Editor's opinion
Sean Thompson
I am a full-time web developer & IT professional with more than 18 years experience. I have been working with numerous hosting companies over the years.
First impression
Scaleway, a French cloud computing and web hosting provider, was established in 1999 by Xavier Niel, a serial entrepreneur who also owns Monaco Telecom, Salt Mobile SA, and Eir, among other ventures. With offices in Paris, France, Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Warsaw, Poland, they boast a team of over 550 proficient hosting experts serving a solid customer base of over 25,000 businesses. Their services are powered by nine renewable energy-driven data centers. Scaleway offers a range of services including Domain Registrations, Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, Dedicated Servers, and Cloud Computing Architecture.
Trial Period
Unfortunately, Scaleway does not provide a free trial period to test out their services, nor do they offer a refund policy. But as cloud instances are billed by the hour and shared hosting is billed monthly, you can try them out without risking too much should they not be a good fit for you.
Billing Cycle
Scaleway's Cloud Instances (that include VPS plans) are billed by the hour and thus offer the flexibility to provision resources when you need them and delete them when you don’t, so you only pay for what you use. Their Dedicated Servers are billed either by the hour or on a monthly basis, whilst their Shared Hosting plans are billed monthly.
They accept all major Credit Cards as well as the SEPA mandate, a payment integration initiative of the European Union for simplification of bank transfers denominated in Euro, as valid payment methods.
Control Panel
Their Shared Hosting plans utilize cPanel as the default control panel, but you also have the choice to opt for Plesk. With the cPanel interface, you can easily manage various hosting settings such as FTP access, phpMyAdmin, subdomains, SSL certificates, and more from a user-friendly dashboard. On the other hand, VPS plans include full root access by default, allowing you to install your preferred control panel on your own.
Limits
Scaleway's Shared Hosting plans come in four distinct options, namely Lite, Personal, professional, and Ecommerce. The Lite plan comes with 10GB SSD disc space, 1x vCore CPU, 1GB RAM, and 1x 5GB POP/IMAP email account. The Personal plan features 50GB SSD space, 2x vCore CPUs, 1GB RAM, and 2x 5GB POP/IMAP email accounts, whilst the Professional plan has 100GB SSD disc space, 4x vCore CPUs, 2GB RAM, and 10x 5GB POP/IMAP email accounts. Lastly, there is the Ecommerce plan which boasts 250GB SSD space, 8x vCore CPUs, 8GB RAM, and 25x 5GB POP/IMAP email accounts.
All Shared Hosting plans come with unlimited MySQL or PostgreSQL databases but one should note that they don’t include a free SSL certificate. These can however be purchased additionally.
Their VPS plans are scalable and fully customizable, designed to offer the best price/performance ratio. Users can choose the location, amount of disc space needed, RAM, vCore CPUs, and more, and will then be billed accordingly.
Website Builder
Although they don't offer a website builder as part of their hosting plans, they do include over 420 preconfigured installer scripts, such as WordPress, Drupal, Prestashop, and Joomla, which will provide you with all the tools necessary to create a professional and aesthetically pleasing site quickly and effortlessly.
Security
Their data centers are all ISO 27001 certified, the world's best-known standard for information security management systems (ISMS), and their infrastructure is protected from DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks with powerful detection and mitigation algorithms powered by Arbor® Networks Peakflow and Sevi® M6-NG devices. Hosting accounts are safeguarded by Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam software, MFA (Multifactor Authentication), Security Groups, which act like a WAF (web application firewall) where you can set your own rules and filtering, and Role-Based Access, to restrict access to resources according to a set of rules defined by the user.
They also undertake regular proactive measures such as penetration testing, vulnerability scanning, and cyber threat analysis.
OS
Scaleway’s Shared Hosting plans all run on the CentOS operating system, a free and widely used, open-source, platform famous for its security and stability, whilst their VPS plans offer users the option to choose between 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 provides support services that are both friendly and efficient, but the response times and available channels depend on the support package you choose. The Basic plan, which is free of charge, includes access to a Ticketing System only. If you opt for the Silver plan, you'll have access to both Tickets and a Hotline available from Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM (UTC+1), with a guaranteed response time of less than an hour. The Gold plan, which is eye-wateringly expensive, ensures response times of less than 30 minutes via Tickets or the Hotline. Lastly, there's the Platinum plan, which offers a customized support plan tailored to your specific requirements. For me personally, Basic support was more than enough, I got assisted within 10 minutes on multiple occasions by knowledgeable agents.
Conclusion
Pros |
Cons |
- Fast SSD Drives;
- Wide Variety of Hosting and Cloud Services;
- Good Uptime;
- Good Security.
|
- No Refunds;
- No Free SSL Certificates;
- Not Suited for Beginners;
- Expensive Support Plans.
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Scaleway is a great choice for seasoned IT professionals with a big budget. They offer a broad range of web hosting and cloud computing services that come with superior support, good security, and uptime, but can be a bit costly. Probably not the best option if you are a newbie.