Scaleway Review 2026 — European Cloud VPS With No Egress Fees

Scaleway is a French cloud that starts at just €0.43/month with zero egress fees and full EU data residency. Is it the right cloud for your workload?

What is Scaleway?

Scaleway is a French cloud infrastructure provider founded in 1999 — originally as Online SAS — and is a subsidiary of the iliad Group, one of France's largest telecommunications conglomerates. It positions itself as "Europe's sovereign cloud and AI provider" with over 100 products spanning Virtual Instances (VPS), Object Storage, Kubernetes, Managed Databases, Serverless Functions, and GPU/AI instances.

The company operates across France, Poland, the Netherlands, and Italy, with datacenters expanding to Sweden and Germany. Its key differentiators are a no-egress-fee policy for Virtual Instances and genuinely competitive entry-level pricing — starting at €0.43/month — combined with a strong emphasis on GDPR compliance and European data sovereignty.

Development Instance Pricing

Development Instances are designed for testing, staging, and low-traffic websites. They offer the lowest entry price on the platform:

Pricing data as of September 2026, calculated from hourly rates. Verify current pricing at scaleway.com/en/pricing/virtual-instances/

The STARDUST1-S at €0.43/month is exceptional for static sites, personal projects, or running lightweight daemons. The DEV1-S at ~€6.55/month is a solid real-world entry point for small applications. Note that the STARDUST1-S offers only 100 Mbps — fine for low traffic, but upgrade if you expect sustained throughput.

General Purpose Instance Pricing

General Purpose Instances come in multiple series, each targeting a different CPU generation and performance tier:

BASIC2 Series (AMD EPYC — balanced)

POP2 Series (AMD EPYC — high performance)

Pricing as of September 2026. Verify current rates at scaleway.com

Scaleway also offers a POP2 Windows Series for Windows Server workloads (e.g., POP2-2C-8G-WIN at ~€133/month including the Windows license) and Savings Plans offering up to 25% discount for committed usage.

Compute Optimized and Memory Optimized

Compute Optimized — COMPUTE3 Series

High CPU-to-RAM ratio, ideal for video encoding, ML inference, and CPU-intensive web serving:

Memory Optimized — MEMORY3 Series

High RAM-to-CPU ratio for in-memory databases, caching layers, and big-data analytics:

Pricing as of September 2026 — verify at scaleway.com/en/pricing/virtual-instances/

Datacenters and Regions

All Scaleway Virtual Instances deploy across three European regions:

• PAR-1 — Paris, France: The flagship region, co-located with iliad Group infrastructure
• AMS-1 — Amsterdam, Netherlands: Western Europe hub with low latency to most EU markets
• WAW-1 — Warsaw, Poland: Central/Eastern European coverage

Additional operations in Italy and planned expansions to Sweden and Germany. Scaleway also operates 65+ Points of Presence globally for CDN and edge services.

With every production datacenter inside the EU, Scaleway satisfies GDPR data residency requirements by default — a significant operational advantage for European businesses or any company serving EU residents.

Key Features

No Egress Fees on Virtual Instances

Scaleway's headline differentiator: egress bandwidth is included in the listed price for Virtual Instances. Contrast this with AWS, GCP, and Azure, where egress fees can add 20–50% or more to monthly bills for data-intensive workloads. If you're building APIs, media delivery, or any application with significant outbound traffic, this alone can justify choosing Scaleway.

Pay-As-You-Go Billing

All instances are billed by the hour with no minimum commitment. You can spin up and destroy instances freely — ideal for CI/CD pipelines, batch processing, or testing environments.

Savings Plans (Up to 25% Off)

For stable production workloads, Savings Plans reduce costs by up to 25% in exchange for a usage commitment. This makes Scaleway competitive against reserved instance pricing at AWS or GCP.

ARM Architecture Support

Beyond x86 (AMD EPYC), Scaleway offers ARM-based (Ampere) instances — delivering better performance-per-watt for compatible workloads like Go services, Node.js APIs, and ARM-native CI/CD pipelines.

Object Storage (S3-Compatible)

Scaleway Object Storage uses the S3 API, meaning any tool that talks to Amazon S3 works natively. Use it for static assets, database backups, media files, and data lakes. Pricing is billed separately from compute.

Kubernetes Kapsule

Managed Kubernetes service with autoscaling, multi-AZ support within EU regions, and no management fee for the control plane on basic tiers. A solid choice for container-first architectures without the operational burden of self-managed K8s.

Managed Databases

Scaleway offers managed PostgreSQL and MySQL — both with automated backups, patching, and failover. This reduces DBA overhead for teams that want reliable relational databases without managing them manually.

Serverless Functions and Containers

Scaleway Functions enable event-driven serverless architectures, while Serverless Containers allow deploying any containerized workload without managing underlying infrastructure.

GPU Instances for AI and ML

With L4, L40S, and H100 PCIe GPU instances, and over 5,000 GPUs in its fleet, Scaleway is a serious option for AI training and inference at a fraction of the cost of hyperscaler GPU pricing.

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Private networking between instances via VPC, keeping inter-service traffic off the public internet. Essential for production setups with database backends or microservice architectures.

Free IPv6

Every instance receives a free IPv6 address. Public IPv4 addresses are available but billed separately — a common trend among modern cloud providers as IPv4 exhaustion continues.

HDS Certification

Scaleway holds HDS (Hébergeur de Données de Santé) certification — the French government's healthcare data hosting standard. This makes it usable for regulated health data workloads in France and signals serious compliance posture for EU regulated industries.

Pros and Cons

Who Should Use Scaleway?

Ideal for:

• European developers and startups wanting GDPR-compliant infrastructure from day one
• AI/ML teams needing GPU access at competitive EU rates
• High-egress applications such as APIs, streaming services, or large file delivery
• ARM-native workloads including CI/CD pipelines and Go/Node.js services
• Budget-conscious devs who want a robust cloud platform below €10/month
• Teams needing compliance with EU data regulations (healthcare, finance, government)

Less Ideal for:

• Southeast Asian audience targeting — no Asian datacenter means higher latency from Thailand
• Beginners needing hand-holding — less tutorial content than DigitalOcean or Hetzner
• Teams needing one-click managed WordPress — better options exist for pure WordPress hosting
• US-East-Coast workloads — no US datacenter

What About Thai or Asian Hosting?

If your primary audience is in Thailand or Southeast Asia, choosing a cloud with local datacenter presence will dramatically reduce latency. For Thai-focused workloads, providers like AsiaGB (our editors' choice for Thai hosting), Bangmod Cloud, or Ruk-Com Cloud serve that need. Scaleway works well as a secondary region for EU users or as a cost-effective CI/CD platform running alongside your Asian production servers.

Frequently Asked Questions