been reset, all the configuration was not there.

Also no IPv6 for bare metal ARM boxes.

tl;dr: I moved on because of inflexible control panel and random hardware
issues. Really wanted to like it.

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ve55
I was checking out their terms of service
([https://www.scaleway.com/terms/](https://www.scaleway.com/terms/)), a few
clauses in there seem pretty restrictive, such as:

>Users are required to use decent and respectful language. All abusive,
violent or hateful sentiments are totally prohibited.

>The propagation of data, images or sounds that may constitute defamation, an
insult, denigration or an infringement of privacy, image rights, good morals
or public order.

Does anyone who knows this better than I anticipate that this would cause
problems if one wanted to host, for example, an internet message board with
this service?

Obviously one would comply with DMCAs, delete illegal content, etc, but I
can't imagine forcing all users to use "decent and respectful language", for
example. Is this something you just generally ignore until a specific problem
with the provider surfaces?

~~~
Algent
>Does anyone who knows this better than I anticipate that this would cause
problems if one wanted to host, for example, an internet message board with
this service?

Probably anything illegal in France or Netherlands. The sentence sum the most
common thing you could do that could get you in legal troubles if you cross
some lines.

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nik736
I actually love Online.net and Scaleway. The problem is just that I personally
prefer to have one strong core and not 8 slow cores since single thread
performance is still the most relevant thing. Even though you get 2GB RAM for
3 EUR they are still shitty CPU cores. I mean you can't expect a lot for that
price but I'd prefer a shared burstable E3 or E5 core over Avaton cores. Sicne
Scaleway only offers these slow cores it's not useable for me even though I
love them.

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milosonator
Why is Scaleway so cheap compared to for instance: DigitalOcean?

~~~
edouardb
We design and manufacture our own server hardware so we can optimize our cost.
We select each component of our servers to get high quality servers at the
best price and remove all unneeded components. The result is that you get a
server with the best price-performance ratio.

~~~
matt4077
Whereas the competition enjoys paying extra, and carefully tries to find new
unneeded components? Yeah, didn't think so...

I guess the truth is a mixture of "larger willingness to cut corners" and
"aiming for a lower margin". That's not a bad thing. It's just that in a
market as transparent and competitive as this, it's really hard to be better
along every single dimension.

~~~
7b64f0f2
Since we design our own hardware, we put exactly what we want and need into
them. We share some components like power, network, and casing.

This means for example :

\- one integrated network switch/router for 18 servers; no need to buy an
external cisco/juniper/whatever

\- one dual power supply for the whole gang instead of 19 (18 servers +
switch)

\- less metal/plastic parts

We try to reuse hardware designs and software from one iteration to another
when possible.

In short, we do have less "unneeded components". Equivalent designs (thinking
at moonshot for example) are expensive, so to achieve same density it's more
expensive to buy existing solutions than what we design & build.

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zschallz
I've been loving Scaleway. It's a great service and I'm glad to see they're
expanding. Hopefully they'll come to the UK and North America next.

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smnscu
I've been a Scaleway user for a very long time (I cancelled recently in an
effort to cut frivolous personal expenses). Their cheapest offerings are very
slow, but they are perfect if you're looking for something extremely cheap,
dedicated (with your own IP), and with unlimited traffic (!!!). Also, as
people noticed here, their web console is pretty great. They even have
preloaded images, I had a personal torrent server up in 2 minutes.

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tusbar
So does Scaleway support machines – well, snapshots or volumes – transfer
across regions? That would be nice.

~~~
edouardb
It's not supported yet.

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art0rz
Is there a reason for not supporting C1 instances in Amsterdam? I was an early
adopter before Scaleway started offering virtual instances, and liked the idea
of running bare-metal for such a low price, but it seems it is not available
in Amsterdam.

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kyriakos
How do scaleway cores compare to digital ocean?

~~~
nisa
I'm using a VC1S for 2,99€

2x Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU C2750 @ 2.40GHz

The ARM cores are slower - there was a thread a while back:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9309459](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9309459)
the X86 servers are not very fast either:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11251671](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11251671)
but if you look at the numbers in that thread it's likely that DO overbooks
their machines and if you are unlucky you can end up with slower performance
than on Scaleway.

But for me it doesn't matter. I'm not doing heavy computational lifting and
for nginx + some database it's fine and 2GB memory is pretty nice to have.

A minor annoyance is that you can't choose the kernel version and you are
stuck on 4.5.7 at the moment - I guess if you care about local security priv
escalation bugs it's a no go.

But docker seems to work and you can select a kernel flavour in the admin
menu.

Another annoyance is only a /128 IPv6 address for the VPSs - but IIRC the
dedicated boxes get a /48

But for 3€/month I'm more than happy - you usually only get OpenVZ VMs with
ancient 2.6.36 kernel for that price if at all.

