
We are slashing the C1 price by 70 percent - Remiii
https://blog.scaleway.com/2015/09/02/we-are-slashing-the-c1-price-by-70-percent/
======
cwyers
> We believe that cloud computing is an amazing technology and that everybody
> should be able to benefit from its advantages. That's why we decided to
> reduce the price of the C1

Am I the only person who is turned off by that kind of marketing copy? You
lowered prices because you thought you could sell more nodes, gain economy of
scale, serve as a loss-leader, your costs went down, something. You didn't
lower the prices because you wanted to do something nice for everybody.

~~~
mikeash
What's really odd is that if you take it at face value, the statement implies
that they didn't care about helping people beforehand, or else the price would
have been lower from the start.

~~~
cwyers
That's amazing, I hadn't even noticed that before but now that you've said it
I can't not see it.

~~~
mikeash
I'm glad I could, uh, help.

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ddoscampaign
This is brilliant because the main cost of running gear is power draw (PDUs /
electrical circuits). Having OEM/ODM blade ARM setup a-la sgi
cloudrack/supermicro is the way to drive costs to the floor, in a
Backblaze/Google way. Unfortunately, it's a "Dell/Walmart model"
hypercommodity where such a business has to maintain massive customer
subscriptions to stay cash positive and still just trickles in $.

It's an interesting space, but if I were launching a cloud IaaS/VPS, I would
probably optimize for the other extreme of "Apple model" premium/full-service
expensive hosting that has fantastic uptime, gear and sales/support for
enterprise/startup and IT/web operations... There's some more money in that
and less headaches. (The most money seems to be in the upper-middle pricepoint
area.)

~~~
toomuchtodo
> I would probably optimize for the other extreme of "Apple model"
> premium/full-service expensive hosting that has fantastic uptime, gear and
> sales/support for enterprise/startup and IT/web operations... There's some
> more money in that and less headaches. (The most money seems to be in the
> upper-middle pricepoint area.)

A few weeks ago, I'd say "You mean AWS", but after this morning, and a few
other incidents over the last few weeks, I don't think anyone can do fantastic
uptime in a virtualized/cloud environment.

There's the rub, isn't it? Companies want to compete on quality, but if you're
_supposed_ to architect your application(s) for failure, uptime becomes a lot
less important. You then only have price to compete on.

I know Twilio runs in both AWS and Rackspace, depending on various KPIs for
shifting load. Seems to be the way the world is headed. I'm curious if
containerization like Docker predicts CDNs running your containers for you at
the edge...

~~~
azinman2
I have fantastic uptime on linode. Averages probably 9 months?

~~~
organsnyder
Is that just uptime as reported by the OS, or actual time between outages? The
server can be happily churning away even if its network connection goes down.

I've been on Linode for a while, and have also had a decent experience.
However, I wouldn't use uptime as my only metric.

~~~
fapjacks
I will vouch for Linode. Also if you've never heard of Ramnode, they are my
go-to VPS provider. I build actively monitored infrastructure with downtime
notifications on the order of 5 minutes or less, so my story isn't just
anecdote. I have bought hundreds of VPS over the years from a huge number of
providers, and Ramnode is hands down absolutely the best provider. _Excellent_
uptime and the VPS always feel snappy and responsive. It never feels
oversubscribed like every other provider out there. Linode is also very good,
too, IME.

------
jedisct1
Scaleway kindly donated a node to host a DNSCrypt public resolver.

Zero problems since January.

This hardware is perfect to host a DNS server. Unlike a VM, the performance is
predictable, and setting up the server couldn't be any easier.

Not a bad choice to host Docker containers (Docker works fine on this
architecture) that don't require tons of memory.

They have quite a lot of Linux distributions available, but I'm even more
excited about the Bitrig port which is being worked on.

------
jo909
For every comparison we should take into account that scaleway offers
dedicated hardware, not a VPS.

Also I think its important to note that they (currently) only offer one very
"small" server model, so your whole application would have to be able to scale
horizontally really well to be able to run on such infrastructure. So you
can't have a few big database servers and a lot of small stateless application
servers, which I belive is a very typical architecture today.

~~~
weddpros
But... Scaleway is a spinoff of Online.net which offers fine (and cheap)
dedicated Intel servers. I don't know (yet) the ping between Scaleway and
online.net but it's probably low enough to allow scaling "workers" on ARM
servers, while DBs are kept on 64bits dedicated Intel servers.

