Hello, World,
Let's get the boring stuff out of the way before the introduction: This blog post constitutes an independent review and is not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated with Contabo GmbH in any official or unofficial capacity. No endorsement, partnership, or any form of affiliation with Contabo GmbH is implied or should be inferred from the content presented herein. The author disclaims all liability for any errors or omissions in this information and for its availability.
I've been using Contabo and their services (more specifically, their Cloud VPS services) for over 8 months now as of originally writing this, in which period I've upgraded VPS plans 3 times. What I've noticed when considering using Contabo as my hosting provider before fully committing to Contabo is that there's no good and concrete information about Contabo experiences besides a few negative experiences which don't help that much as they seem like extraordinary cases. My goal with this blog post is to provide a detailed report of my experience, share knowledge, tips, and whether or not you should go for Contabo or not when deciding to host your apps on their servers.
Even though the majority of this blog post is my own personal experience, I've taken a few bits from sites like LowEndTalk and Reddit, from experiences that do seem to be legit - this found knowledge was mainly applied in the # Tips section of the post. I will do my best to clarify which bits where from online experiences and I'll try to link the source where it is feasible to.
That aside, let's begin!
(Note: Before setting up a VPS at least read the # Tips section of this post!)
Edit 2024-08-01: In 10 days, I am switching to HostHatch - I cannot with Contabo for another month, personally. I will no longer be making any major changes to this blog post unless needed so this may be out of date by the time you're reading this.
Edit 2024-08-22: About 10 days after leaving Contabo, I got a 50 euro coupon: NVYT8PHP valid for a week. Feel free to take that Contabo discount because I'm not going to be the one taking it. Speaking of money, they said I should be refunded in around a week after leaving Contabo:
We have successfully marked the server for cancellation and no further action is needed. Your remaining positive account balance should be refunded to you automatically after that cancellation process. Kindly note that it may take up to 7 days to be refunded.
Yeah, honestly, I don't think I'm getting this refund. At least I got a coupon I could share with everyone. While the refund seems to either be late, or I'm not getting it - who knows honestly lol.
# Support
My experience with Contabo's support was always slow, they take their time to respond. Though generally, Contabo does not seem to rush and takes its time. Albeit slow, their team is understanding and helpful as well as respecting boundaries you might have while talking to support. I've reached out to them quite a few times as I've had many questions about their service and of course - had problems with it. Here's a few tickets I've opened in the past and what happened:
- Pricing questions: being new and used to Linode's pricing model, I was confused about some parts of how Contabo handles it all. Turns out they're pretty sane and barebones - they don't really keep anything behind any paywalls, you pay monthly, and if you don't pay they suspend your VPS and give you a week to pay up, and if you don't - they delete it. Contabo support handled these questions in a pretty detailed manner and it's been fine.
- Billing balance questions: With Contabo expect things to move slow, including billing. Once you top up your balance, it'll take some time for it to show up in your account, so don't be worried. Of course this depends on the billing method - PayPal is almost instant, but I've decided to move onto direct bank transfers, which take up to a week even. As any other billing question - they handled this type of question very well as well.
- Upgrading problems issues (main culprit of large downtime): Contabo's upgrading system, from my experience, is terrible, slow, and full of problems. This is the only thing I truly hate about Contabo. I don't understand how upgrading a VPS could take 12, or even 60 hours. I can upgrade my Qemu VM as fast as just changing a couple of parameters - what are they doing that takes this long? Shouldn't they have an automated system? It's (probably) literally a VM which is clear by what the OS reports and the VMM steal.
