Scaleway
French sovereign cloud — unmetered egress, ARM-first, GPU-ready, but dragged down by support and account-governance complaints
Pick when you want a true European-sovereign cloud (Iliad-owned, RGPD-native) with unlimited egress, free internal networking, and a real GPU/ARM ladder up to H100 SXM. Avoid if you need predictable support, need port 25 open from day one, or run anything mission-critical without offsite backups — the recurring Trustpilot/Reddit pattern is silent account locks, slow ticket replies, and at least one publicly admitted data-loss incident.
Overview
Scaleway is the public-cloud arm of French ISP Iliad (Free / Free Mobile), founded in 1999 and renamed from Online.net's hosting division in 2015. The product surface is broad: Cloud Instances (STARDUST / DEV1 / PLAY2 / PRO2 / GP1 / GP3 / POP2 / COPARM ARM / GPU), Bare Metal, Object Storage (S3-compatible), Managed PostgreSQL/MySQL/Redis, Managed Kubernetes (Kapsule, free control plane), Serverless Functions/Containers, and a NVIDIA L4/L40S/H100 GPU lineup. Two structural differentiators set it apart from Hetzner and OVH: outbound bandwidth is genuinely unmetered on Cloud Instances (no per-GB egress fee, no overage), and IPv6 is free on every instance — STARDUST in particular can run for €0.36/mo as IPv6-only. The trade-offs are equally structural: IPv4 is unbundled at €0.004/h (~€2.92/mo), local storage is excluded from most plan prices (you pay Block Storage separately at €0.087/GB/mo), SMTP/25/465/587 are blocked by default and only unblocked after submitting ID + bank documents, and the support reputation on Trustpilot and Reddit is consistently weaker than the technical product warrants.
Trust score breakdown
Console is modern, fast, and noticeably more polished than Hetzner's or OVH's. The scw CLI is well-maintained, the REST API is straightforward, and Terraform/Pulumi/Ansible providers are first-class. One-click app catalog covers the core self-hosting stack (Nextcloud, GitLab, WordPress, Mattermost, Mastodon). Documentation is solid in English and French. The friction points are around getting your account fully activated (verification can stall), getting SMTP unblocked (ID submission), and the per-instance pricing being misleading until you've costed Block Storage and IPv4 separately.
POP2 (production-optimized AMD EPYC) and GP1/GP3 deliver competitive single-thread performance — 37%+ uplift over the previous PRO2 generation per Scaleway's own benchmarks. Unmetered egress with 1-5 Gbps per-instance bandwidth is genuinely strong for EU traffic. Block Storage SBS at 5k IOPS is fine for most workloads but trails Hetzner's RAID10 NVMe (~40k IOPS). GPU performance is real — NVIDIA L4/L40S/H100 SXM in EU regions, hourly billing, no committed-use lock-in.
99.9% per-zone SLA, public status page (status.scaleway.com), and a real multi-AZ topology in PAR/AMS/WAW. Track record is mixed: the December 2023 NL-AMS-1 Block Storage incident (5h+ broader impact), the April 2026 Microsoft-blacklist SMTP outage, and a publicly admitted 11-month-old-snapshot data-loss case on a Reddit/HN-discussed Cloud Instance reboot. The 2021 stolen-SSD scandal (a French YouTuber bought a Scaleway disk with unencrypted customer data) was an operational-security failure, not a runtime outage, but it remains the highest-profile reliability story in the brand's recent history. Architecture is sound; operational hygiene has visible cracks.
Free Basic support has no SLA and the consensus on Trustpilot, LowEndTalk, and r/sysadmin is that ticket replies are slow (24h+ for non-trivial), often canned, and that account-verification/billing escalations get stuck in a loop. English and French only. Paid tiers (Bronze €9.99 / Silver €59 / Gold €499+) genuinely improve response — but for a default-tier comparison vs Hetzner, OVH, or DigitalOcean, Scaleway is the weakest of the four on free-tier support.
Public pricing page, public SLA, public status page with incident write-ups (the AMS-1 Block Storage post-mortem was honest and detailed). The opacity sits in account-level governance: suspensions and verification failures arrive with terse messages and no clear appeal path, billing edge-cases (failed card retries, locked accounts mid-billing-cycle) are not explained on the signup flow, and the SMTP/25 unblock pipeline requires personal-ID submission with no published acceptance criteria. Pricing itself is honest if you read carefully; the unbundling of IPv4 and storage is documented but easy to miss on the headline pricing page.
