Online.net’s Scaleway is an interesting beast in the cloud hosting world. Instead of building a virtual cloud hosting infrastructure that competes directly with Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean and other VPS providers, the company designed its own ARM-based servers.
And that’s why the company can drive the prices down so much. You can now get a BareMetal SSD server with 2GB of RAM and 50GB of storage for $3.40 per month (€2.99) — that’s 70 percent cheaper than Scaleway’s previous pricing of €9.99 per month.
The company has stated on Twitter that the new pricing applies to existing users as well. As a reminder, as ARM v7 chipsets were first designed for smartphones, it’s very easy to run many of them with very little power, cooling and space. Scaleway managed to squeeze 912 separate computers in a single server rack.
The company also kept the best of both worlds — dedicated servers with the flexibility of virtualization as you get 4 dedicated ARM cores, a dedicated IP and 200Mbit/s of unmetered bandwidth. Contrarily to many popular VPS providers, you won’t share your CPU raw power with other users.
Other than that, it works pretty much like everybody else. In a few clicks, you can start an instance and install a distribution or an application. Some of these apps were already available for ARM architectures, but some of them had to be ported by Scaleway’s team to run on these servers. You can already find all the major distributions, from Debian to Ubuntu and Fedora.
In a few clicks, you can add more storage or integrate with Amazon S3. The company only has one server model. If you need more RAM or CPU power, you should boot up a new server with an existing image and make it work with your other servers. All the servers are currently hosted in Iliad’s data center in France.
At first, Scaleway was a technical achievement. Then it became a promising alternative when it comes to cloud hosting. Now with this new aggressive pricing strategy, it could become a serious contender.