- First upgrade (VPS S (1) SSD => VPS M (2) SSD): 16 or so hours of downtime (unlike their promised "15 minutes of downtime" at the time with the "Live Upgrade" option), they messed up my network configuration (if I remember correctly), and they did not make it clear that I'll need to expand the storage space myself before the upgrade nor in the upgrade notification. Thankfully, after contacting their support, they fixed the networking and clarified that I need to expand the storage myself while the VPS was live (which, in my opinion, is dangerous and should be handled by Contabo, but I respect that they give full control to the owner). They linked to this article: https://contabo.com/blog/changing-partition-layout-vps-installation/?utm_source=support&utm_medium=email (at least keep the
utm_source
GET parameter so it doesn't render the article weird). - Second upgrade (VPS M (2) SSD => VPS L (3) SSD): This upgrade is pretty recent and it caused about 60 hours of downtime if not more, and not only that - it took me FIVE (5) TRIES TO CONTACT THEIR SUPPORT just to get an automated response. After the automated response I got "we don't see your upgrade request" and a few minutes later "yep, never mind! It's done - we're working on finalizing it." I was so close to leaving Contabo at that point, it wouldn't be the first nor the last time I considered leaving it.
- DDoS protection (very recent attack on ari.lt): Recently the server has been attacked by a DDoS attack, or
"Unfortunately, it is impossible to resolve this problem by regular means. We will do anything possible to protect your server from attacks. However, this attack is a massive one, which requires a lot of resources. <...> In this case, there is only one last resort: Not to block the attacking IP addresses (of which there might be myriad) but to block the attacked IP address. As already mentioned, this is the last thing we would ever do, but the stability of our network for other customers must be maintained by all means, and our hands are tied in this matter: We had to take action, and had to suspend access to your server."
according to Contabo. They limited my VPS over and over (I think around 10 times) again which caused me bad anxiety, purely out of my own inability to be patient and control my emotions. Their support was super slow to respond, so much so I thought they were ignoring me on purpose. At one point my anxiety, paranoia, and exhaustion got so bad I was having extremely painful panic attacks and was basically begging them to give me all the data on the VPS to me so I could move to other hosting providers. Once I got in touch with the support properly, they were understanding despite all my anxiety and handled the ticket fine. They made a decision to move my VPS to another location (If I remember correctly, Frankfurt to Düsseldorf) and ever since then it's been fine. I didn't track how much downtime this caused, but it was definitely an unreasonable amount of spotty uptime. This incident greatly impacted my mental health at the time (which isn't due to Contabo directly per say, but mainly their slowness to respond in combination with my inability to control such feelings). - Edit 2024-08-01 - Networking issues: My VPS was throttled to 10 Mbit/s for no reason despite them claiming always 100 Mbit/s availability. The experience was terrible: Firstly, I got requested login information into the server, after they did, I gave them access, though backtracked once I realised that there could be unexpected charges related to it in the future. They then just moved my VPS to a different location giving me more downtime. This was my last straw - I am tired of downtime.
Despite these negative experiences which might make Contabo seem terrible in retrospect due to these isolated incidents, I don't plan of switching away from Contabo, at least not at the moment. I like them for the most part, but god forbid you need urgent support from their side - it's absolutely terrible. Especially when it's people like me who have various problems with control of anxiety and paranoia (this is not Contabo's fault of course). Understandable that they need to sacrifice on support though - they're cheap, and how are you going to make the ends meet if you don't compromise something?
Consider this if you oftentimes need urgent support and plan to run anything enterprise. Support on Contabo is slow, and it's just fact. Sometimes you might get a fast response, but expect them to respond in 2-4 working days if you're contacting them.
Also, even though I'm not a support representative of Contabo, if you have any questions about Contabo or anything to me as a Contabo customer, even the technical ones, you're free to contact me. But please, for the love of god, don't send me any personal information about yourself, your server, or just in general. I can help with like system administration questions, setup questions, tips, experience questions, etc. though I really cannot help with things that are truly confirmed to be on Contabo's end, I can help you theorise, but I can't replace Contabo's support. Contact me through contacts listed on my website at https://ari.lt/ or at https://blog.ari.lt/b/contact-me/ :)
(By the way, I've heard that phone support is useless. At least I can't even reach them, but I've heard it's bad in general (A few experiences list this, for example https://www.reddit.com/r/VPS/comments/1b6m2er/do_not_use_contabo_for_anything_important/))
This section might not be universal amongst all products of Contabo, including VPS plans (or even same plans!). I'm talking from my experience in using Contabo's Europe (Germany) location with the first 3 tiers Contabo provides with the SSD option:
- VPS S (1) SSD (hosted at Frankfurt, if I remember correctly)
- VPS M (2) SSD (hosted at Frankfurt, if I remember correctly)
- VPS L (3) SSD (hosted at Düsseldorf)
And, in my opinion, the performance of Contabo VPSes is fine. Network performance is lacking sometimes, but even that I don't really have a big issue with. If Contabo upgraded their network infrastructure, it'd honestly be really good when it comes to performance.