Also if you want to scale horizontally, you probably want to scale on more
than one datacenter (online provides that too).

~~~
conorgdaly
speaking of online.net, they currently have a banner ad front and center on
their homepage for scaleway which says: "Run up to 10 bare metal SSD cloud
server for free" [1]

Clicking through just lands me on the scaleway homepage. Can anybody shed some
light on this? Clicking around their site and couldn't see any mention of it.

[1]
[http://www.online.net/img/carousel/cloud.jpg](http://www.online.net/img/carousel/cloud.jpg)
screengrab: [http://imgur.com/cuvZlgb](http://imgur.com/cuvZlgb)

~~~
cuonic
Scaleway offer the first month for free, and the maximum amount of servers you
can have running during the free trial is limited to 10, to benefit just
signup on [https://www.scaleway.com](https://www.scaleway.com)

------
zinxq
Storage and VPS systems are becoming (have become) commodity so quickly.

It will be interesting to see if this has any effect on open-source Saas
businesses. I.e. "We'll host it for you or you can host it yourself for free"
\- for example, ghost.

Hosting it for me has definitely has its level of remove-hassle advantages,
but if such software is easy to install and low maint, then it becomes notably
cheaper to grab a VPS for it.

~~~
voltagex_
ScaleWay seem to have some one-click setups - "InstantApps". See
[https://www.scaleway.com/docs/category/instantapps/](https://www.scaleway.com/docs/category/instantapps/)

------
fapjacks
Well, having just now tried this out, I have to say I'm happy with their
interface and the experience getting a server started. I'm excited to see what
the uptime is like on this new box and if the unmetered bandwidth is truly
unmetered bandwidth.

------
pixiez
C1 is probably not an extremely performant machine, so what is the preferred
solution for database hosting? I guess the latency will be too high if we host
the database remotely i.e. outside Scaleway but the C1 instance might be not
good enough to host a database which is normally the main bottleneck?

~~~
axaxs
Host it on a real host at online.net, they're in the same DC and owned by the
same company.

------
lux
This makes them very similar in price to Digital Ocean, even slightly cheaper.
I wonder what the performance comparison would be between their equivalent
tiers...

Their S3-compatible object storage is also quite appealing.

Being in North America though, I'd love if they had a data centre option here
too.

~~~
voltagex_
It's 180ms from a residential Canadian connection so I'd imagine it's similar
from some parts of the US. Expecting ~300ms from my Australian ADSL connection
(compared to ~190ms to an LA based DigitalOcean instance).

vpsbench on Scaleway:

    
    
        CPU model:  ARMv7 Processor rev 2 (v7l)
        Number of cores: 4
        CPU frequency:  MHz
        Total amount of RAM: 2022 MB
        Total amount of swap: 0 MB
        System uptime:   10 min,
        I/O speed:  99.6 MB/s
        Bzip 25MB: 32.62s
        Download 100MB file: 70.5MB/s
    
    

Small DO instance:

    
    
        CPU model:  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 0 @ 2.30GHz
        Number of cores: 1
        CPU frequency:  2299.998 MHz
        Total amount of RAM: 494 MB
        Total amount of swap: 1023 MB
        System uptime:   40 days, 11:26,
        I/O speed:  445 MB/s
        Bzip 25MB: 8.76s
        Download 100MB file: 25.8MB/s

~~~
akkartik
Wait, what's the CPU frequency on Scaleway?

I just created a test instance with them and ran an open source project of
mine. It runs just as fast as anywhere else, but _compiling_ it takes 5 times
as long. Investigating further to see if it's just something about my (weird)
project.

 _Edit_ : ah pella posted a comment at the same time as me with details on
just how slow the ARM CPU is:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161307](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161307).
The benchmarks linked there are _15x_ slower on single-threaded workloads.

~~~
Marazan
One thing with those benchmarks:

Amon's piece is back when Scaleway was way more expensive. Amon says that he
started a DigitalOcean Droplet with similar specs to the Scaleway box.

The Scaleway box has 2GB of memeory and 4 cores.

The first Digital Ocean box with more than 1 core and 2GB of memory is $20 a
month. That's 6 times more expensive than Scaleway!

It would be interesting to see what the benchmarks would be like on the price
competitive Digital Ocean offering (single core, 512MB memory, 20GB Hard disk)

~~~
akkartik
I just tried it and got a 20x difference.

