For example I rebooted a host, and it didn't come back. For 10 hours it was down. After getting in touch with their support I was told "Oh yeah, there is a problem with the hypervisor, we'll fix it". Meanwhile their status-site showed "zero problems". (The next day it came back.)
Provisioning a stock (Debian) system results in a host with no working serial console, which makes it hard to rescue.
You can't make outgoing SMTP (25/587) access without giving them copies of passports, etc. Though if you enable IPv6 you'll soon discover outgoing SMTP works ;) Only downside there is you can't set reverse DNS for your IPv6 address.
(Reverse DNS? They require the forward address to point to you before they'll let you set it, as a "security measure".)
I'm using the host for offsite monitoring, but we'll see if it stays. Cheap, but perhaps too cheap.
Many hosters I've dealt with have required this to prevent abuse from someone reading the rDNS and assuming the IP address is related to someone it is not.
(Perhaps more annoyingly there is no ability to set reverse DNS for IPv6 the address allocated to a server.)
That's odd, I simply opened a ticket and they enabled it for me.
--
According to a security issue about your account, we would like to verify your identity to unlock the situation.
For this we will need you to send to this mail address XXXX the following document :
If you are are an Individual , we invite you to send :
* A copy of your ID
* A picture of yourself holding your ID
* A business Certificate
Why asking you these documents ?
As you know some swindler steal the identity of other people and use their credit card number getting them in unscrupulous way. By asking you these proof, we will be all protected from these people.
The process link to this identification request as a goal to fight against fraud and unpaid bill.
All the document which will be sent will be received by departement taking care of fraud.
--
It's interesting how most of the companies where I've heard of them asking for ID/passport (e.g. Hetzner, Online.net, Scaleway) are European.
Most American companies (e.g. DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, Vultr) will let you just create an account (often with free credit) and do whatever you want.
Other ID works too. If you are using a credit card, just ask their support
However, for the last 2 years or so, I've had no issues at all and the platform seems to be evolving constantly. Their prices are insanely competitive.
If you learn just a little bit of Ansible and Terraform, you can easily setup a Kubernetes cluster there.
I can totally recommend them.
Disclaimer: just a happy customer :)
When I initially set up my servers a few years ago I did have an issue where I was getting randomly corrupted packets on a few of my instances. I spent about a week going back and forth with their support about it and they eventually determined it was a hardware fault with the VM host and had me migrate them to a different physical server. I haven't had any problems with them since.
I had the exact same issue, and found at least two reports of similar issues on public sources. This was very frustrating, as configuring the server over SSH was basically impossible since the sshd would drop the connection as soon as it detected a corrupt packet (invalid MAC), resulting in dropped SSH shell every couple of minutes.
I contacted support multiple times. I even pointed them to resources showing that this was likely an issue with their hardware, and some other guy had had the issue resolved by moving the instance to a different rack. Their support's reply was basically telling me to try to re-start the server as many times that it would spawn on a working rack.
Needless to say I had very little interest to continue working with them after this experience.
To be fair, their standard images work fine, and you can't beat the price.
I have never had any network issues.
I use Scaleway Amsterdam-based instances for more than two years. I used to run about a dozen of permanent servers: from small ARM-based, to bare-bone, to "X64 Pro Workload intensive" VPS (which are now apparently replaced with EPYC); and countless amount of short-lived instances. I did have the only single serious issue when production server was completely gone, including LSSD data, due to underlying "hypervisor critical failure". Unfortunately, I had no server snapshot that time, but that's another story and it's on me.
> reports of not being able to launch an instance from control panel
They do occasionally (quite rarely) have minor issues. Just recently I was unable to remove their "X64 Pro" instance neither within web interface nor scaleway-cli client. However, this issue was resolved within a couple of hours after reporting the ticket (with no paid support).
In general, I am very pleased with the Scaleway, considering the quality/price ratio. If only they'd have servers in Scandinavia/Northern Europe region, I wouldn't look for other offers such as Hetzner/Helsinki.
I never had any issue with my Online.net servers (one at a time, but I upgrade it from time to time) nor my Scaleway one.
> When I contacted support to ask if they have plans to mitigate this, their full response was "sometimes we are victims of our own success" (nice, good for them, but some real information would be useful).
The two datacenters they use for public hosting (DC2 and DC3) are full. They recently finished building a new one (DC5) and commissionned a first room a few months ago.
Bandwidth has always been vastly superior to any competitor, not sure if this has something to do with the fact that the mother company Iliad also contains a famous french ISP (Free). Not to mention another sister company that sells domains without making a marging on it.
I have restarted thousand of instances, never had a problem that was not a PEBKAC. Actually, I even have a production site there since the beta and never had a problem.
Scaleway's hardware and software is a huge problem, it's unreliable to the point of being unusable. I'd only use it for cheap hosting of build server workers. Their disks for example have no RAID, you're expected to mount multiple volumes and perform software raid yourself, except that there's no easy way to do that and also you often run into limits for how many disks you can attach to a VM!
However they were none too pleased when my machine Tor Exit node was listed in some email spam list, so I had to move.
The C14 cold storage product seems to have a ton of bugs in it, like how you'll open up an archive and you can't connect to it for an hour.
I already moved my small servers to Digital Ocean and I'm thinking of replacing C14 with Glacier.
Their arm offerings are nice but unfortunately they are always out of stock. When I contacted support to ask if they have plans to mitigate this, their full response was "sometimes we are victims of our own success" (nice, good for them, but some real information would be useful).
Another major problem for anyone considering Scaleway is several reports of not being able to launch an instance from control panel, or completely bricking a working instance by simply restarting it.