Be aware of Scaleway
Scaleway is a cloud provider. They provide servers, storage starting of 3 $ per month. I was a customer there for few years. Few weeks ago I left Scaleway.
After you sign up, you login and can quickly create servers (called instances). You can select which Linux and how powerful your instance should be. After the boot up you can sign in into your machine via ssh.
They offer servers starting from 3 $ which are enough for smaller projects and more expensive like for AI machine learning for ~500 $ per month.
Why I left Scaleway
With time the storage will be full and you need more.. so you can add additional storages (hard drive or network storage). If you want to add more storage you also need to shut down your machine (required by Scaleway).
So: shutdown, add additional storage and start. So far so good?.. nope. What Scaleway does: if you shutdown your server to add additional storage, Scaleway will offer your server to other users. If the kind of server is sold out and someone ordered that server which I just shut down, I can’t start the server anymore, it is simply not there anymore. If you try to start: you see the booting animation for like 10 minutes until a cryptic error pops up.
Unreliable. Not recommended for professional projects.
At least the storage disks were still mine, so I could simply create another instance and backup my data. This was also a very adventurous process. I was not able to simply connect my linux disk to another server because it was “not compatible”. E.g. my linux disk was 50 GB. If I order a server with 20 GB and later attach my 50 GB: not possible, max size 20 GB.. Same for servers with 70 GB: I need a 70 GB disk, 50 is not compatible…
There was not a mention of “we will remove your server and offer it immediately to someone else if you shut down your server to add additional storage“.
Support said “we did this always like this” – maybe, but they also had more servers laying around so it was not a problem to shut down the server. They should at least let the server in my account for 5 minutes. I was not deleting it, I simply shut it down. When I asked why they suddenly have a server shortage? they said: “Due of corona virus more people need servers”… WTF?
Lesson learned
If you have important projects: ask the support what will happen if you shutdown the server. Search a cloud provider which will do such things only if you delete your server from your account, not just shut it down.
So, be careful. Scaleway is good until you want to add more storage. Their backend UI will not tell you what can happen.
BTW: I searched for my problem on google and there are already some people mentioning this few years ago.. so they didn’t change anything, they are still working like that.