Scaleway, using one of four 1332 bogomips processors and 2GB RAM (~$3.30/mo):

    
    
      Test execution summary:
          total time:                          685.4730s
          total number of events:              10000
          total time taken by event execution: 685.4637
          per-request statistics:
               min:                                 68.52ms
               avg:                                 68.55ms
               max:                                 75.46ms
               approx.  95 percentile:              68.58ms
    

Digital Ocean, using the sole 4600 bogomips processor and 512MB RAM ($5/mo):

    
    
      Test execution summary:
          total time:                          34.9343s
          total number of events:              10000
          total time taken by event execution: 34.9257
          per-request statistics:
               min:                                  2.88ms
               avg:                                  3.49ms
               max:                                  8.00ms
               approx.  95 percentile:               3.68ms
    

Commandline:

    
    
      $ sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 run

------
lordlarm
Scaleway is a highly interesting player in the IaaS market as they're one of
the few currently that are offering ARM based servers. Will we see more ARM
servers the next couple of years from more vendors?

~~~
rmac
Why is ARM interesting? Running android natively is one of the few things I
can come up with...

~~~
ikawe
Lower power consumption makes it possible to offer very cheap service. In some
cases this will just save a few bucks, not very interesting.

But the interesting point is what kind of previously economically unviable
projects are now viable.

~~~
api
Total isolation is also interesting for some high-security applications.

I Tweeted to them and suggested that they offer -- at a possibly much higher
price point -- a _physically_ isolated server that must be manually
provisioned by a human being. Any access would require multi-factor
authentication followed by the actual dispatch of a person to retrieve the
device.

This would be interesting for things like CA master signing servers, etc.

------
Tinyyy
I wonder if it is effective to run Tor nodes on this, given the unmetered
bandwidth. I suspect that CPU is going to be a huge bottleneck here. Does
anyone mind trying it out?

~~~
dublinben
Don't bother trying to run an exit relay. The operators of the company will
assume you're a terrible person and forward your information to law
enforcement. [0]

[0] [https://forum.online.net/index.php?/topic/4642-do-you-
allow-...](https://forum.online.net/index.php?/topic/4642-do-you-allow-
tor/#entry24618)

------
siscia
It seems to me a very nice deal for the Erlang/Elixir developer... Cheap,
multicore, server...

------
vbezhenar
That's very interesting. I wonder how those ARMs can deal with encryption
(VPN). Also OpenBSD image or, better, ability to install anything from ISO
would be very nice.

~~~
jedisct1
Directly installing from an ISO image is unlikely to work, due to the NBD
devices.

Changes might be backported to OpenBSD later, but Bitrig might be available
soon:
[https://github.com/bitrig/bitrig/issues/65](https://github.com/bitrig/bitrig/issues/65)

------
weddpros
At 3€/m, it's really worth it for some workload...

------
coreyp_1
I would love to have a server with them, but I can't think of any projects to
put on it (that I have time for). :(

------
ay
I don't see how big of an IPv6 prefix do they allocate per server...

~~~
taneliv
From
[https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server/](https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server/) :
"Do you offer IPv6?

Not yet, this is in our mid term roadmap. We developed our own routers and
switches to get as many features as possible. Some work is still needed to
integrate IPv6 with all security features."

------
killercup
(The title currently just says '2,99 per month'. This should probably be
changed "2.99€" instead, since a lot of people would expect HN to default to
USD. Even I (living in Germany) was surprised it was in Euro.)

~~~
susi22
I didn't check if they do, but they should not charge VAT for customers
located in the USA. Which means that the price will actually end up being
$2.80 (as of right now 2.99/1.2 EUR to USD).

~~~
germanier
The displayed price already is without VAT.

------
bluejellybean
2015 and they do not accept Discover cards.

~~~
JoshTriplett
2015 and people still use Discover cards. Why?

I can think of several good reasons to use American Express, despite it being
somewhat less widely accepted. But Discover doesn't seem to have any obvious
value over a MasterCard or Visa.

~~~
jazzyk
Their value is providing competition to Mastercard/Visa. Without Discover, the
duopoly would charge even higher transaction costs, etc.

~~~
mikeash
What about American Express? They're doing pretty well. I don't think I've
ever seen anyone use Discover, so I don't know how much competition they
really provide.

------
sz4kerto
"Today, we are announcing a huge price cut for Scaleway compute services. We
believe that cloud computing is an amazing technology and that everybody
should be able to benefit from its advantages. That's why we decided to reduce
the price of the C1 to €2.99 per month or €0.006 per hour, effectively
reducing the price by 70% compared to the previous price (€9.99 per month)."

Why must you say that? This is definitely untrue.

~~~
ketralnis
What is untrue about it?