Mixed picture. STARDUST IPv6-only at €0.36/mo and unmetered egress are exceptional value for traffic-heavy workloads — there is nothing equivalent at AWS/GCP/Azure pricing. ARM (COPARM) and GPU (L4/H100) tiers are competitively priced for EU-sovereign capacity. The drag is the unbundling: IPv4 (€2.92/mo) and Block Storage (€0.087/GB/mo) push the all-in price for a typical PRO2/POP2 + 100 GB + IPv4 setup well above Hetzner's CPX equivalent and into DigitalOcean territory. Best value if you can run IPv6-only or are GPU/egress-heavy; mid-pack value for default web-stack workloads.
Plans
| Plan | vCPU | RAM | Storage | Transfer | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| STARDUST1-S (Shared x86, IPv6-only, PAR-1) | 1 | 1.00 GB | 10 GB Local SSD | — | $0.36 |
| STARDUST1-S (Shared x86, with Flexible IPv4) | 1 | 1.00 GB | 10 GB Local SSD | — | $3.28 |
| DEV1-S (Shared AMD, local SSD) | 2 | 2.00 GB | 20 GB Local SSD | — | $6.42 |
| PLAY2-PICO (Shared AMD, Block storage extra) | 1 | 2.00 GB | — | — | $10.22 |
| PLAY2-NANO (Shared AMD, Block storage extra) | 2 | 4.00 GB | — | — | $19.71 |
| PLAY2-MICRO (Shared AMD, Block storage extra) | 4 | 8.00 GB | — | — | $39.42 |
| COPARM1-2C-8G (Ampere ARM, Block storage extra) | 2 | 8.00 GB | — | — | $31.10 |
| COPARM1-4C-16G (Ampere ARM, Block storage extra) | 4 | 16.00 GB | — | — | $62.56 |
| COPARM1-8C-32G (Ampere ARM, Block storage extra) | 8 | 32.00 GB | — | — | $125.85 |
| POP2-2C-8G (Production-Optimized AMD, Block storage extra) | 2 | 8.00 GB | — | — | $53.66 |
| POP2-4C-16G (Production-Optimized AMD, Block storage extra) | 4 | 16.00 GB | — | — | $107.31 |
| POP2-2C-8G-WIN (Windows Server, Block storage extra) | 2 | 8.00 GB | — | — | $133.08 |
| GP1-XS (General Purpose AMD, Block storage extra) | 4 | 16.00 GB | — | — | $66.43 |
| L4-1-24G (NVIDIA L4 GPU, 24 GB VRAM) | 8 | 48.00 GB | — | — | $547.50 |
| H100-SXM-2-80G (NVIDIA H100 SXM, 80 GB VRAM) | 24 | 240.00 GB | — | — | $2554.50 |
€0.0005/h-€6/h+, hourly billing with monthly cap. Egress is unmetered (no per-GB charge), but IPv4 is €0.004/h (~€2.92/mo) extra and Block Storage is billed separately at ~€0.087/GB/mo on most plan tiers. Stardust IPv6-only at €0.36/mo is the cheapest credible EU cloud VM.
Performance & infrastructure
- Storage
- Local SSD (STARDUST/DEV1) or Block Storage SBS (others, ~€0.087/GB/mo)
- Network
- 100 Mbps (Stardust) → 200-500 Mbps (DEV1/PLAY2) → 1-3 Gbps (PRO2/COPARM) → 5+ Gbps (GP1/POP2)
- DDoS protection
- Included
- IPv6
- Included
- Uptime SLA
- 99.9%
- Control panel
- Scaleway Console (own); scw CLI; full REST API; Terraform / Pulumi / Ansible providers; Scaleway IaaS API
- Root access
- Yes
- Management
- Unmanaged
Capabilities at a glance
SMTP port 25 (outbound mail)
UNBLOCK ON REQUESTOutbound TCP/25, TCP/465, and TCP/587 are blocked by default on every Cloud Instance to suppress spam. Unblock requires opening a support ticket AND submitting personal ID (national ID or passport) plus a bank statement or company registration document — Scaleway treats this as a fraud/abuse-control gate, not a paperwork formality. Reverse DNS is configurable on Flexible IPs once unblocked. Approval is not guaranteed: the Scaleway community forum has multiple threads of declined requests with no appeal path. For new self-hosted mail (Mail-in-a-Box, Mailcow), budget 5-10 business days plus the ID submission, and expect a non-zero chance of rejection — relay through a third-party (SendGrid, Mailgun, AWS SES) on port 587 if you can't afford the wait.
