[reconquestio]

Sounds great, but I will not go for this the second time, Scaleway.

Two years ago I purchased a server there, configured everything and started handling workload. Then I received the following email:

Our support team created a new ticket associated to your account. Hello, Your instance 'REDACTED' is running on a hypervisor that encountered a critical failure. We are not able to power on the hypervisor again. We were not able to recover your local files located on your LSSD. Your node has been stopped. If you created snapshots of the server's volumes or if you halted your node recently, you will recover your volumes at their latest good state. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Scaleway Team

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[wut42]

Seriously problems happens, and you should not held Scaleway responsible for THIS.

However-- you can definitely hold Scaleway responsible for the crazy price hike (that happened two or three times), very bad support (it improved a bit lately).

[wut42]

For the ones downvoting me, please say why?

[Daho0n]

I didn't downvote but IMO it is because disagreement is often shown with votes instead of comments. Ability to downvote is a broken system, but saying that will also give downvotes, especially if you also point out a big site that have tried the up/downvote system already and shown have broken it really is.

[wut42]

I just stated facts tho. They did have raised their pricing multiple times. It could be argued on the support quality, ok, but a comment with details is always better for this...

What's also intringuing me is that my comment was at 5 or 6 points. And then in a couple of minutes went directly to -1.

[Daho0n]

If it were on Reddit I'd guess vote manipulation but on HN? Strange.

I can't see anything wrong with your comment either.

[wut42]

A bit late to follow-up, but by the time you commented, my comment was back from -3 to 6 and now 9.

So who nows? But it's not the first time I raised my issues with Scaleway price rises, and every time they get downvoted quickly. So that makes me think, yes.

[outime]

You may want to know that this also happens in more expensive providers like AWS.

As a counterpoint, in my experience of a bunch of years with Scaleway they have always worked quite well. I left them due to the price getting out of hand.

[asaddhamani]

What did you move to?

[outime]

I can recommend Hetzner. For non-production stuff I highly recommend checking lowendtalk.com / lowendbox.com to see offers from different providers.

[londons_explore]

In cases like this, I would like them to offer a paid option to take the hardware to a data recovery specialist.

For example, the email could say:

"As the plan your instance was on did not include redundant storage, we regret to inform you we have no plans to recover the data on it. We will hold the server hardware for 7 days, and forward it to one of our approved data recovery experts on request. We can also send the data recovery expert encryption keys used for your account that they will need to recover data. There is a charge of $X for this service".

[ballenf]

I really liked this idea, until I realized that the net effect would be a post here: "their inferior hardware lost my data and then they tried to extort 5000EUR to get it back."

While on paper it seems crazy that offering a customer an extra option could never be a negative, in practice it can.

[dest]

I had a similar issue (two years ago as well!) and support was pretty disappointing. It was a self hosted email server, all content just vanished.

The only alternative they gave to me was to upgrade to another type of machine, as the previous one was not available anymore. It was noticeably more expensive of course.

So in the end they had a failure and I ended up having to pay more (I found another solution at another provider)

[sillysaurusx]

Problems happen. Did you contact support and ask for a refund? How did they respond?

If the PSU failed, there's not a lot they can do to prevent a critical failure. (Sounds like the drive failed in this case.)

[batterylow]

> Did you contact support and ask for a refund? How did they respond?

How this was resolved is the most important part in my opinion

[Daho0n]

>If the PSU failed

The PSU? As in one (1)? Because then, to quote Adam Savage, Well there's your problem!

[morganvachon]

Yeah that caught my eye as well. My home media server is a repurposed Dell tower server with redundant PSUs, if I can swing that for non-critical movies and TV shows, surely a large scale cloud provider will have not only redundant PSUs on each node, but their storage will be redundant and rebuildable as well? Else what are their customers actually paying for?

[espadrine]

The way I see it, Scaleway vs. AWS is the old tradeoff: enterprise-grade hardware vs. commodity hardware with resilient software.

You can set up one AWS EC2 backed by an RDS.

Or you can set up two Scaleway servers in failover, backed by three CockroachDB Scaleway nodes.

In the second approach, you need more cheap things, but the total price can still be lower. On the other hand, you should not expect the same reliability from a single Scaleway node, compared to a single EC2.

[luhn]

EC2 isn't enterprise hardware, it's all commodity and, more lately, custom-designed silicon. It certainly fails, and Amazon's own recommendations call for redundancy using things like EC2 auto-scaling groups and RDS multi-AZ.

EC2 has a slight leg up because EBS stores data redundantly, so a single disk failure won't knock out your data. But failure is still possible, and a durable storage strategy should involve backups.

[remram]

I left in 2018 when they increased all their prices 60% (€16/mo boxes turning €24/mo). I wouldn't rely on them for anything critical, but €2.40 for 24h is unbeaten right now. I have some software I need to build for Apple M1s and as far as I can see it's this or MacStadium (or buying a device).

[mike_d]

SSD $/GB/mo was almost half what it is on AWS last time I checked. Run a clustered replicated storage system or ephemeral workload and you are fine.

[asah]

What's the problem exactly? hardware dies.