Though, I think they oversell due to CPU steal. I mean, I don't really care, the steal is only like 1% on average, and the prices are crazy cheap so it's like fine, though I don't think they make it clear enough that you will experience up to 15% (maximum I've ever observed) VMM steal if you use their Cloud VPS services. You can check the CPU steal like this:
sar 1 <SECONDS> | grep "Average" | awk '{print $7}'
Where <SECONDS>
is the time period it checks. sar
is a command from the sysstat package.
So, unless you need very good performance network-wise, I think Contabo is an okay choice, especially considering how cheap their products are - truly a steal.
# Hardware
Currently, on my VPS L (3) SSD (hosted at Düsseldorf) I pay for this hardware:
- Host: KVM/QEMU (Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996) pc-i440fx-7.2)
- CPU: AMD EPYC 7282 (8) @ 2.794 GHz
- Memory: 24031 MiB
- Network: 450-600 Mbit/s download, 450-600 MBit/s upload
- SSD: 1.2 TB
# Downtime
I haven't experienced any downtime of the VPS itself randomly due to fault of Contabo personally. I don't understand these internet bad experiences where they say they have downtime every week or so - that's false, well, in my case it is.
Most downtime I've experienced was from the DDoS and upgrades. Though, I've also had issues with their DNS recently.
Contabo DNS (the one they ship by default in /etc/resolv.conf
) has been going down a lot recently for me, causing networking on my VPS to malfunction. I've switched to Quad9 DNS by adding these lines to the top of /etc/resolv.conf
:
nameserver 9.9.9.9
nameserver 149.112.112.112
As in, before all the Contabo DNS stuff:
nameserver 9.9.9.9
nameserver 149.112.112.112
domain ...contabo...
search ...contabo...
nameserver ...contabo...
nameserver ...contabo...
You should too if you don't want weird DNS downtime sometimes. Everything else, though, has been fine for the most part. It's weird how they don't report such downtimes properly at https://contabo-status.com/, at least I don't see it, might be blind though.
I've also had issues with IPv6, it's extremely slow for me, so I'm just avoiding it on my server. If you choose to enable IPv6, do so by running the alias Contabo provides by default in /root/.bashrc
:
alias enable_ipv6='sed -i "/net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6.*/d" /etc/sysctl.conf && sysctl -q -p && echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/disable_ipv6'
I.e just run enable_ipv6
(though you might need to reboot). After you enable IPv6, of course, update /etc/resolv.conf
to use Quad9 on IPv6 as well:
nameserver 9.9.9.9
nameserver 149.112.112.112
nameserver 2620:fe::fe
nameserver 2620:fe::9
# Skill level
If you're going into Contabo, you need to have skills in systems administration - they barely provide anything through UI. Some people, such as I, like that. But if you're looking for something more 'high-level' and through UI go for something else. Contabo gives you bare bones, and I genuinely like that. I respect that they're sticking to bare minimum as I really do like minimalism like this.
It'd be nice if they provided out-of-the-box UI-configurable firewalls, but it's fine, I guess. Install UFW or something and it'll be enough for the most part I think.
Their DDoS protection is close to useless as well so you might want to also set up Cloudflare, though there's other reasons to why to not use Cloudflare - there's many reasons why you shouldn't man-in-the-middle yourself with a free service a corporate entity provides, especially if you care about privacy, though this isn't a Cloudflare post, so guess find your own reasons and draw your own conclusions. (for starters, even though I don't agree with all the Stallman's words, this gives valid reasons - https://stallman.org/cloudflare.html)
Just be warned that you're basically on your own, with a helping hand of slow support and an outdated dashboard.
