Scaleway

What Scaleway actually is

Scaleway is the cloud arm of the French iliad group — the same company behind the Free telecom brand — and it is the closest thing Europe has to a full-spectrum hyperscaler alternative that keeps every byte inside the EU. The company behind it (Scaleway S.A.S., majority-owned by iliad) has roots going back to the Online.net and Dedibox hosting businesses; the IaaS platform itself left beta and took the Scaleway name in April 2015. Today it spans virtual instances, Elastic Metal bare metal, managed Kubernetes (Kapsule), Object Storage, Block Storage, serverless containers and functions, managed databases, and a GPU fleet that iliad's 2024 annual report puts at over 5,000 top-tier GPUs including H100s.

The product map is broad enough that this review covers the platform, while Kapsule and Object Storage have their own entries in our listings (managed Kubernetes, object storage). For VPS buyers the headline is virtual instances: hourly-billed VMs across four European regions, with no egress fees on instance traffic and prices published to the cent.

Two claims frame Scaleway's pitch, and we take both seriously. First, data sovereignty: all regions sit under French and European law, outside US CLOUD Act reach — for a European buyer that is a legal fact, not a marketing adjective. Second, transparency: per-hour prices, per-service SLAs, and — since 2012, back in the Online.net days — published datacenter PUE figures. Not many providers do that.

Pricing: what you really pay

Instances bill per hour of uptime, before tax, with storage and the flexible IP priced separately — a structure worth understanding before you compare monthly totals. At the bottom of the official PAR-1 price list, STARDUST1-S (1 vCPU, 1GB, 100 Mbps) runs €0.00015/hour, about €0.10 per month. The workhorse DEV1-S (2 vCPU, 2GB, 200 Mbps) is €0.0088/hour, roughly €6.42 per month; DEV1-M (3 vCPU, 4GB) lands near €14.45 and DEV1-L (4 vCPU, 8GB) near €30.66. The newer PLAY2 line starts at €0.014/hour (~€10.22/month) for 1 vCPU/2GB and runs to ~€39.42 for 4 vCPU/8GB. General Purpose tiers go up through PRO2-XS at about €80.30/month (4 vCPU, 16GB) to PRO2-L at roughly €640.21/month (32 vCPU, 128GB), and the POP2 high-bandwidth line reaches multi-gigabit NICs at €0.25–€0.73/hour.

Two side costs catch people out. A flexible IPv4 costs €0.004/hour (~€2.90/month) whether or not the instance runs, and snapshots are billed at €0.000044/GB/hour — around €0.03/GB/month. Block Storage starts at €0.000130/GB/hour for the 5K IOPS class. Egress on instances is advertised without fees; Object Storage egress is a different story (75GB free monthly, then €0.01/GB), and one tracker reports a 75GB allowance then $0.0108/GB for some traffic classes, so read the current pricing page for your specific mix rather than assuming.

Free allowances exist but are modest: the Object Storage product sheets advertise 75GB of stored volume free every month plus free inter-regional transfer, and there are periodic trials (a 90-day Object Storage offer is currently advertised). This is not AWS-style free-tier theater — it is a few genuinely free allowances on top of pay-as-you-go. Compared with Hetzner, Scaleway's compute is noticeably more expensive for the same RAM; compared with AWS or Azure it is dramatically cheaper. You are paying for the EU footprint and the ecosystem breadth.

Performance & infrastructure

As with every provider we have not instrumented ourselves, treat this as editorial assessment: our dated sysbench, fio and iperf3 runs in our benchmarks cover Hetzner, DigitalOcean, UpCloud, Vultr and Linode, not Scaleway. What the documentation supports is a well-organized platform: three availability zones each in Paris (PAR1–PAR3), Amsterdam (AMS1–AMS3) and Warsaw (WAW1–WAW3), plus a Milan region (MIL1) added in March 2026 — ten availability zones across four EU countries. Instance families are segmented honestly by workload (Development, Basic, Compute-optimized, Memory-optimized, POP2 for high network throughput), and the datasheets publish bandwidth ceilings per type instead of vague "up to" language.

Certifications include ISO 27001 and HDS, and Block Storage advertises up to 5,000 or 15,000 IOPS classes with free transfer. Instances can boot from Block Storage, resize vertically, and resolve over IPv6 — each instance gets a DNS name pointing at its IPv4 or IPv6 address. The managed Kubernetes control plane is free (you pay only for nodes), which is one of the better deals in EU Kubernetes and something we check first when advising European teams.

