I'm not a mod, but three out of your five comments contain the word "shit," and one of the five was flagged. HN has a lot to offer, but only if you put effort into it.
EDIT: Just to clarify, it's fine to call out something as bullshit, but you have to justify your reasoning. Ideally it wouldn't be so emotional, but an informative comment is valuable regardless of the clothes it wears. E.g. if you dig into the ToS and highlight clauses that illustrate why it's bullshit, that would be useful.
There is no privacy without open source software.
This article with the recommandations to buy Netgear stuff or commercials VPN services is just a farce.
The author don't know shit, writing this type of false articles will lead to another privacy disaster.
Whether the server is free / open source software is irrelevant to the matter of privacy with a VPN. It's running on someone else's computer, so you have no way of proving what is running, or more importantly, what isn't running - the service provider can run OpenVPN and also tcpdump, both of which are free software. You need to trust the provider not to monitor your traffic, and perhaps not to be easily compelled to monitor your traffic on someone else's behalf.
(The same is true of Tor exit nodes, incidentally, and it's very easy for an intelligence agency to run Tor and tcpdump.)
If you actually want a VPN, one of your best options is to use a commercial service that has a reputation to uphold. Some fly-by-night "non-profit" is probably a front for a miscreant running tcpdump. (And there is no conflict with a commercial service running open source code, as I'm sure you know!)
Scaleway is shit, I use it since the closed beta (I live in France) and even if they are good to host simple websites with no big trafic their service is very disappointing.
First they surfed on the ARM bare metal hype for a while and then changed everything to sell x64 VPS. They lack a lot of features as they don't provide backup system or even snapshots.
Their staff think of themselves as fucking gods and do not give a shit about customers request. They have been out of order many times and don't communicate at all about it.
You are definitely just a running billfold in their eyes, never spend money for them.
Their business plan was using the revolutionary ARM CPUs to make cheap offers with real hardware. That was clear, that's what they sold us in the beginning.
Know they are stuck with it because of their lack of knowledge: the C1 server doesn't even support IPV6!
Stop kidding about "snapshots". They don't offer snapshots at all. Period. You should shutdown your server through the fucking dashboard before you can click the snapshot button. Snapshot is an instant backup made on a running server, otherwise it's useless.
Tell me what you want but I know what I've seen for 3 years with them. Now I and my company are running DO servers, which is way better for the price.
I've not used Scaleway but for what it's worth Digital Ocean's snapshot feature only works offline too (and takes forever to run). I'd also made the same complaints as yourself that an offline "snapshot" isn't really what I would class as a "snapshot". A "clone" would be a more apt description.
Anyhow, semantics aside, I seriously wouldn't recommend DO for any serious work. It's fine if you freelance in Wordpress or other off the shelf products but if you have any serious work to do then just don't even waste your time with DO as it's solutions are slow, inflexible and, in my professional opinion, immature when compared to other leading cloud providers.
They do, it's just not very good. Each VPS gets one IPv6 address (instead of a /64 block as you might expect), and the address is also not tied to the server if you ever power it down and then up again.
