[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. 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

[fapjacks]

Ouch! That is a very big deal.

[jl6]

Looks like you get a lot more memory than on the cheapest Digital Ocean droplet (2gb vs 512mb), and more storage too (50gb vs 20gb).

[pella]

benchmark : "Scaleway vs DigitalOcean and deploying web apps on an ARM server" ( By Martin Rusev on 28.05.2015 )

"In all my tests, the performance of their servers was slower compared to DigitalOcean, but this could be because they are using Network drivers(LSSD) and a 32bit ARM architecture(armv7l)"

https://www.amon.cx/blog/scaleway-vs-digitalocean-and-deploy...

[pella]

FAQ: https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server/

"How does the SSD storage perform?

SSD drives provide excellent performances with a really low latency. They perform especially well with random access patterns. Our SSD storage provide an average latency of 550 μs (550 microseconds) when a traditional rotating drive has a latency of several miliseconds.

We provide 2000 IOPS (an IO is a 4K random read or write access) per 50GB chunk you buy. It means that if you buy a 150GB volume (3 chunks), you will get about 6000 IOPS (3x2000).

To enjoy the performance of your volume, your application needs to use parallel IO. The total bandwidth of your volumes is limited to 120MB/s by the network link."

[tomjen3]

They seem to provide much more memory at a slightly cheaper price, but given that it is arm I am not sure I care - can you run Ruby, Python and (Oracle) JVM?

I really just wanted a cheap server for Minecraft.

[speakeron]

I just ran up a Debian Wheezy instance and put Java 8 on it (jdk-8u60-linux-arm32-vfp-hflt.tar.gz from Oracle). It runs fine.