We design and manufacture our own server hardware so we can optimize our cost. We select each component of our servers to get high quality servers at the best price and remove all unneeded components. The result is that you get a server with the best price-performance ratio.

Whereas the competition enjoys paying extra, and carefully tries to find new unneeded components? Yeah, didn't think so...

I guess the truth is a mixture of "larger willingness to cut corners" and "aiming for a lower margin". That's not a bad thing. It's just that in a market as transparent and competitive as this, it's really hard to be better along every single dimension.

Since we design our own hardware, we put exactly what we want and need into them. We share some components like power, network, and casing.

This means for example :

- one integrated network switch/router for 18 servers; no need to buy an external cisco/juniper/whatever

- one dual power supply for the whole gang instead of 19 (18 servers + switch)

- less metal/plastic parts

We try to reuse hardware designs and software from one iteration to another when possible.

In short, we do have less "unneeded components". Equivalent designs (thinking at moonshot for example) are expensive, so to achieve same density it's more expensive to buy existing solutions than what we design & build.

Thanks for the additional insight!

EUR/USD went way down those last years so Europe is becoming a low cost area. As well, I don't know about DigitalOcean but with Online there is some basic services they don't provided. For example it drove me mad that you can't just move a server to an other account or change the account owner with online. I've never been stuck with the dozens of other hosting company I've been working with to move a server.

I would imagine that intrinsically the costs of buying/renting an X number of CPU cores and Y gigs of RAM just has a certain cost and therefore the price of VPS's just have to be at a certain minimum level. I guess Scaleway is just closer to that edge, but being about twice as cheap as DO (which is quite big and popular) just makes me question the long-term viability of these prices.

"France is a fiscal heaven" dixit Xavier Niel CEO of Online.net because you can employ qualified people that cost twice as less than in the US.