SourceDatacenter locations
Support
Response SLA: Basic (free): no published SLA; Bronze €9.99/mo: business hours response targets; Silver €59/mo: 24/7 critical-issue ticket; Gold €499/mo+: 24/7 + phone + architect access
English and French support only. Free Basic plan has no SLA and Trustpilot/Reddit reports replies of 24h+ for non-trivial issues, often with canned answers. The recurring negative pattern (Trustpilot ~322 reviews, predominantly negative) is around (a) account suspensions with terse 'verification failed' messages, (b) billing disputes when card auto-charge fails, and (c) the SMTP/25 unblock pipeline. Paid support tiers materially improve responsiveness — most production teams running Scaleway in anger budget at least Bronze.
OS & apps
Supported OS
One-click apps
What to watch out for in pricing
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IPv4 is unbundled — €0.004/h (~€2.92/mo) per Flexible IP. Cloud Instance prices on Scaleway's website do NOT include a public IPv4 address. Each instance you want to reach over IPv4 needs a Flexible IP at €0.004/h (€2.92/mo). IPv6 is free, and STARDUST/Cloud Instances can run IPv6-only — Stardust drops from €1.80/mo to €0.36/mo if you commit to IPv6-only. When comparing to Hetzner (€0.50/mo IPv4), DigitalOcean (bundled), or Vultr (bundled), always add €2.92/mo to Scaleway's headline price for an apples-to-apples production setup.
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Local storage is excluded from PLAY2/PRO2/GP1/POP2/COPARM/GPU plans. Only STARDUST and DEV1 ship with included local SSD. Every other Cloud Instance series (PLAY2, PRO2, GP1, GP3, POP2, COPARM, L4/L40S/H100 GPUs) prices the compute alone — you must attach Block Storage SBS volumes separately at €0.087/GB/month for the 5k IOPS tier. A POP2-2C-8G + 100 GB Block volume is €53.66 + €8.70 = €62.36/mo before IPv4. The headline price you see on the pricing page is the floor, not the all-in.
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Outbound bandwidth is unmetered (no per-GB egress charge). Unlike AWS/GCP/Azure (€0.05-0.09/GB egress) and unlike Hetzner US/SG plans, Scaleway Cloud Instances are 'unmetered' — there is no per-GB charge on outbound internet traffic and no overage bill. Bandwidth caps are speed-based per instance class (100 Mbps Stardust → 5 Gbps+ on POP2/GP1), not volume-based. This is a real differentiator for traffic-heavy workloads (image hosts, video, mirror servers) and is the strongest value lever in Scaleway's pricing model.
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Snapshots and backups billed by GB-hour, not flat percentage. Unified Snapshot is €0.000044/GB/hour (~€0.032/GB/month) — predictable and cheap. Compare to Hetzner's 20%-of-instance backup fee: a 100 GB snapshot on Scaleway is €3.20/mo regardless of which instance it backs, while Hetzner's backup of a CPX22 (€7.99) is €1.60/mo. Scaleway is cheaper on small instances, more expensive on big-disk small-CPU instances. Snapshots persist after server deletion.
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Support beyond Basic is paid — Bronze €9.99/mo, Silver €59/mo, Gold from €499/mo. All accounts get Basic (community + ticket queue, no SLA, English/French) for free. Bronze (€9.99/mo) adds business-hours response targets. Silver (€59/mo) adds 24/7 critical-issue ticket SLA. Gold (max(€499, 3% of spend)) and Platinum (custom) add architect access, phone, and faster SLAs. Phone support is NOT available on Basic — if you expect to call someone when a server breaks, budget a paid plan.
Known pitfalls
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IPv4 is unbundled — add €2.92/mo to every headline price
Scaleway Cloud Instance prices on the marketing pages do NOT include a public IPv4 address. Each instance you want to reach over IPv4 needs a Flexible IP at €0.004/h (€2.92/mo). IPv6 is free, and Stardust + a few other tiers can run IPv6-only — but most production workloads still require IPv4. When comparing to Hetzner (€0.50/mo IPv4), DigitalOcean (bundled), or Vultr (bundled), always add €2.92 to Scaleway's headline price for an apples-to-apples comparison. This is the single biggest source of pricing surprise in our experience auditing the platform.
Source -
Most plans exclude local storage — Block Storage is billed separately
Only STARDUST and DEV1 ship with included local SSD. Every other Cloud Instance series (PLAY2, PRO2, GP1, GP3, POP2, COPARM, GPU L4/L40S/H100) prices the compute alone — you must attach Block Storage SBS volumes separately at ~€0.087/GB/month for the 5k IOPS tier. A POP2-2C-8G + 100 GB Block volume is €53.66 + €8.70 = €62.36/mo, before IPv4. The headline price is the floor, not the all-in. Compare to Hetzner CPX22 (NVMe RAID10 included) at €7.99/mo + €0.50 IPv4 — the gap is much larger than the listing pages suggest.
