
C2: Affordable X86-64 Servers - fooyc
https://blog.scaleway.com/2016/03/08/c2-insanely-affordable-x64-servers/
======
lazyjones
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-6418...](http://www.supermicro.nl/products/MicroBlade/module/MBI-6418A-T7H.cfm)
(4 nodes in 1 3U blade!).

~~~
voltagex_
I'm happy to run any benchmarks people like (within reason). I can also
compare to most AWS instances if you like.

~~~
networked
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)

~~~
tux3
Here are the results on a C2S:

    
    
      CPU                 : 4 CPU GenuineIntel Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU  C2550  @ 2.40GHz 2394MHz
      L2 Cache            : 1024 KB
      OS                  : Linux 4.4.4-std-3
      C compiler          : gcc version 4.8.4 (Ubuntu 4.8.4-2ubuntu1~14.04.1) 
      libc                : libc-2.19.so
      MEMORY INDEX        : 22.134
      INTEGER INDEX       : 17.899
      FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 21.522

~~~
imdsm
I have to be honest, they don't look bad at all.

From my experience so far, C1 is like working with a microwave, and VC1 (VPS)
is much nicer, for €2.99 let's not forget.

------
cfallin
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
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
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
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
Go's net/http framework uses a go routine per connection.

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
For my understanding: One request is executed on serveral cores?

~~~
jerf
No. There's a certain amount of basic serialism in a single HTTP request. Go,
Erlang, Haskell, a few others make it _really easy_ to write handlers that may
themselves be running on multiple cores, but the HTTP handling itself is
essentially serialized by the fact that you have to get the request, _then_
send the headers, _then_ send the body, which itself probably has order
constraints (such as HTML, which certainly does, at least unless you really go
out of your way to write yourself a CSS framework that would render chunks of
the HTML order-independent). Most of the required bits of handling a request,
like header parsing, header generation, etc. have been made so efficient in
the implementations that care about that that any attempt to multithread that
would lose on coordination costs to a single-threaded implementation, I
think... at least, I'd need to see a benchmark to the contrary before I'd
believe in a win.

(You can play a lot of games in how a lot of requests are handled, even going
to the HTTP2 extreme of interleaving responses to different requests on the
underlying network stream, but what I said will be true on a per-request
basis.)

------
speakeron
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.

------
gravypod
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
> 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
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?

------
LogicX
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.

~~~
yyin
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.

~~~
LogicX
I don't work for them, just a customer. It just happened to be what I typed
for their URL. I'm not intimately familiar with how every site I visit does
their redirects.

------
earlz
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/)

~~~
bryanlarsen
> KVM access is expensive

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I got the impression that KVM access on
KimSufi or SoYouStart requires somebody to walk over to your machine and plug
a USB key into your machine. That would explain why it costs $30.

~~~
Someone1234
Not really in a data center. They have embedded firmware for KVM e.g. Dell's
DRAC, HP's ILO, Oracle's ILOM, Intel's RMM2, and IPMI. Plugging and unplugging
things into a server can be operationally hazardous and is definitely tedious.

~~~
bryanlarsen
OVH's more expensive servers do use IPMI and include free KVM. Their cheaper
kimsufi and soyoustart offerings use a USB KVM to ethernet device, and charge
for its usage.

------
zschallz
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
I got super excited at first, but then...

The servers are based on: [http://ark.intel.com/products/33927/Intel-Xeon-
Processor-E54...](http://ark.intel.com/products/33927/Intel-Xeon-
Processor-E5420-12M-Cache-2_50-GHz-1333-MHz-FSB) and
[http://ark.intel.com/products/47927/Intel-Xeon-
Processor-L56...](http://ark.intel.com/products/47927/Intel-Xeon-
Processor-L5630-12M-Cache-2_13-GHz-5_86-GTs-Intel-QPI)

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.)

~~~
LoSboccacc
kimsufi doesn't look bad but I don't find anywhere their cancellation policy

~~~
lorenzhs
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.

------
codecamper
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?

~~~
tux3
I have a 3€ C1 server at Scaleway moving some 25-30TB of data per month, so
yes, it's very real.

~~~
codecamper
amazing! very good!

~~~
muhpirat
With my tor relays I pushed around 150Mbit up and Down. Which is around 45TB
per direction and Month.

------
thenomad
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?

~~~
nwilkens
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
Hmm, very interesting. Thanks!

------
muhpirat
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

------
Vlaix
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.

------
siscia
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
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/)

------
cateye
How would this compare to Hetzner offerings?
[https://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver](https://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver)

~~~
tronje
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.

~~~
imaginenore
Hetzner has cheap VPSs:

[https://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_vserver/cx30](https://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_vserver/cx30)

~~~
tronje
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).

------
tluyben2
Invite only.... So you cannot even get them. What's the use of this
announcement?

~~~
voltagex_
I think I have a number of invites, but the site is very slow at the moment.

~~~
svacko
if you have one more invite, i've sent you an email with request :) thx

~~~
maximedev
Invitations won't get too far : "Send an invitation to your friend to try
Scaleway! Your invitation will get queued and sent when enough capacity is
available."

------
sspiff
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).

------
tokart
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
> 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.

------
reynoldsbd
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
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.

~~~
sspiff
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
Nope, OVH doesn't have data center in Germany afaik.

~~~
sspiff
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.

------
aidenn0
$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.

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

~~~
fooyc
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
>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
I did the opposite and moved from OVH. I didn't have any problems with Online,
but can't say the same about OVH.

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

------
therealmarv
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
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
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
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.

------
nonuby
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
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.

------
kazinator
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.)

~~~
ropiku
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.

------
stcredzero
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._

------
netforay
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
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 :)

------
ab4275
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 :-)

------
driverdan
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
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.

------
Sami_Lehtinen
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
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.

------
fermigier
"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)

------
z3t4
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!

------
ikurei
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
They are located in France

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

------
sofaofthedamned
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.

------
iofur
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.

------
rogeryu
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
4GB is too little?

------
pjc50
If you want even more affordable (but lower performance),
[http://lowendspirit.com/](http://lowendspirit.com/)

~~~
8draco8
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
Thanks for the intel re the London DO datacentre. I'm glad it's not just me
:-)

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

~~~
morganvachon
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.

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moreorless
I love Vultr. Support is fantastic!

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

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tempodox
What is “ _unmeted bandwidth_ ”?

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

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sspiff
Do you mean through their server bidding? Because those old pieces of junk are
known for being stacked with near-failing hard drives.

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dvfjsdhgfv
I got a dozen of them an in the last 5 years only one drive failure, quickly
replaced, no data lost thanks to RAID.

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topbanana
Anything similar in the UK?

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vbit
Any support for FreeBSD?

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ino
How do they handle DoS?

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throwaway21816
>invite required

Great way to drive away customers

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

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bluhue
Where from?

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imdsm
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.

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anentropic
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

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rfreytag
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.

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lubos
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.

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Nexxxeh
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.

