Scaleway

Scaleway (formerly Online SAS or Online.net)^[1] is a French Cloud computing and web hosting company, founded by Xavier Niel in 1999 and a majority owned subsidiary of the Iliad group. The company provides physical dedicated servers and cloud computing architectures.

Scaleway

Formerly	Online SAS[1]
Industry	Internet
Founded	1999; 26 years ago (1999)
Founder	Xavier Niel
Headquarters	Paris , France
Key people	Arnaud de Bermingham (Chairman)
Products	Cloud computing, Dedicated Servers, Web Hosting
Revenue	40,659,303 euro (2015)
Net income	1,025,254 euro (2015)
Number of employees	550[1]
ASN	12876
Website	Scaleway.com

As of 2015, Scaleway is the second largest hosting company in France.^[2]

History

In 1999, Online started its activities in web hosting and domain name registration services^[3][4]

In August 2002, the domain name registrar BookMyName was bought by Iliad from its competitor LDCom.^[5]

In May 2006, rental of dedicated servers through the Dedibox brand was launched.

In December 2008, Iliad bought Alice ADSL: They also took over construction and operation of Datacenters, launched in 1999 by ISDnet, bought by Cable & Wireless in January 2000^[6] acquired by Tiscali France in June 2003^[7] and finally renamed as Iliad Datacenter.

In April 2010, Online merges with Dedibox, another subsidiary of Iliad,^[8] bringing together different hosting activities under a single brand.

In 2012, the company has opened its third datacenter of 11800 m² in Vitry-sur-Seine^[9] after 11 months of construction works. The site received the first Tier-III certification in France by Uptime Institute in January 2014.

Since 2012, the company publishes in real time the PUE of its datacenters on pue.online.net, in an effort of transparency.

In 2013, Online launched labs.online.net in preview. An infrastructure as a service offer, based on dedicated hardware and without virtualization,^[10] based on ARM CPUs.^[11] The hardware is made in a factory near Laval in France.

In April 2015 the service left its beta status and has been renamed as Scaleway.^[12] As the popularity of the platform grows, Online added servers with x86_64 based CPUs in March 2016.^[13]

In early 2015, the company announced to have exceeded 400 Gb/s of immediate Internet traffic.^[14]

Entrepreneur Yann Lechelle [fr] joined as CEO in early 2020,^[15] but left in December 2022.^[16]

In November 2023, Iliad launched Kyutai in France, the first European independent and non-profit artificial intelligence research laboratory, a laboratory that adopts an open-source and open-science approach for 300 million Euro.^[17]

Infrastructure

Datacenters

Aerial view of Online DC3.

Scaleway owns and operates several data centers located in Île-de-France.^[18][19]

• DC2, with a size of 4,500 m² in Vitry-sur-Seine, within the Val-de-Marne. The building has been constructed in 1989 by NMPP (Presstalis), then successively taken over by ISDNet, Cable & Wireless, Tiscali, then Telecom Italia, and is therefore an indirect product of the acquisition of Alice ADSL by Iliad.
• DC3, with a size of 11,800 m² in the same city is divided into several private spaces. It was built in 2012 by the group.^[20] It has reached its capacity in early 2016 and works have been planned to extend its capacity by 2,300 m2.^[21]
• DC4, with a size of 8,000 m² on six floors in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, housed in the former anti-atomic fallout shelter of the "Laboratoire central des ponts et chaussées". It was built between 1936 and 1939 by architect Gabriel Héraud,^[22] the building was acquired by Iliad in 2011.^[23] The main part of the fallout shelter is being used for the C14 offer.^[24]
• DC5, with a size of 32,000 m² on four floors at Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône. It is the result of the acquisition of an old mail sorting center of La Poste,^[25] and will handle the growth from 2017-2025 of the hoster.^[21]

In the past the company operated also:

• DC1, with a size of 6300 m² in Bezons,^[26] which also hosts the network head of Free.^[27] Built in 2001 by the American company Exodus Communications^[28][29] then taken back by Spherion,^[30] after the bankruptcy of the company. It is leased to Iliad on a long-term contract since 2003^[31][32] This site does not host any activities of Online since 2013.^[33]