French cloud hosting company Scaleway originally started with very cheap cloud instances. Over the years, the company has expanded its offering and added more premium services, such as managed Kubernetes, object storage, block storage, managed databases, load balancers and GPU instances. But Scaleway is now launching another cheap cloud instance that costs €0.0025 per hour — around $0.0039 per hour.
Obviously, you’re not getting incredible performance for that price. But it’s a good way to try out new things and build an application just for you. If you’re the only user, those specifications might be enough.
Called Stardust, the virtual compute instance comes with 1 vCPU, 1GB of RAM, an IP address (IPv4), 10GB of local storage and up to 100Mbps of bandwidth. There’s no restriction on bandwidth usage.
Billed by the hour, you end up paying €1.80 per month ($2.10). The company isn’t going to generate a ton of revenue from such a cheap product. That’s why supply is limited. Scaleway will release a limited batch of cloud instances every month — first come, first served.
There are also some limits as you can’t spin up a ton of Stardust and build your own infrastructure. Each account can have up to one Stardust instance in Paris and another one in Amsterdam.
Scaleway lists some potential use cases for its new product, such as an internal wiki, a code repository backup, an always-on instance to set up daemons, triggers and workers, a VPN server, etc. The instance supports Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS and Fedora.
