an honest (subjective) review of Contabo GmbH - a cheap German hosting provider

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. TL;DR This is my honest opinion, experience, and research: not fact. Your experience may differ from mine.

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 I will no longer be making any major changes to this blog post unless needed so this may be out of date by the time you're reading this.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:

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/))

# VPS performance

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:

  1. VPS S (1) SSD (hosted at Frankfurt, if I remember correctly)
  2. VPS M (2) SSD (hosted at Frankfurt, if I remember correctly)
  3. 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:

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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:

# 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:

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nameserver 9.9.9.9
nameserver 149.112.112.112

As in, before all the Contabo DNS stuff:

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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:

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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:

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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:

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:

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. YOUR EXPERIENCE MAY DIFFER FROM MINE.

Cya!