Nua·ge, a minimalist French cloud (IaaS) hosting provider

Last November 11th, I saw my Twitter explode with mentions for the account @nuage_fr, a new French cloud host that flooded dev influencers with promo codes.

Rest assured, I'm still far from being a dev influencer, this article is absolutely not sponsored!

Nua·ge thus arrives with a very minimalist offer, a platform offering IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) hosted in France, with an emphasis on a user experience meant to be simple and intuitive.

An IaaS platform lets you manage VPS instances with control options like network security groups, etc...

So I wanted to test the service, knowing I had nothing to lose with their offer of 100€ given when using a referral link.

Note that I won't be covering signing up for the service, which actually works very well, with a top-notch user experience!

Creating a VPS instance from scratch

The first slightly confusing thing at the start is that you're asked to create a project, which is a set of resources (quotas aren't configurable yet) that will let you organize your instances.

In the end, it's actually quite handy, and all you're asked to do here is enter a name!

Then, once you're in your project, you can start adding an instance, where you can pick and choose:

• The OS / version
• The number of vCPUs
• The RAM
• Storage (only one option for now)

And you can also request to associate a public IP with your machine, and open SSH access by entering a key pair.

If you don't know how to create an SSH key pair, here's how to do it!

Experience

Overall, the user experience is indeed very pleasant, much less overwhelming than many other IaaS providers.

I think I would initially recommend this service for junior developers who want to get their feet wet with VPS in a simple way.

And here are a few other points I noted after my trial:

Workspace management

I found this to be a real plus, because workspace management is introduced right from sign-up, and being able to divide things into spaces and then projects to group all related resources together is really nice!

Stability

After testing the creation of a new instance and connecting to it, I ran into a server issue where it wouldn't let my incoming SSH connection through.

After talking with support, I had to restart the instance first, and ultimately recreate one from scratch.

This is a minor issue since it happened early in the experience, and it was resolved very quickly, but it also reflects how new the service is, even though it's powered by Oxeva, a subsidiary of the group and backed by the La Poste group.

Pricing

Comparing it to OVH's services for example, whose entry-level VPS has twice as much RAM but 5 times less storage for 3€ excl. tax/month, Nua·ge ends up being roughly twice as expensive.

After all, it's not the first company to charge for user experience!

Cost management/forecasting

When your main point of reference is the AWS console, I can tell you this is a very strong point for Nua·ge. Here all costs are announced, projected, and all available or used credits are clearly displayed.

Note however that all listed prices are excl. tax, except in the billing section.

Configuration

With minimalism sometimes comes the downside: lack of choice. It's not a flaw I ran into much, but the security group options, for example, lack a middle ground when it comes to choosing which ports and protocols to allow.

Support

Having had real support issues with OVH in particular, this is a point I now pay close attention to. I had to deal with support for the small incident mentioned earlier, and they were very responsive, even on a weekend.

The advice was good, even though it's still hard to judge how it will evolve over time and as the number of users of the service grows.

A positive point for now, and fingers crossed for what's next!

Conclusion

I can't predict what the offer will look like over time, or whether the "user experience" focus will come at the expense of hosting robustness or efficiency, even though, for now, things look pretty promising.

In the end, with the referral links currently available offering 100€ in credit, this lets you test the service for free for almost a year with a small instance, and who knows, maybe even host a side project that doesn't require too many resources!

My take: Give it a try, see how the service evolves, and let's talk again in a year!