
Scaleway – NVMe SSD Servers and Hot Snapshot - olragon
https://blog.online.net/2018/05/03/introducing-scaleway-nextgen-nvme-cloud-servers-with-hot-snapshots/
======
jmngomes
...providing that they can actually and predictably supply the servers.

My experience with Scaleway was essentially this: they advertise that you can
have virtual servers with up to 10 150GB SSD volumes, so I signed up and
created a virtual server with two 150GB volumes. After several attempts over
three days, the server wouldn't start at all; it never actually started.

Scaleway's support told me that "it's because there are no available nodes
matching your configuration." and "If our stock is low then there is more
chance that the only free nodes are "default" ones, with 200GB available
only". The solution, according to their support, would be to "keep trying to
start the server until it works".

So, they'll sell you a vServer but can't guarantee when you'll be able to spin
up the machine.

For me, it was a terrible experience, and Scaleway's "customer support" forums
will give you a good grasp of what you're in for if you buy their service.

~~~
PaulKeeble
I also found that in addition to that even when the server was available I had
a bunch of problems even getting it to start. Their customised images just
seemed to not work that day.

Once I finally got the image started I then attempted a basic update && dist-
upgrade and find myself looking at a bunch of errors, they had reconfigured
the entirity of their image to point at their own caches, but thoses caches
weren't there.

I finally contacted support and their answer was that this was my fault for
choosing an old Ubunutu instance (I hadn't it was new ish). I went to the
forums and all I found was people with major stability issues, problems with
availability and broken images. They are cheap but awful both in basic
delivery and in customer support. It is not worth wasting your time with. It
cost me 5 cent just to mess around and not get anywhere and that was mostly a
ridiculous bill after they wasted my time so incredibly and I never got a
working box.

This is not a company worth dealing with.

~~~
reacweb
hello, my personal website is running on a scaleway C1 (dirt cheap baremetal
arm) since 3 oct 2015. There were some network issues the first months. No
problem since. My main administrative task is: apt-get update/upgrade every
week and backup of my site every couple of month.

~~~
aexaey

      > apt-get update/upgrade every week
    

Have a look at:
[https://wiki.debian.org/UnattendedUpgrades](https://wiki.debian.org/UnattendedUpgrades)

------
option_greek
I checked them out after using GCP, AWS and its unbelievable how much slower
their servers are. I some times wonder how anyone other than AWS/GCP/Azure
even survive in this competitive market.

~~~
dx034
If you only want a server, OVH/Hetzner are much cheaper for the same
performance. To me, AWS/GCP/Azure only really make sense if you start using
the whole ecosystem. Otherwise you can get the same for half the price..

~~~
shub
I've spent the last 3 years doing AWS stuff at work and agree 100%. If all
you're using is EC2 then it's not a great value. Where it's worthwhile are the
other services you can tie in to really easily. At work we're using:

    
    
      SQS
      SNS
      RDS
      S3
      Athena/Glue
      EMR
      CloudWatch
      Lambda
      CloudWatch Events
      EC2 Autoscaling, ELB, ALB
      Elasticsearch Service
      Glacier
      ElastiCache
      Route 53
      CloudFront
      Data Pipeline
    

It's spendy, no question. None of this is stuff you can't do yourself on cheap
instances. We'd just need an additional 2-3 FTEs to maintain the homegrown
jungle of crap that would replace the managed services. Oops, there went my
savings.

------
thereandhere
Is one still required to submit all their personal information (ID card
details, proof of address, etc.) before the servers can be useful? Previously
you had to do it, or SMTP ports (etc.) would be blocked until you did.

If that's still the case, is it at least made known that the servers are
crippled, prior to starting your account creation process (previously it
wasn't, which I found shady)?

My experience so far is that the servers are okay, but the website's UI could
be clunky-ish, support to be unresponsive and the aforementioned shady
business with requesting personal-information to enable services.

~~~
Zekio
so them blocking a port that can be used for sending Spam mail, without you
identifying yourself, is shady?

~~~
megous
Yes. But who cares, there are many better services.

~~~
dspillett
Care to name the one(s) you recommend and why?

~~~
megous
Rather not, I'm still glad it's not very well known in SV or mentioned on HN.
Sorry.

I tried scaleway, and I'm glad I didn't try to move my personal SMTP server
there.

The other issue was that I can't run my own kernel there, which was also non-
obvious before purchasing. They make it look like it's baremetal, but it's
limited in this way.

Now I'm on a fully virtualized vmware VM where I can do pretty much anything,
including running a kernel with WireGuard included. And it's half the price of
1-XS for the same specs and no blocked ports and no uploading of my ID
somewhere I don't trust.

