Anybody knows if Scaleway it's better than the parent company?
I was an online.net costumer for a lot of years for a personal project, and a happy one, but then they changed the contract unilaterally, which included the billing going up almost 75% with another changes in the ToS. And look I get it, sometimes prices rises, and you can always change providers, so the problem was not that... but the customer service and poor communication.
I only notice the change, after my credit card notified my of a higher charge than the ones I'm used to. There was not notification about it in the dashboard. And after a lot of tickets with representatives, they told me under the excuse of "ram / hdd prices are going up" the notice was send through email, and probably gmail mark it as spam... and then the nightmare to cancel begin.
After telling them to cancel the account, they told that under the new contract (that I didn't accept) they could only do it if I got charged another extra month, even if from the start you always payed one month in advance, plus paying the setup fee at the beginning.
Look I get it, hardware it's messy and prices can go up to stay in business, but this attitude of "I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further" was the one that made me look for another solutions, and be skeptical about Scaleway despite in paper being a good alternative to Digital Ocean (that let me tell you, DO customer service it's gold in comparison to what I got from online).
If you are looking for low-priced servers I can highly reccomend HETZNER[0].
They are even cheaper then scaleway and I had no problems so far.
[0]https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
Hetzner is great for cloud but especially for dedicated instances. If you have your infrastructure as code, buying dedicated servers there is likely much cheaper and easier than using a large cloud provider and trying to scale.
Only issue I have with them is that there's no way to get 10gbit/s (not even burstable) and that you don't get datacenters outside of Europe.
Not affiliated with them, just a very happy customer.
you can order 10g uplinks for most of hetzner's dedicated servers (for ~€45/m).
I haven't used their 10G uplinks in years, but it seems they're still easily available at €1/TB over 20TB:
https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-info...
I will check them out, the prices doesn't seem bad at all. Will try for a small projects, and if everything goes well maybe migrate bigger ones.
I second this. We use Hetzner Cloud for all our staging servers and have never had an outage, and I had a client on a bare metal Hetzner server for about 12 years before the hard drive eventually gave up.
Hetzner Cloud is nice! When I benchmarked SCW cloud and HZN cloud, Hetzner was the clear winner. SCW was a bit cheaper at the time. Now Hetzner is cheaper and faster! You just don't get as much bandwith.
I've got one of Hetzner's machine from the "auction" side (https://www.hetzner.com/sb) for various things that has been running along nicely for a while. Paying a pretty keen price for 3x3T drives (unless the storage is on a RAID backed SAN I never get a single drive remote machine), 32G RAM and a fairly decent (though far from leading edge) CPU.
For cheaper (and other options in the same range or more expensive too) in a large array of configurations https://www.serverhunter.com/ and https://en.metadedi.net/ are useful resources, though obviously do a little research before signing up for a host based on it being cheap.
I have been using Hetzner and they are good and cheaper than AWS.
Hetzner was one of the major sources of attack I experienced at my last job. Hackers thought they were a good value, too. (Was 5-ish years ago, not sure if that’s the same case now.)
I mean... yes? Cheap servers are cheap servers no matter who's buying them or why
Would have loved to use Hetzner, sadly they rejected a picture of my ID card/passport (with some details blacked out) a few years ago when i tried registering and verifying my identity, i don't think there was any process for appealing to have someone else look at it again, thus my account ended up being blocked. Of course, this is just 1 data point and i'm sure that the experience of other people is more positive in general!
That said, the prices actually look pretty competetive and are indeed cheaper than Scaleway's offerings. However, Scaleway also recently came out with more cost effective instances, called Stardust (though the specifications are somewhat limited): https://blog.scaleway.com/a-star-is-born-as-scaleway-launche...
Personally, i use Time4VPS for my VPSes, which is a somewhat small daughter company of a larger Lithuanian telecom (Interneto vizija). Affiliate link, if anyone is interested in having a look: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294
I've been using them for a few years, the uptimes and the performance both are generally pretty good, can even self-host an e-mail server and the few IPv4 addresses i've had from them haven't been blacklisted anywhere. However, they don't directly compete with SaaS or PaaS like AWS's or Scaleway's managed offerings.
Why wouldn't they reject a ID/passport with some details blacked out?
They have proper support lines where one can call and ask. (At least this was so a couple of years ago, no need to call support since then..).
> Why wouldn't they reject a ID/passport with some details blacked out?
In my subjective opinion, a better question would be: Why would they reject an ID/passport with some details blacked out?
The ID card and the passport both have serial numbers on them, as well as sufficient information (issuer country and the institution within the country), that any decent implementation of validating such data should be able to look it up.
