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Scaleway Stardust Instances

Posted 6 hours ago/30 comments/scaleway.com
4 hours ago by Youden

Some comparisons of the entry-level offerings at a few providers:

- Stardust, 0.0025€/h: 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 10GB disk, unlimited 100Mbps network

- Hetzner, 0.004€/h: 1 vCPU, 2GB RAM, 20GB disk, 20TB 10Gbps network

- Azure, 0.005$/h: 1vCPU, 0.5GB RAM, 4GiB disk, per-byte network

- Amazon Lightsail, ~0.005$/h: 1vCPU, 0.5GB RAM, 20GB disk, 1TB ???bps network

- Amazon Lightsail, ~0.007$/h: 1vCPU, 1GB RAM, 40GB disk, 2TB ???bps network

- DigitalOcean, $0.007/h: 1vCPU, 1GB RAM, 25GB disk, 1TB ???bps network

- OVH, 0.008€/h: 1vCPU, 2GB RAM, 10GB disk, unlimited 100Mbps network

- GCP, 0.009$/h: 0.2vCPU, 0.6GB RAM, no disk, per-byte network

I suppose the big question is how well the CPU performs. Their "price/performance" graph naturally makes them look quite good but it has some issues. The biggest one is that the methodology is entirely missing but there are some smaller clear issues like comparing to Amazon's C6g instance (which costs 13x as much) instead of the price-comparable Lightsail instances.

41 minutes ago by JorgeGT

There used to be a 1€/month VPS at Aruba Cloud (big Italian provider) with 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 20GB Disk, 20 TB traffic, WMWare hypervisor... it was just fantastic, but sadly they finally increased it to 2.79€+VAT this summer and I left. Plenty of datacenter locations through Europe though, if Hetzner DE and FI locations are not for you.

4 hours ago by tyingq

Lightsail viciously throttles after only a small amount of cpu use. I've not seen anything obvious to compare it to, as it would only be useful for something really occasionally bursty.

an hour ago by smarx007

First time hearing about Cloud-Mercato. https://vpsranking.com/en/ is something I have seen before and https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench/wiki/VPS-Hosts allows the results to be replicated.

3 hours ago by justinclift

> I suppose the big question is how well the CPU performs.

While that's true, Scaleway have an (at best) mixed reputation for IP stability and poor customer support.

eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24976899

4 hours ago by ve55

I've used Scaleway for several projects across many years, personal experience for those interested:

Pros:

- often free/unmetered bandwidth - very useful for some projects

- relatively cheap prices

- low downtime in general

- decent support ticket response times

Cons:

- CPU is generally rather slow, very noticeable compared to mainstream providers like AWS, GC, etc

- little selection of some parameters such as location (only Paris, Amsertdam, Warsaw)

- have had some issues with stopping/starting instances being absurdly slow due to how they move the entire disk around in the past

I think they're a decent choice for side projects that are intended to run at a low cost scale, since the unmetered bandwidth can add up to a lot of savings compared to some competitors (they don't lie about unmetered either - I used to have a $4/month instance that sometimes used >10TB/month, and they never complained), but I likely wouldn't use them for a serious or high-growth startup.

3 hours ago by othercharles

Price/perf of this is hidden by the tiny slice of hardware you get. Equivalent to my Hetzner machine would be 116 Euro/mo. before accounting for the 10x higher peak bandwidth, 2x capacity dedicated NVMe, 4TB of magnetic storage and 100GB of backup space I get for 60 Euro/mo.

I have no idea what "1 vCPU" means in this context but severely doubt it even means "1 hyperthread", unless the physical hardware were something like dual 16 core or single 32 core chips.

Definite pass

4 hours ago by tyingq

I suppose I know where the next wave of vulnerability scans is coming from now.

an hour ago by puzzlingcaptcha

The 100Mbps bandwidth cap is not great, but at least it is not 50Mbps like on the Oracle Cloud free instances (which they do not mention anywhere and customer support will play games with you just not to admit it).

19 minutes ago by latch

Assuming you can sustain this, that's 33TB/month, or 33x more than the [more expensive] AWS lightsail.

It might not be _the best_, but for the price, how is that anything but great?

What's a case where you want to (and more importantly can) burst more than that, but only for a very short time?

4 hours ago by sabalaba

It looks interesting. Sounds like they're going to be charging for an entire year of service up front or at least as part of an annual contract, which makes sense. (See: "Stardust will only be the beginning in a year-long partnership.") So this will be 21.99 euros ($26.04 USD) for the year. I wonder if this is an x86 instance or if it's ARM. Pricing would make a lot of sense if it was ARM.

3 hours ago by ac29

According to the blog post "every service, feature and scenario currently provided via its DEV1-S instances will also be available on Stardust Instances" [0]. The DEV1-S is an AMD Epyc and the technical specs match up as well. So, that seems most likely.

[0] https://blog.scaleway.com/a-star-is-born-as-scaleway-launche...

5 hours ago by gallexme

Weird price /performance comparison with hetzner, their cheapest is 2.89€ scaleway is 1.8€, hetzner offers double ram and storage and 1+gbit internet (in my experience usually 2.5gbit)

5 hours ago by tiernano

Is it not per of the cpu?

4 hours ago by gallexme

it all seems a bit fishy

there ads for scaleway on the linkedin page on cloud-mercato, "A week ago, Scaleway release the European VM with the lowest price. This week, place to the biggest machine with 448 CPU and 7.6 TB of RAM aka "#baremetall Ultimate Performance"." they only have 1 employee on linkedin, company location paris

the website is owned by a portugese company called balladscale with 2 employees and generates $56,524 in sales (USD).

unless cloud-mercato is just a buggy mess, it feels like its been put up in last minute, there bugs everywhere

after logging in with a computer

they dont even offer a "price score" for hetzner https://imgur.com/a/ymMUTj0

and dont offer a storage performance for scaleway https://imgur.com/a/3qZuxdK

they do offer to a "compute score" comparison with both in it and the hetzner machine is somehow ~3% slower, but that doesnt make up the price difference metrics on scaleway website

https://imgur.com/a/o7MO8Nb

4 hours ago by tyingq

Scaleway is owned by Iliad Group. It's a legit subsidiary of a legit multi billion dollar French telecom corporation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliad_SA

Edit: Ah, the concern is Cloud Mercato, cited in the benchmark graphs.

4 hours ago by mrpetruccio

I'm using scaleway for more than 3 years. Moved to thm all my websites.

5 hours ago by gallexme

Idont know, the "independent" benchmark site doesn't really work on mobile, n most links go to some kind of broken login Form

But ime scaleway had slower cpu crunching Power and web requests per second than similar hetzner cloud machines, and online. net(parent company) always had routing problems to me which couldn't be resolved in timely manners (1gbit dedicated server only 100mbit arrived at my place)

5 hours ago by spurgu

I had issues so many times with Scaleway where it took insanely long to reboot a server, seemingly getting stuck on some network provisioning, so I ended up ditching them altogether. Might use these boxes for some testing or throwaway stuff though.

Currently happy with DO and Hetzner, and increasingly so with the latter. But Hetzner's lack of firewall is a bit annoying, esp. when using Docker (which interferes with iptables).

5 hours ago by tiernano

Nice price for a small vm... If.my math are correct, €1.86 per month (744hours). Not bad...

5 hours ago by spurgu

A month is 365.25/12=30.4375 days on average, disregarding leap seconds.

5 hours ago by tiernano

Some providers use 720 (30 days) hours, some 744 (31days), I have even seen one doing 672 (28 days)...

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