# Should I use Contabo?
If you're considering Contabo, you're probably looking for something cheap, and Contabo sure is cheap, but you get what you pay for. In my opinion: yes, but no. If there are other reasons why you wouldn't use any other competing hosting provider such as Netcup (The internet highlights their aggressive billing policy, KYC process, etc.), Hetzner (The internet highlights their aggressive KYC, shutting VPSes down randomly), or HostHatch (From what I see, low storage and whatnot) - Contabo is an okay choice, wouldn't be my first one, but it's the best choice on the market if you feel restricted over other hosting providers.
Though consider long-run of Contabo. These are factors you should consider in my opinion:
- Are you okay possibly having 3 days of downtime due to some action you took on the VPS such as upgrading?
- Are you okay with suboptimal performance?
- Are you skilled enough to manage a raw system basically on your own? (though I'm sure you can do it if you managed a server before)
- Are you okay with slow support?
- Are you okay with an outdated panel with basic functionality?
And consider that when setting up a Contabo VPS you will be forced to pay a setup fee. If you just get a 1 month contract you will have to pay double the price of the VPS for the first month as the setup fee is the price of the VPS. I find this concept funny though - it takes nothing to set a VM up besides run a single command through Qemu or more realistically Proxmox. Goofy.
One thing to also consider is long-term commitment. Would I recommend Contabo long-term? No. Hard no.
But before setting up a VPS read the # Tips section of this post!
# What's good about Contabo?
Pretty much really good prices for resources you get with okay performance. I don't think any hosting provider will ever beat the prices and production of Contabo. They also run on green energy as stated in the sustainability page at contabo.com which is a huge positive and more hosting providers should take Contabo as an example in this case. I also like that they provide a bare bones VPS, even though features like good DDoS protection and a firewall would be nice, I believe Contabo is respectable in this sector.
# What's bad about Contabo?
I found support to be slow, I felt and found experiences online that describe some of their billing methods as "unexpected costs" (or as people usually seem to describe it online - "hidden fees", even though it's not an accurate label), some of them discussed in the # Tips section (some stuff I found online through research online), the network performance is suboptimal, and the stability of it could be questionable at times. There's really not much particularly bad or good about Contabo - it's really bare bones. It being bare-bones also means there's a lack of community resources and shared experiences (including discussion of the contract, exactly why the "unexpected costs" mentioned in this post aren't well-known) and whatnot.
Also, be prepared for stress if you choose Contabo. Contabo's slow nature has caused immense stress for me a couple of times. It sucks, but it's over for now. Hey, at least I get a cheap way to host all of ari.lt for a good price without going broke.
# Tips
I've gained some knowledge when using Contabo and doing research about it online, here's how to mitigate its weirdness from my and online people's experience:
- Avoid Contabo if you can find another hosting provider that fits your needs and abilities. I've done extensive research and Contabo was the only one that really sold me.
- Use the European locations if you can, the latency seems the best there and other locations cost extra. Of course, they support more locations https://contabo.com/en/locations/.
- Based on various online sources: be wary of other "unexpected costs". They are costs that I feel like aren't as well discussed online and could be considered unexpected by me and other people online (who usually refer to it as "hidden fee" but I feel like that's not fully accurate due to Contabo not trying to intentionally hide them) which might apply to you, such as described below. I've mainly been able to find them from online people's experiences as Contabo resources are pretty hard to navigate for me, based on not that old user experiences:
- Make sure to stay up to date with "Clause 4: Payment terms" and other terms and conditions of Contabo at https://contabo.com/en/legal/terms-and-conditions/.
- Use a firewall and a DDoS protection script if possible as Contabo doesn't seem to have any firewall and their DDoS protection is pretty useless.
- Maybe don't use Contabo's DNS that's shipped by default as you might face issues with it. Instead try to use Quad9, Cloudflare, Google's, or any other DNS provider in priority just in case.
- Avoid non-Linux operating systems - don't make your life harder than it has to be, especially at Contabo. Choose to install the latest version of Debian or something.
