Create your own VPN for pennies with the cheapest virtual compute instance around

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French cloud hosting company Scaleway, has announced a new cloud instance that only costs a meagre quarter of a Euro cent (that’s €0.0025) per hour.

Dubbed Stardust, cloud instances created with the new service come with certain limits. For starters, with Stardust you can only get a single virtual CPU with 1GB of RAM, 10GB of local storage, a single IPv4 address and up to 100Mbps of bandwidth.

The service hasn’t clarified what happens when you exceed that bandwidth, but we’re guessing you’ll just be charged for any additional use.

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Not just a gimmick

Billed by the hour, Stardust would cost €1.80 per month or about $2.10.

Scaleway provides two VPN tutorials:

Chart comparing Startdust with other vendors — (Image credit: Scaleway)

Scaleway also stated that every service, feature, and scenario currently available for its DEV1-S instances will also be available on the Stardust instances.

Also, like with other Scaleway instances, Stardust instances can also be isolated from the public network using the Private Networks service.

But don’t think about utilizing the service to spin up tons of instances and build your own infrastructure. Scaleway limits every account to a maximum of two Stardust instances, with one in Paris and another in Amsterdam.

Even with these limits there are lots of possibilities of using the service. You can, for instance, use it to collaborate with a small group of people by hosting a LAMP web app like a wiki or even a code repository. Individual users can also use it to deploy an OpenVPN server to surf anonymously.

If you can think of some use cases for the cheap cloud instance, you might have to rush to sign up for an account. Scaleway has pointed out that it will only release a limited batch of Stardust cloud instances every month.

It seems Scaleway hopes to use Stardust to draw in and sign up new users, who then might upgrade to one of its other services.

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With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’s TechRadar Pro’s expert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.

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