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.
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.
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.
Don't try to normalize this stuff, there's no reason hosting companies should need scans of their customers IDs.
I am using Scaleway for hosting my own mail server and never sent them an ID. They have my credit card info, of course, but that’s it.
Not sure about VPSes, but this had happened to me once with a C1 server.
(I've already opened a ticket with them).
Edit: Just received a second message from them. Turns out I a missed part of their blog post that says that the update is not yet available in AMS1 region.
> All VC1 users can upgrade to Start servers without any price change.
> To upgrade your existing VC1 server, simply do a power off and a power on your server. Your server will start on a Next-Gen Start Hypervisor with increased performances and for the same price as before. You may already be running on a new hypervisor if you created your server recently. New hypervisors are powered by Intel Denverton CPUs instead of Avoton.
SQS
SNS
RDS
S3
Athena/Glue
EMR
CloudWatch
Lambda
CloudWatch Events
EC2 Autoscaling, ELB, ALB
Elasticsearch Service
Glacier
ElastiCache
Route 53
CloudFront
Data Pipeline
If you want to run a business, Scaleway's lack of reliability (servers often sell out etc.) may be a problem. If you're a hobbyist, the potential bandwidth bill from GCP/AWS is a show-stopper, and the Scaleway servers are more than good enough for many applications.
Regarding the slowness, are you talking about CPU speed, I/O, or network?
I wouldn’t use it for any large web service though.
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
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.
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.
With UnixBench single thread:
--------------------------------------
Old VC1: Intel Atom C2750 @ 2.40GHz
Dhrystone 2: 12029634 lps
Double-Precision Whetstone: 1984 MWIPS
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New Start1: Intel Atom C3955 @ 2.10GHz
Dhrystone 2: 22143815 lps
Double-Precision Whetstone: 3165 MWIPS
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Other tests that I performed also showed a ~60% performance increase, except for some compression tests that only gained ~45%.