Scaleway is not your usual VPS provider. In fact they don't do virtualization at all. Instead they offer physical systems that are entirely dedicated to a single tenant. They call them "Bare Metal SSD Servers". Those are computers on a chip based on ARM cpus and shared SSD disks. At €2.99/month ($3.50), it's probably the cheapest dedicated cpu you can rent.
The plan features 4 cores, 50GB disk space and 2GB RAM. Scaleway appears to be an subsidiary of Online.net and their datacenter is in Paris, France.
Ordering and provisioning of the machine is fast and easy. The setup is a bit more complicated than usual due to the ARM architecture instead of i386, some packages such as Postgres were harder to find. Ruby had to be compiled, which took considerably longer than usual.
As expected, the system performances are considerably lower than traditional VPS based on Intel cpus. The HTTP response times were relatively stable around 210ms, the 1% slowest queries were served in 500ms. Contrarily to what is advertised, the C1 Server is not fully isolated from its neighbours as the SSD volume is shared. The average database response time, which reflects the disk performance, varies between 15ms and 65ms. IOWait was higher than competitors.
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