Contabo Review

Contabo is a German hosting company, founded in 2003 and based in Munich, that sells self-managed VPS, virtual dedicated servers (VDS), dedicated servers and GPU servers in 9 regions across Europe, North America, Asia and Australia. It suits developers, hobbyists and small businesses who want a lot of RAM and disk space for little money and can manage a Linux server themselves.

The entry Cloud VPS 4 costs $6.60/month on a monthly contract (plus a one-time $2.40 setup fee), or $5.28/month on a 24-month term, for 4 vCPU, 8 GB of RAM and 100 GB of SSD storage. Billing is by contract, not by the hour, and the cheapest prices need a long prepaid term.

My Contabo review scores below are based on the current plans, prices and policies, checked on November 8, 2026, on published customer feedback, and on my own k6 tests of three live websites hosted on Contabo servers.

Data sheet of the host

Contabo's Core VPS plans in US dollars, with the 24-month price in large type and the monthly price struck through above it (November 8, 2026).

Contabo is run by Contabo GmbH, a German company with its head office in Munich. Its own data centers in Germany serve the European Union region, and it also has servers in the UK, the US, Singapore, Japan, India and Australia.

Hosting Types

Operating Systems

• Linux: Ubuntu, Debian, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, CentOS and openSUSE
• FreeBSD
• Windows Server (the license raises the monthly bill, for example by $9.60 on Cloud VPS 4)
• Your own image, uploaded as a custom ISO, as long as it runs on KVM
• One-click apps such as n8n, Nextcloud, WireGuard and GitLab

DataCenters

The Cloud VPS 4 configurator with its region map and the monthly surcharges for the three US regions (November 8, 2026).

Only the European Union region is free. Every other location adds a monthly surcharge, and it grows with the plan: on Cloud VPS 6, US East costs $3.00 extra and Tokyo $4.95.

About Contabo

Contabo started in spring 2003 with a single server, under the name Giga-International, and became Contabo in 2013. It opened its first data centers outside Europe, in the US, in 2020.

The company says it now runs more than 450,000 servers for over 300,000 customers in 190 countries, with about 300 employees. Stephan Wolfram is the CEO.

Contabo is open about why it's cheap. Its About page credits standardized hardware across all data centers, buying for price-performance per euro and per watt, and "proprietary optimization scripts to manage load on our servers." I explain what that means for buyers in my article on why Contabo is so cheap.

The main tradeoff is CPU speed, not resources. You get far more RAM and disk space per dollar than with most VPS hosts, but my tests of live Contabo websites put it in the lower half of the VPS hosts I've tested for server response time.

Technical Features

Score: 8.2/10

Contabo earns a high features score for the amount of hardware each plan includes, plus free DDoS protection, snapshots and nine regions. It loses points for unpublished CPU details on the Core line and slow ports on the small plans.

Shared vCPU, Performance VPS or dedicated cores

Performance VPS (Cloud VPS Plus) plans with AMD EPYC vCPUs and NVMe storage, in US dollars (November 8, 2026).

Contabo sells three VPS lines, and the CPU is the main difference between them. Core VPS is the cheap line. Contabo's FAQ says it runs on "proven infrastructure across multiple CPU generations," virtualized with KVM, and it doesn't name a processor model or say that the cores are dedicated.

That wording matters. A vCPU on a shared host is a share of a physical core, and when neighbors are busy, your server gets less CPU time. Contabo argues that for websites, mail and dev servers, RAM and network throughput matter more than the CPU, which is true for idle workloads but not for uncached PHP pages under traffic.

Independent data gives a hint about the hardware. VPSBenchmarks, which buys and tests VPS plans itself, has reported AMD EPYC processors on several Contabo Cloud VPS plans between March 2025 and September 2026, without a model number. That's their measurement, not a Contabo promise, and the host machine can differ from one server to the next.

The Performance VPS line names AMD EPYC CPUs and Gen 4 NVMe storage, but Contabo's FAQ says it's still shared at the hypervisor level. Only the Max Performance VPS (Cloud VDS) line gives you cores assigned to your instance alone, on an AMD EPYC 7282 at 2.8 GHz, which is a 2019 server chip.

RAM and storage

Every Core plan pairs its vCPUs with 2 GB of RAM or more per vCPU, from 8 GB on Cloud VPS 4 to 96 GB on Cloud VPS 18. That's the headline reason people choose Contabo: a mail server, Nextcloud or a few WordPress sites rarely run out of memory here.

Storage is SSD by default. From Cloud VPS 6 up, you can swap to NVMe at half the size (for example 200 GB SSD or 100 GB NVMe on Cloud VPS 6), and a storage extension doubles the disk for a monthly fee, up to 1.2 TB on the top Core plan.

NVMe is faster for databases, so I'd take it for a busy WordPress or WooCommerce site and keep SSD for backups and files. Contabo doesn't publish RAID levels or IOPS figures for these disks.

Traffic and port speed

All plans include unlimited traffic, with an asterisk. Incoming traffic is unmetered, and outgoing traffic falls under a fair usage policy "based on average server workloads," with Contabo reserving the right to throttle servers with "exceptionally high or disruptive usage patterns."

The port speed is the real limit. Cloud VPS 4 has a 200 Mbit/s port, Cloud VPS 6 has 300 Mbit/s, and only the 16- and 18-vCPU plans reach 1 Gbit/s. That's plenty for web pages, but slow for large downloads, backups to another provider or video streaming.

Operating systems, panels and apps

Linux images and FreeBSD are free, and you can upload your own ISO for anything that runs on KVM. Windows Server costs extra each month, and the price grows with the plan ($9.60 on Cloud VPS 4, $20.40 on Cloud VPS 6).