~~~
dspillett
Then you declare yourself wrong.

If I don't know better services exist then from my PoV they are not available
and so may as well not exist.

------
edko
What's the catch with the unlimited traffic? Can I use their servers to
deliver large content files to a large group of users, with only the
advertised bandwidth as the limitation? Or do they decrease bandwidth after a
certain amount of traffic?

~~~
geostyx
I ran 173TB combined up/down last month without ever being throttled on their
C2L instance. I've run 583TB through it in the last 5 months. It even bursts
to 2.2Gbps every few minutes.

~~~
voltagex_
What did that cost you? What's the bandwidth to other countries like?

~~~
kogepathic
Scaleway doesn't charge for bandwidth, so I'd guess their monthly cost is the
price of the C2L (23,99€/month)

------
PascalW
Last I looked at Scaleway what put me off was the fact that their storage was
not backed by RAID [1].

Compared to other, comparably priced providers like Hetzner and OVH that do
use RAID this is a big caveat IMHO. Of course important data should be backed
up remotely but disks fail and I'm not willing to deal with the hassle of
restoring data simply because a single disk failed.

[1] [https://www.scaleway.com/faq/servers/volumes/#-Local-
Volumes](https://www.scaleway.com/faq/servers/volumes/#-Local-Volumes)

~~~
vidarh
Different use cases. If your servers are sufficiently redundant, then RAID is
a waste of money, and you might be better off getting more capacity for your
money.

But for critical data, or data where you can't scale out as easily, of course,
that's another matter.

I won't use RAID for services I have 10 identical copies of and health checks,
but I will for the database server that is a pain if I have to fail over or
restore, in other words.

------
merinowool
From my experience Scaleway is awfully slow and you can't really scale your
project as you like as there is often no stock. There is also that weird IP
thing where you need to bind to private IP instead of the public. This causes
a lot of problems - for example using custom dns for Kubernetes doesn't really
work with that setup. Only thing good about it is the network. Another thing -
if your instance has a fault and there is no stock you'll have downtime,
sometimes even a day or so until there is something in stock.

~~~
milad_nazari
Personally, I don't think Scaleway servers are good enough to be used in
production like you describe it. However, because of the low prices, they are
ideal (for me at least) for hosting small web apps.

~~~
merinowool
That is sadly true. I am actually going to delete my cluster tomorrow because
of that.

------
usr1106
They are known for overselling a bit. They admit it in this very blog post.
Nice technical, leading edge concepts, good prices. But then they might
struggle with fulfilling the promises.

They had big announcements for IPv6. After a long wait they had to admit that
their C1 infra has HW limitations and IPv6 would never come. On their other
infra they do have IPv6, but I understand the implementation is awkward (not
an IPv6 expert myself).

They had big plans for ARM. Nowadays they do mostly Intel.

Yes, I like them for pioneering, but I would not like to have my business
heavily relying on their promises.

~~~
usr1106
Forgot to mention: You get free networking on IPv6. Certainly a good deal, if
you have usage for servers without IPv4.

------
onli
Does someone have a benchmark of the new cpus in the start-instances vs the
older X86 baremetal servers, C2S and higher?

~~~
weropol
Not baremetal, but I did some benchmarks before and after the free upgrade of
my VC1 to Start1 hardware.

With UnixBench single thread:

\--------------------------------------

Old VC1: Intel Atom C2750 @ 2.40GHz

Dhrystone 2: 12029634 lps

Double-Precision Whetstone: 1984 MWIPS

\--------------------------------------

New Start1: Intel Atom C3955 @ 2.10GHz

Dhrystone 2: 22143815 lps

Double-Precision Whetstone: 3165 MWIPS

\--------------------------------------

Other tests that I performed also showed a ~60% performance increase, except
for some compression tests that only gained ~45%.

------
jagger27
I'd love if Online.net followed OVH's footsteps and opened up a North American
DC (Canadian would be great).

~~~
Ayesh
I'd jump ship to OVH if they have a DC in NY or SF.

------
Aissen
What's nice is that simply turning the server on and off allows you to move
the faster machines :-)

~~~
drdaeman
Except that you may suddenly encounter that servers were out of stock, someone
just got lucky with the slot you've freed and now you can't power your server
back on. ;-)

Not sure about VPSes, but this had happened to me once with a C1 server.

~~~
Aissen
Did it happen to you on a VC1 (now Start-XXX) ? These are virtual servers.

~~~
drdaeman
No, I've only ever used their baremetal offerings (C1 and C2s). Sans the few
oddities, I think they're quite good for the price, at least for various
toy/sandbox stuff. It could be that this kind of situation can't happen on VC1
(Start-XXX) - as I wrote, I'm not sure.

