I tried their free trial when it was still branded as Online.net Labs. What follows is my experience, which is good as anecdote only.
I use MariaDB-Galera in a project of mine to be able to run it in a parallel fashion. To determine if the servers were suitable for my use, I tried to install MariaDB-Galera, only to find out:
- MariaDB doesn't officially support ARM yet;
- The Debian and Ubuntu repos don't have the MariaDB-Galera edition available;
- All repos I could find with the Galera edition didn't have it compiled for armhf, including the official repo, by virtue of the first point.
- Compiling it on the server resulted in other problems: besides the usual compile errors that can be more or less sorted out by hand, and the dependency hell of the resulting deb packages (remember, no armhf packages available) I figured it would be unacceptable (in terms of ease-of-maintenance) to have to recompile MariaDB every time a new version with security fixes came out. This is something I can live with when toying with Raspberry Pis and similar things, but not on production stuff.
I eventually gave up, declaring the servers unsuitable for my use. End of anecdote.
IMHO they are charging too much for the product, at a time when the ARM ecosystem is not yet ready for server use (the architecture and OS support are fine, the user-land software, not so much). The servers are bare metal (it's awesome being able to use as much CPU as you want without breaching AUPs or hitting artificial caps), but the networked storage, while definitely better than HDDs, may not fulfill the needs of those with higher I/O requirements (I admit I haven't tested, also by virtue of Galera not being available). Lastly, the prices first show without VAT, which means that if you're in the EU and without a VAT ID, it'll turn out to be even more expensive. I'd consider something like €7/month (perhaps with less storage) to be a more acceptable price.
> I'd consider something like €7/month (perhaps with less storage) to be a more acceptable price.
Fwiw it's €10/mo if you leave it on all the time, which isn't too much higher than that. The headline pricing of €0.02/hr is capped at a max €10/mo, i.e. free past 500 hours. Sort of similar to how Google Cloud does automatic discounts for high-utilization instances, except that Google's utilization discounts are a curve rather than a cliff. (But yes, still not including VAT.)
They have local SSDs now, the previews had local HDs only. I do think the pricing is a little higher than I expected. I had fewer problems with compatibility than you. MariaDB seems to be in jessie [1]
That is the "normal" MariaDB, not the Galera edition. This is a problem that has more to do with MariaDB than with Scaleway, but it still shows one of the problems people may have with ARM servers at this point.
A couple of friends of mine are happier with compatibility than I am, too. Others are even more disappointed than I am, since one of the uses they have for dedicated stuff is game servers, which usually are closed source and not available for ARM.
I use MariaDB-Galera in a project of mine to be able to run it in a parallel fashion. To determine if the servers were suitable for my use, I tried to install MariaDB-Galera, only to find out:
- MariaDB doesn't officially support ARM yet;
- The Debian and Ubuntu repos don't have the MariaDB-Galera edition available;
- All repos I could find with the Galera edition didn't have it compiled for armhf, including the official repo, by virtue of the first point.
- Compiling it on the server resulted in other problems: besides the usual compile errors that can be more or less sorted out by hand, and the dependency hell of the resulting deb packages (remember, no armhf packages available) I figured it would be unacceptable (in terms of ease-of-maintenance) to have to recompile MariaDB every time a new version with security fixes came out. This is something I can live with when toying with Raspberry Pis and similar things, but not on production stuff.
I eventually gave up, declaring the servers unsuitable for my use. End of anecdote.
IMHO they are charging too much for the product, at a time when the ARM ecosystem is not yet ready for server use (the architecture and OS support are fine, the user-land software, not so much). The servers are bare metal (it's awesome being able to use as much CPU as you want without breaching AUPs or hitting artificial caps), but the networked storage, while definitely better than HDDs, may not fulfill the needs of those with higher I/O requirements (I admit I haven't tested, also by virtue of Galera not being available). Lastly, the prices first show without VAT, which means that if you're in the EU and without a VAT ID, it'll turn out to be even more expensive. I'd consider something like €7/month (perhaps with less storage) to be a more acceptable price.