Source -
SMTP port 25/465/587 unblock requires national ID + bank statement
Outbound mail ports are blocked by default on every Cloud Instance. Unblock requires opening a support ticket AND submitting personal ID (passport or national ID) plus a bank statement or company registration document. Scaleway treats this as fraud/abuse control, not a paperwork formality — community forum threads document declined requests with no appeal path. For new self-hosted mail (Mail-in-a-Box, Mailcow), budget 5-10 business days plus the ID submission, and expect a non-zero rejection rate. If you cannot afford that risk, relay through SendGrid/Mailgun/AWS SES on port 587 instead of self-hosting.
Source -
Account suspensions and silent locks are the #1 Trustpilot complaint
The most consistent negative pattern across Trustpilot (~322 reviews, predominantly 1-2 star), Reddit (r/sysadmin, r/selfhosted), LowEndTalk, and Web Hosting Talk is account locks with no warning or terse explanations ('verification failed', 'system policies'), often after card auto-charge failures or when accounts are flagged by automated abuse heuristics. The recovery path is the same support ticket queue with no escalation tier on Basic (free) support — which is where most of these reports originate. Mitigation: complete KYC verification proactively at signup, never run mission-critical workloads on Basic-tier support without offsite backups, and budget at least Bronze (€9.99/mo) if uptime matters.
Source -
Publicly admitted data-loss incidents — keep offsite backups
Scaleway has at least one publicly admitted Cloud Instance data-loss case (an 11-month-old snapshot served as 'current state' after a spontaneous reboot, discussed on Reddit and Web Hosting Talk), and the December 2023 NL-AMS-1 Block Storage incident caused 5h+ broader-platform impact during a security update. The 2021 stolen-SSD scandal (a French YouTuber bought a decommissioned Scaleway disk on a classified-ads site and found unencrypted customer data including SSH keys and source code) was an operational-security failure but remains the highest-profile data-handling story in the brand's recent history. Treat included Block Storage as durable-but-not-backed-up: always run a daily Restic/Borg/duplicity job to Object Storage or an offsite target.
Source -
Free-tier support has no SLA and is English/French only
Basic (free) support has no published response-time SLA — community reports suggest 24h+ for non-trivial issues with frequent canned replies. Phone support is gated to Gold (€499/mo+) and Platinum (custom). Languages are English and French only — no German, Spanish, or Italian support despite operating in IT/PL/NL regions. If you expect timely human help when something breaks, budget a paid support tier (Bronze €9.99 / Silver €59) into your monthly cost when comparing to Hetzner or DigitalOcean.
Source
Community pulse
Sentiment in 2026 is sharply bimodal and very brand-loyalty-driven. The hands-on developer crowd on r/selfhosted, r/sysadmin, and LowEndTalk consistently praises STARDUST as one of the best hobby-box deals in Europe, recommends COPARM ARM and the L4/H100 GPU lineup as serious sovereign-AI infrastructure, and rates the Console UX above Hetzner and OVH. Trustpilot tells the opposite story — ~322 reviews with a heavy 1-2 star skew, dominated by complaints about account lockouts, slow ticket replies, billing disputes, and the SMTP unblock process. Two recurring 'careful here' stories anchor the negative sentiment: the 2021 stolen-SSD-with-unencrypted-customer-data scandal (still cited on HN/LowEndTalk) and a publicly admitted 11-month-old-snapshot data-loss case on a spontaneous reboot. The April 2 2026 Microsoft-blacklist SMTP outage and a fr-par Object Storage timeout incident later that month surfaced briefly on Reddit but were resolved without lasting fallout. Net: developers building greenfield self-hosted boxes recommend it; people who hit the support funnel, the SMTP gate, or an automated suspension generally don't return.
- Scaleway customer reviews — Trustpilot (~322 reviews, predominantly 1-2 star, April 2026) · Trustpilot · 2026
- SSD belonging to Euro-cloud Scaleway was stolen, then turned up on YouTube · The Register / Hacker News · 2021
- How Scaleway's Object Storage failed me: files lost, terrible customer service · LinkedIn / community discussion · 2024
- Update: Block Storage incident on AMS-1 (December 2023 post-mortem) · Scaleway Blog · 2023
- Scaleway Stardust IPv6 €0.37/mo — LowEndTalk discussion · LowEndTalk · 2024
- Scaleway vs Hetzner: definitive 2026 comparison for European cloud · Gart Solutions · 2026
Last full audit: April 27, 2026
Founded 1999 — 27 years in business · Based in Paris, France