Scaleway is the cloud of a French web hosting provider online.net. It is the first IaaS provider worldwide to offer an ARM based cloud. It is known for being fast, simple and reliable. Its fantastic user experience gives the user the power to spawn his servers in two clicks. The dedicated SSD servers give constant and predictable performance in 44 seconds. The 24/7 support team is there to back uptime and response time guarantee for mission critical services.
In the world of cloud hosting, Scaleway has become a beast that is competing directly with Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean and other VPS providers instead of building a virtual cloud hosting infrastructure. The company has designed its own ARM-based servers.
$3.4 per month servers
Due to its self-designed ARM-based servers, Scaleway has driven down prices very much. For just $3.44 per month, one can get a BareMetal SSD server with 50GB of storage and 2GB of RAM. The previous price was $11.14 which was more than three times of the new price. The new price is also applicable for the existing users. It is important to remeber that ARM v7 chipsets were actually developed for smartphones. They require a very small amount of space, power and cooling to perform well. Thanks to these chips, Scaleway’s single rack server is equal to 912 separate computers.
Scaleway users get 2 for 1 because they get dedicated servers with the touch of virtualization. Every user gets 4 dedicated ARM cores, 200Mbit per second of unmetered bandwidth and a dedicated IP. What is really different here is that no one will be sharing his CPU raw power with another user. The rest is very much like other VPS hosting services. For installing an application or a distribution, only a few clicks are needed. Not all apps were available for ARM achitecture; therefore, Scaleway’s team ported them to run on servers. From Ubuntu to Debian and Fedora, all major distributions are available here.
A user can integrate with Amazon S3 or add more storable with just a few clicks. Only one server model is available; therefore, one will have to boot up a new server and make it work with other servers under the existing image if he requres more CPU power or RAM. All servers are located in the same datacenter in France.
Scaleway started with a successful experiment and became a good alternative when it joined the cloud hosting club. The excellent pricing strategy can make it a tough contender for others.
Pros
- Very low price
- No CPU sharing
- No raw power sharing
- Excellent uptime
- Great technical support
- User friendly
- Highly reliable
- Very stable
Cons
- Only one server model is available
Verdict
Scaleway cloud is an excellent alternative for many people. It is highly reliable and stable. The ARM architecture has allowed the company to offer users 70% less prices than before. The technical support is excellent, and every thing can be done with a few clicks. In short, Scaleway has a bright future!