Reliability is respectable but not spotless. Scaleway advertises 99.99% SLA on PRO2 instances and 99.5% monthly availability on GPU instances, with service credits; third-party analysis records a 99.9%–99.99% band depending on service tier. Long-term customers writing into review aggregators report occasional unexpected outages and difficulty claiming SLA credits — the terms are published, but exercising them takes effort. Anti-DDoS protection ships with Scaleway's Dedibox dedicated line at no extra cost (Arbor Peakflow-based), while cloud Instances are advised to use security groups, Load Balancers and Edge Services WAF for attack absorption — a real distinction to plan around.

A note on the ecosystem and tooling, which is part of what you pay for. There is an official Terraform provider, a documented API and CLI, and the service catalog covers the practical stack end to end: managed PostgreSQL and Redis, Load Balancer, Kubernetes Kapsule, serverless containers and functions, a CDN, DNS, IoT Hub, and an AI platform with H100 clusters. That breadth matters when a project grows past a single VM, because migrating data between products inside one provider is dramatically cheaper than migrating between vendors. The documentation is thorough and versioned, the product availability matrix by region is published rather than hidden, and the console has improved steadily — dense, but honest.

Where it falls short

Compute pricing is the first honest criticism. On pure €/GB-RAM, Scaleway loses to Hetzner by a wide margin (DEV1-M at roughly €14.45/month for 4GB versus CX23-style plans well under €8), and the entry DEV1-S at €6.42 for 2GB is not a bargain. The €0.004/hour flexible IP charge and snapshot billing add up quietly. If your workload is a plain Linux VM and cost per GB is the only metric, Scaleway is not your cheapest option.

Second, product sprawl has left rough edges: instance generations coexist (DEV1 and PLAY2 overlap oddly on price), pricing varies between availability zones (PAR3 is priced differently, per the fine print), and some reviewers find the console dense. The egress story is inconsistent across sources — instance traffic is advertised as free of egress fees while storage and other classes meter it — and that is exactly the kind of ambiguity that produces a surprise invoice.

Third, support is 24/7 ticket-based, and while that is better than many competitors, reports of slow resolution and credit-claim friction recur. A small team running production on Scaleway should budget for the possibility that an incident means waiting, not dialing.

Who should pick this

Our pick for European businesses that need EU data residency with paperwork, and want one vendor for VMs, Kubernetes, object storage, GPUs and bare metal. GDPR-bound startups, public-sector projects (Scaleway was recently selected to support France's Health Data Hub migration), and teams standardizing on Terraform will find the breadth convenient and the legal story clean. The free Kapsule control plane and unmetered instance egress make it a practical Kubernetes host for EU workloads.

Also a good fit for anyone building on the wider ecosystem — serverless containers, managed Postgres/Redis, Load Balancer, Edge Services — who would rather keep all of it under one European contract than assemble it from five vendors. GPU users get H100-class hardware with published SLA, which is more than most EU providers offer.

We would not pick it for pure price-per-GB VPS duty (Hetzner wins that), for US or APAC audiences (there are no regions outside Europe), or for teams that need phone support and white-glove escalation without an enterprise agreement.

Key takeaways

• European full-spectrum cloud (iliad group, France): instances, Elastic Metal, Kapsule, Object Storage, serverless and 5,000+ GPUs — all in EU jurisdictions, outside the CLOUD Act.
• Ten availability zones across Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan (Milan added March 2026); no non-EU regions.
• Honest hourly pricing: STARDUST1-S near €0.10/month, DEV1-S at ~€6.42/month (2 vCPU/2GB), PRO2 line to ~€640/month; flexible IPv4 adds ~€2.90/month and snapshots bill separately.
• Free Kapsule control plane, free instance egress, 75GB/month free Object Storage — but storage egress and IPs are metered.
• SLAs vary by product (99.99% PRO2, 99.5% GPU) and credit claims take effort per user reports.
• Cheaper per GB at Hetzner; Scaleway earns its premium with EU sovereignty, certifications and ecosystem breadth.

Sources

• https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/virtual-instances-pricing
• https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/storage/
• https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/instances/faq/
• https://scaleway.com/en/docs/account/reference-content/products-availability
• https://github.com/scaleway/docs-content/blob/main/pages/account/reference-content/products-availability.mdx
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleway
• https://www.iliad.fr/media/ILIAD_URD_28042025_ENG_81bbd00ae3.pdf
• https://howtohosting.guide/scaleway-customer-review
• https://gpufind.cloud/providers/scaleway/review
• https://pikkly.dev/vps/scaleway/
• https://www.eucloudcost.com/compare/hetzner-vs-scaleway/
• https://topsitehosters.com/providers/scaleway
• https://github.com/scaleway/docs-content/blob/main/pages/dedibox-network/reference-content/anti-ddos.mdx
• https://www.scaleway.com/en/object-storage/