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.
Plans
Verified against Scaleway's pricing pages.
| Plan | vCPU | RAM | Storage | Transfer | Monthly | Hourly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| STARDUST1-S (Shared x86, IPv6-only, PAR-1) | 1 | 1 GB | 10 GB Local SSD | — | $0.36 | $0.0005 |
| STARDUST1-S (Shared x86, with Flexible IPv4) | 1 | 1 GB | 10 GB Local SSD | — | $3.28 | $0.0045 |
| DEV1-S (Shared AMD, local SSD) | 2 | 2 GB | 20 GB Local SSD | — | $6.42 | $0.0088 |
| PLAY2-PICO (Shared AMD, Block storage extra) | 1 | 2 GB | — | — | $10.22 | $0.0140 |
| PLAY2-NANO (Shared AMD, Block storage extra) | 2 | 4 GB | — | — | $19.71 | $0.0270 |
| PLAY2-MICRO (Shared AMD, Block storage extra) | 4 | 8 GB | — | — | $39.42 | $0.0540 |
| COPARM1-2C-8G (Ampere ARM, Block storage extra) | 2 | 8 GB | — | — | $31.10 | $0.0426 |
| COPARM1-4C-16G (Ampere ARM, Block storage extra) | 4 | 16 GB | — | — | $62.56 | $0.0857 |
| COPARM1-8C-32G (Ampere ARM, Block storage extra) | 8 | 32 GB | — | — | $125.85 | $0.1724 |
| POP2-2C-8G (Production-Optimized AMD, Block storage extra) | 2 | 8 GB | — | — | $53.66 | $0.0735 |
| POP2-4C-16G (Production-Optimized AMD, Block storage extra) | 4 | 16 GB | — | — | $107.31 | $0.1470 |
| POP2-2C-8G-WIN (Windows Server, Block storage extra) | 2 | 8 GB | — | — | $133.08 | $0.1823 |
| GP1-XS (General Purpose AMD, Block storage extra) | 4 | 16 GB | — | — | $66.43 | $0.0910 |
| L4-1-24G (NVIDIA L4 GPU, 24 GB VRAM) | 8 | 48 GB | — | — | $547.50 | $0.7500 |
| H100-SXM-2-80G (NVIDIA H100 SXM, 80 GB VRAM) | 24 | 240 GB | — | — | $2554.50 | $3.5000 |
SMTP port 25 (outbound mail)
Deal-breaker for self-hosted mail & transactional email.
On request Blocked, unblocked on request Read more
Outbound 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.
Verified Apr 27, 2026 · source
Capabilities & infrastructure
Known pitfalls
What the marketing pages don't tell you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trust score breakdown
Scored across six dimensions — an editorial estimate, not a guarantee.
Why 75/100
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.
Why 78/100
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.
Why 70/100
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.
Why 55/100
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.
Why 65/100
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.
Why 78/100
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.
Operating systems & apps
Control panel: Scaleway Console (own); scw CLI; full REST API; Terraform / Pulumi / Ansible providers; Scaleway IaaS API · full root access
Operating systems
One-click apps
Datacenter locations
4 regions worldwide.
Support
Response time: 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
Verified Apr 27, 2026
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.
Sentiment verified Apr 27, 2026
Recent changes
How Scaleway compares
Top-rated alternatives on the board.
UpCloud
€3 / $3.50 /mo
25 on req
Linode (Akamai Cloud)
$5/mo
25 on req
Hetzner Cloud
€3.99/mo
25 on req
DigitalOcean
$4/mo
25 blocked