
Scaleway cloud adds AMD EPYC instances - nirv
https://www.scaleway.com/general-purpose-instances/
======
sascha_sl
I've written extensively about Scaleway on Twitter, and not good stuff.

\- Their network ranges are very likely to be blacklisted by essentially
everything that employs blacklisting.

\- The disks/volumes should be treated as ephemeral. There is no redundancy.

\- Their SLA is a joke. I had a mailserver crash in the night and not booting,
sent a ticket in the morning, resolved next evening. "SLA does not apply
because problem was not a power failure". There is no SLA anywhere in their
T&C, it's just mentioned on their marketing site without any detail.

\- Turning off systems takes 30+ minutes. They mirror the entire disk to their
storage system (very slowly) and free the entire machine (and you're still
billed for it). This even applies if you resize the machine or add a volume.
Turning on systems is a bit faster, but still in the 20+ minutes area. Oh, and
you have a chance of not being able to boot again because although yes, you
are billed, they're not reserving a machine for you.

\- Can't pick own kernel on some machines. Arbitrary restrictions on number of
volumes / addon services that aren't documented anywhere. They tell you when
you try to hit save.

\- Their network stack is crap. No machine gets an assignable public IP. If
you attach an IP you still have the private IP on the NIC, but some firewall
NATs traffic to you. It's also just slow in general.

~~~
sannee
I've had similar issues. Network outages, server power cycles taking forever
etc. The only good thing Scaleway is for is hosting Tor exits, which they
don't seem to mind.

To add to the network stack comment - they assign _single_ IPv6 address to
your server. Not a /64 block, just a single /128 address. I have no idea what
they were thinking.

~~~
yann_eu
We were basically thinking about routing /64 blocks over the /127
interconnection to provide routed /64 ;)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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jstanley
I have a Scaleway VM and the networking has lots of trouble. Would not
recommend.

It's difficult to host a Tor hidden service on Scaleway because half the time
the clients just can't connect. I have not figured out why this is.

I also find that my SSH session sometimes just randomly drops. It's nothing to
do with keepalive. Sometimes I can leave it for a few hours and come back to
it, sometimes if I look away for 10 seconds, the SSH session will be gone when
I come back.

EDIT: Here's a chart showing my findings for Tor hidden services:
[https://img.jes.xxx/1940](https://img.jes.xxx/1940) the cht1 machine is the
one on scaleway. The red charts show the proportion of requests which failed,
you can see for cht1 this is normally more than half.

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geezerjay
Does anyone know how Scaleway compares with other providers such as Hezner or
OVH or Digital Ocean?

~~~
puzzlingcaptcha
I've used the cheap VPS plans from OVH, Hetzner, and the 'baremetal ARM'
instance from Scaleway (c1). This is not exactly an apples to apples
comparison and all very anecdotal but:

OVH would typically have one extended outage a year, usually related to
something like an excavator severing fibre cables or diesel generators not
starting in a brownout. The supporting infrastructure was nice, you could get
e.g. free primary DNS hosting for external domains, and the domains they sold
were cheap too. RESTful API was nice. SSD performance & storage space (bumped
up only recently) was on the low side. Quite a few datacenter locations to
pick from.

Scaleway 'baremetal ARM' was a mixed bag. I didn't like the ipv4 NAT and
related networking, they took a long time before you could use your own kernel
(a feature promised at launch), crypto acceleration module on their Marvell
ARM processors (CESA) didn't work for a long time due to a borked devicetree
and after it did support was vestigial (had to patch and maintain your own
libraries etc). Networked SSDs were a bit of a pain and a kernel update once
broke them leaving all my instances on recovery console unable to mount
anything... Performance was meh. It was the cheapest way to have a dedicated
instance though.

I've been now on Hetzner for about two years and I don't have any particular
complaints. It's solid. There was one bigger outage last year but didn't
affect my datacenter. Pricing is very competitive, API is functional,
processor crypto extensions (AES-NI) are exposed through the KVM (I think this
wasn't the case with OVH but perhaps changed now). Only two datacenter
locations (DE and FI). Cheap snapshots and backups. I barely ever need to log
into the management console. HTH.

~~~
geezerjay
Thank you for posting such an informative reply. Kudos!

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ponyous
I tried Scaleway a year ago, and it was almost impossible to just set up the
firewall due to some low level kernel bug.

Who would use hosting where firewall is insanely hard to set up?

A friend of mine went another route, he built the infra first and wanted to
secure it after. He hit the same problem. Firewall was impossible to set up.

Not to mention before I figured this out I had to recreate 5+ instances
because it was locking me out. I will not use Scaleway in the future.

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tracker1
Love how their extra small is 4 cores and 16gb ram (about $45/mo).

~~~
mtarnovan
Their cheapest instance is actually just 0.5EUR/month if you don't need a
public IP.

~~~
slig
The cheapest one I can see is 1.99EUR/m [1]. Maybe that's an old plan?

[1]: [https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/](https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/)

~~~
mtarnovan
Both of:

* The pricing page includes a public IP for all instance types

* It's an old plan they don't offer anymore

So the cheapest one at the moment is START1-XS, which is 1EUR/month without
public IP.

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nodesocket
What is the difference between BareMetal C2M which offers 8 cores, 16GB
memory, and 50GB of SSD storage for €17.99 vs GP1-XS which offers 4 AMD EPYC,
16GB memory, and 150GB of storage for €39.99? Isn't the BareMetal better
because it is dedicated, yet it is less expensive?

~~~
ysleepy
The C2M is Intel Atom based (Avoton).
[https://blog.scaleway.com/2016/c2-insanely-
affordable-x64-se...](https://blog.scaleway.com/2016/c2-insanely-
affordable-x64-servers/)

~~~
nodesocket
Ah thanks. Since my workload is more memory bound, might be ok with Atom.

~~~
mst
Worth noting: ovh have stunningly good rates for RAM, on dirt cheap instances,
and you just have to accept there'll be unplanned reboots and their support
is, well, they're dirt cheap, it's minimal.

For things that suit those constraints, they're amazing value for money
though.

~~~
snaky
Ovh "VPS Cloud RAM 3" is 30GB for €30 exVAT, is it cheap considering e.g.
Hetzner's bare metal EX42 with 64GB for €34 exVAT?

~~~
krembo
No one beats Hetzner. Hands down

~~~
mtarnovan
I used both Hetzner and Scaleway. I trust Hetzner way more tbh. With Scaleway
we had several issues other commenters also mentioned: instances not
rebooting, random freezes, instance types out of stock. In the meantime we
have both bare metal and VPS servers on Hetzner that have years of uptime.

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theztheq
do they support running your own kernel (or even one from a distro) yet?