- Stay up to date with security of course, no firewall will make you more vulnerable. On Debian prioritize the
debian-security
repository. - Also set up SSH and other access in a way where it enhances the security, use just SSH keys and whatnot. https://infosec.mozilla.org/guidelines/openssh is a helpful resource.
- Avoid enabling IPv6 due to extremely degraded performance (in my experience). You can of course try, maybe it's been fixed, but when I tried it a few months ago, it was bad.
- Before contacting Contabo support diagnose the issue as good as possible, provide as much information as possible and you're comfortable with sending over over an unencrypted channel in relation to that topic, and try to resolve the issue yourself. This is all pretty obvious, but this especially is the case in case of Contabo. Reminder that the response times are even worse during holidays and weekends, so if you're facing any issue try to move as quick as possible. Also join tech support communities and ask people who are willing to answer (like me) for resolution help.
- When upgrading your VPS, expect a bunch of downtime - that's normal for Contabo. After upgrading, you will have to extend the main partition yourself live so stop all services running on your server after upgrading and use cfdisk or something (such as https://contabo.com/blog/changing-partition-layout-vps-installation/?utm_source=support&utm_medium=email) to extend your storage you pay for. Then reboot after you're done.
- Prefer to contact Contabo support through the UI rather than email, their email stuff seems to sometimes have weird issues (such as not acknowledging you as being you?) so using UI will help to ensure there's no room for error. Use the link https://my.contabo.com/?support after logging into the Contabo panel to make a new ticket if you already have an account, else just use their support email.
- For some weird reason, Contabo enables VNC by default. You might be interested in disabling that even though it's on a different IP, on a random port, and protected by a password.
- Don't lose your 2FA or access to your account - be extremely cautious. I've heard online that they ask to pay up if you lose access to your account. Backup as much as possible! (based on https://www.reddit.com/r/VPS/comments/yktiuz/comment/iuxoabe/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button, not personal experience)
- Maybe also keep the Contabo API token with you as well found in the Contabo control panel UI.
- Live migration does cost extra in certain cases where applicable (33 euro + VAT to be more specific). This is almost like an unexpected cost I've felt like as it was confusing to even find this out, never experienced it personally though as I never moved locations. This fee only applies if your VPS is moved to a different location, which in case of you upgrading the VPS and keeping it in the same location (as in you're in the Europe data centre - keep the Europe location) shouldn't be applied. (https://help.contabo.com/en/support/solutions/articles/103000269766-how-do-i-change-my-servers-region-)
- Always check your notifications from Contabo, don't assign the email you use for your Contabo account to an email server that is hosted on a server that's under that account as what it goes down?
- Be really patient. Contabo never seems to rush anywhere, so if you've contacted them, only contact them again if they haven't responded in 2 days. Try to stay calm and collected.
- Contabo does not have off-site backups. You might want to do incremental backups on the VPS and then download them locally slowly. Of course, also make on-site backups - though don't go over the backup limit of your plan.
- Contabo only has a 95% uptime guarantee, that's 19 days of possible contractual downtime. It's worthless asking for a refund if you haven't passed this threshold in downtime.
- My downtime in those 8+ months has probably been like 4-5 days. It's not good, but guess also not the worst it could be.
- Share your experiences online! We, the Contabo community, are lacking shared resources, and sharing your personal subjective experience online could help others - contribute to helping others :D
If you have any questions, contact me as mentioned earlier in this post (https://ari.lt/ or at https://blog.ari.lt/b/contact-me/) or contact Contabo support at https://help.contabo.com/en/support/home or their email support[at]contabo.com
.
Good luck if you choose Contabo as your hosting provider! My overall rating for Contabo would be 6/10 and I don't think much could sway this rating unless Contabo makes changes to their transparency (though it's fine for the most part, improvements could be made in making fees and performance more transparent), support (faster response times), and uptime reliability (having a better uptime guarantee and generally having better uptime throughout upgrades and general functioning).
Finally, for good measure: THIS IS PURELY MY OPINION, FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, FEELINGS, AND RESEARCH ONLINE.
Cya!