Scaleway.com review

First impression

Scaleway, a Paris-based web hosting and cloud computing firm, was established in 1999 by repeat entrepreneur and Monaco Telecom, Salt Mobile SA, and Eir owner Xavier Niel. They have offices in Paris, France, Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Warsaw, Poland, and employ over 550 seasoned hosting experts serving a good customer base of over 25,000 companies. They have nine data centers powered by renewable energy to deliver their services. Scaleway offers services like Domain Registrations, Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, Dedicated Servers, and Cloud Computing Architecture.

Trial Period

Regrettably, Scaleway offers no free trial to test their services or a money-back guarantee. Nevertheless, since cloud instances are charged on an hourly basis and shared hosting on a monthly basis, you can take a risk without losing much if they are not suited for your needs.

Billing Cycle

Scaleway's Cloud Instances (VPS plans included) are billed by the hour and thus afford you the flexibility to spin up resources when you need them and spin them down when you don't, with the result that you only pay for what you use. Their Dedicated Servers are billed by the hour or by the month, and their Shared Hosting plans are billed by the month.

They accept all principal Credit Cards together with the SEPA mandate, the European Union payment integration initiative for the Euro-denominated standardization of bank transfers, as payment means.

Control Panel

Their Shared Hosting plans default on the control panel to cPanel, but you can also use Plesk. You can configure various hosting configurations such as FTP access, phpMyAdmin, subdomains, SSL certificates, etc., under the cPanel interface using a friendly dashboard. VPS plans do come with full root access as a default, and hence you can have your desired control panel installed.

Limits

Scaleway Shared Hosting plans are of four categories, which are Lite, Personal, professional, and Ecommerce. The Lite plan includes 10GB SSD disc space, 1x vCore CPU, 1GB RAM, and 1x 5GB POP/IMAP email account. The Personal plan includes 50GB SSD space, 2x vCore CPUs, 1GB RAM, and 2x 5GB POP/IMAP email accounts, while the Professional plan includes 100GB SSD disc space, 4x vCore CPUs, 2GB RAM, and 10x 5GB POP/IMAP email accounts. There is also the Ecommerce plan that includes 250GB SSD space, 8x vCore CPUs, 8GB RAM, and 25x 5GB POP/IMAP email accounts.

All the Shared Hosting plans offer unlimited MySQL or PostgreSQL databases but do not include a free SSL certificate. They may, however, be purchased individually.

Their VPS plans are customizable and scalable to give the best price/performance ratio. Clients can define the location, the disc space they need, RAM, vCore CPUs, etc., and pay based on their requirements.

Website Builder

Though they don't offer a website builder as part of their hosting services, they do give you access to over 420 pre-configured installer scripts, such as WordPress, Drupal, Prestashop, and Joomla, that will provide you with everything you need to create a professional-quality and good-looking site easily and quickly.

Security

Their data centers are ISO 27001 certified, the most widely adopted information security management system standard in the world, and their infrastructure is protected against DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks with sophisticated detection and mitigation algorithms powered by Arbor Networks Peakflow and Sevi M6-NG hardware. Their hosting accounts are protected with Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam software, MFA (Multifactor Authentication), Security Groups, which work similar to a WAF (web application firewall) where you have your own filtering and rules, and Role-Based Access, to restrict access to resources based on a user-defined set of rules.

They also undertake routine proactive measures such as penetration testing, vulnerability scanning, and cyber threat analysis.

OS

All of Scaleway's Shared Hosting plans are based on CentOS, a free, widely used, open-source operating system that is known to be stable and secure, while their VPS plans enable users to choose from Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish), Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa), Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver), Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus), CentOS 7 /8 / 9, Debian 10 / 11, Arch Linux, FreeBSD, Rocky Linux 8 / 9, BigBlueButton, and Windows Server Standard 2022 and 2019.

Support

Scaleway's support centers are effective and courteous but the response times and methods differ based on the support package you choose. There's free Basic that provides you with access to a Ticketing System alone. If you pay for Silver, you'll have access to Tickets and a Hotline from Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM (UTC+1), with a response time guarantee of less than an hour. The Gold plan that costs an arm and a leg provides response times of less than 30 minutes with Tickets or the Hotline. Then, of course, there's the Platinum plan, where you have a custom-made support plan based on your requirements. For me, Basic support was more than enough, I received assistance in less than 10 minutes on many occasions from capable agents.

Conclusion

Scaleway is a great choice for professional IT experts who have a huge budget. They offer huge web hosting and cloud computing services with great support, good security, and uptime but could be a bit pricey. Not probably the best option if you're just starting out.