As for the blacked out fields - they contain information pertaining to my social identification code, one that should be kept private under most circumstances (analogous to social security number in the US). It feels like that information could:
- provide absolutely no benefit to them
- compromise my privacy, should it be leaked due to improper handling of that data on their end
If not providing such sensitive information is grounds for denying account verification and termination of an account, then i'm perfectly fine with that and will simply look elsewhere, for other services. Other people may disagree with that and provide any and all information, the handling of which they deem acceptable, which is okay (hence, i mentioned that others' experience might be more positive/successful in that regard).
Maybe someone who works in the industry (not Hetzner in particular) and has worked with similar systems in the past may comment on what the mechanisms for validating ID cards and such are, and which bits of data are necessary and which aren't?
I might go a further step, to:
1. Why does some webhost think it gets to ask for your passport?
Lol the second they get hacked you have a world class identity theft nightmare
Go to a host where asking for your most protected personal information isn't part of doing business. This is absolutely ridiculous
There are bad actors. I don't know details but suspect that passport requirements help with deterring them. If Hetzner gets a bad reputation it affects all their customers.
Nice that you have options which meet your wishes. But I like the way Hetzner is doing business (not to mention the great quality-price ratio which is hard to find elsewhere).
No kidding. Linode does a good job for cheap VPS machines, as do DigitalOcean and Vultr, and they don't feel the need to ask for identity documents. I haven't heard of big cloud providers (AWS, Azure, etc.) doing that either. Perhaps this is some quirk of German law? In any case, that would be an immediate reason not to do business with them.
When I ran a hosting provider, a small US-based one, we had to block most international signups simply because every one of them turned into a spammer. Abuse is a very, very big problem. They may have discovered that individuals from specific locations are generally troublesome and require stricter verification.
> Why wouldn't they reject a ID/passport with some details blacked out?
A better question is why would they? Sending an unredacted copy of my ID to some foreign company just to buy some hosting would seem crazy to me.
Here's a quote from their authentication email when I signed up a few years ago:
> As a new customer, we kindly request that you provide us with a copy (scan/photo) of your passport or ID card for authentication purposes. You can blur or block out information that is not necessary for authentication.
I sent in a picture of my driver's license with everything except my photo, name, and address blacked out, and they approved it. (In hindsight I'm not even sure why I didn't black out the photo part.)
I stand corrected with them mentioning blur/block in the authentication email (this was not the case earlier). But anyhow, what is for you "some foreign company" and "some hosting" is for them "some customer" which most likely is nice/friendly but there are exceptions.
It's the same, there's no "parent company", Online rebranded as Scaleway. Just a 75% increase ? You've been lucky. They also raised the prices two times since then on the Scaleway IaaS VMs.
Stay away from them, I don't see how they could be trusted with pricing again
Online rebranded as Scaleway, but there is a parent company called Iliad which is also the parent company of Free.
Yes, but the parent was talking about Online (“I was an online.net customer”)
Oh, I use to think Online.net was the parent brand. Thanks for clarify. Didn't knew was a full rebranding. My impression was that was sub-brand something like soyoustart to OVH, in that case, I will keep away from scaleway too.
It used to be the case. Online was doing dedicated servers/housing, Scaleway was IaaS. Now they went full "Scaleway", with Scaleway Dedibox being the dedicated part, and Scaleway Elements being IaaS!
Yeah, something similar happened to me @ Scaleway (so, the part before the rebrand/merger/whatever they did). Incredible price increase for my usecase. Even with the limited 25% discount, it grew out of hand. I'm in the process of migrating to Hetzner, but unfortunately some stuff is IP tied and it takes some time to fix everything.
Even before that, the constant changing of plans for Cloud was anoying. One of the reasons I chose Scaleway was because they promised easy upgrade/increase of resources as I needed it on the VPS. But then they discontinued the line I was using and I had to create a completely new one anyway. Then I had to move that one to the higher priced models again. A lot of fuss for something I would just like to keep running as long as possible with as little involvment.
I am in the same boat. they increases the price out of the blue and their instance availability for scaling up or down is not great.(M1 is out of stock now)
I'm a former Scaleway employee so take this as a informed guess: DC4 space is divided in very small, secure rooms (which you can see in the promotional video) with space for like less than a dozen racks at a time.
They probably filled a room with mac minis and will need to fill another room/racks to provide more hw to customers.
I've had pretty terrible experiences with Online/Scaleway customer support and them just pulling the plug on services with no transition path (like C14). I've decided that I'd rather just pay Amazon or DigitalOcean more and not have to deal with Scaleway.
I recently set up one of their "stardust" instance, which is the absolute cheapest one I found at ~2€/mo. Works as intended , not much more to say about it.