Webmin is free. cPanel costs $29.50/month and Plesk with Linux $16.50/month in the configurator, and Contabo's FAQ says Plesk costs nothing in its first month when you drop it before that month is over. Contabo's API and command-line tool work with Terraform, and cloud-init is supported for automatic first-boot setup.

Performance and Security

Score: 6.5/10

I test hosts on live customer websites, not on a server of my own, and Contabo's three test sites were among the slower VPS results. Here are the numbers, followed by what they mean for a buyer.

Contabo Speed Test Results (November 2026)

In November 2026, I load-tested three live websites on Contabo cloud servers (VPS). Each site's hosting was verified from its server IP.

I compare hosts on uncached server time. The test skips the site's page cache, so Contabo's server has to build the page, and the network round trip from the test location is subtracted from the result. Each hosting type's figure is the median of its sites, the middle result, so one unusually slow or fast site doesn't decide it.

Test settings, 2, 3 and 4 November 2026: 5 virtual users for 2 minutes, at most 1 request per second, every second request with a unique query string to bypass the page cache. Live websites under light load, not a controlled benchmark of Contabo's plans.

All three sites answered every request without an error. Each site's plan, theme, plugins and page weight also affect how long its server takes to build a page.

Uptime figures come once the monitored site has 30 days of data.

Contabo Under Load: 1 to 50 Visitors (November 2026)

The speed tests above use light traffic. For this test, k6 raised the number of visitors from 1 to 50 over 2 minutes, and every request skipped the page cache, so the server had to build every page. It puts real load on a live website, so I only run it on sites I manage or have permission to test, normally at a quiet hour for their visitors.

On the networking guide blog site, server time climbed from 644 ms to 2,563 ms at 40 to 50 visitors, about 4 times slower. Requests still succeeded, but visitors would have waited about 2 seconds for each uncached page.

On the holiday villa rental site, server time climbed from 1,148 ms to about 13 seconds, and k6 stopped the test at 47 visitors because its slowest 5% of requests took more than 15 seconds, although none failed. That earns grade E.

My VPS load grade for Contabo uses the median of its sites: one of them had to be stopped, so the grade is E.

Grades use fixed limits on server time at 40 to 50 visitors: A under 0.5 s, B under 1 s, C under 2 s, D under 4 s, E 4 s or more, more than 1% failed requests, or a test k6 had to stop. Real visitors mostly get cached pages, so this is the hard case: a traffic spike on pages the cache can't answer, such as carts, searches or logged-in pages. Each site's plan, theme and plugins also affect the result.

This load grade counts in my Contabo score. It's one of the three grades behind the host's benchmark rating and the Performance and Security score of this review, next to server time and the slowest 5% of requests.

What the results mean: lots of hardware, modest speed

Contabo's median server time of 521 ms puts it at rank 22 of the 31 VPS hosts I've tested so far, with benchmark rating E. A server time around 0.5 s for an uncached page is usable for a blog with a page cache, but it's slow next to the hosts at the top of my VPS ranking.

The load tests matter more for buyers. The networking blog stayed online but got about 4 times slower at 40 to 50 visitors, and the villa rental site had to be stopped at 47 visitors. Neither site returned errors, so the servers kept working, but visitors would have waited seconds for any page the cache couldn't answer.

This fits how Contabo builds its plans. A plan with 8 GB of RAM doesn't build a PHP page faster than one with 2 GB: CPU time per request does, and on the Core line that CPU time is shared and the model isn't published. My guess is that busy shared hosts and older CPUs explain part of the gap, but I can't separate that from each site's own setup.

Keep the limits in mind. These are three customer websites, with plans, themes, plugins and server tuning I don't know, so a well-tuned server on a bigger plan could do much better. Contabo's FAQ also points CPU-heavy workloads to the Performance and Max Performance lines, which none of my test sites are confirmed to use.

Uptime guarantee

Contabo's terms promise that physical connectivity is available at an annual average rate of 99.9%, excluding maintenance and causes outside its control. The terms don't mention service credits, so there's no published payout if Contabo misses that figure.

That's a weaker promise than SLAs with monthly credits. Contabo runs a public status page at contabo-status.com, and my own uptime monitor on a Contabo site will show figures here once it has 30 days of data.

DDoS protection and firewall

Every Cloud VPS, Performance VPS and Storage VPS plan comes with always-on DDoS protection, along with a firewall you configure in the Customer Control Panel. Contabo doesn't publish the mitigation capacity per server.

Including it for free is a real plus at this price. The panel's firewall is only a network filter, though, so you still need to keep the operating system, SSH access and your web apps patched yourself.

Backups and snapshots

The Cloud VPS 4 configurator: Windows, cPanel and Plesk prices, and the Auto Backup add-on at $2.00/month (November 8, 2026).

Snapshots are included: one on Cloud VPS 4, two on Cloud VPS 6, three on the larger Core plans and five on every Performance VPS plan. They're handy before an update, but they live with the server, so they aren't a backup strategy on their own.

Auto Backup is a paid add-on: daily backups stored off the server, with the last 10 versions kept and one-click restore. It costs $2.00/month on Cloud VPS 4 and $4.00/month on Cloud VPS 6, which I'd add from day one on any server that holds real data.

Where the servers are

The European Union region is the default and the only one without a surcharge, so it's the cheapest choice for visitors in Europe. US buyers pay $1.30 to $1.90 a month extra on Cloud VPS 4 for St. Louis, Seattle or New York.

Location helps latency, but it isn't the whole story. My test measures server time with the network round trip removed, so a Contabo server in Europe wasn't penalized for its distance from the US test location.

Ease of Use

Score: 7.0/10

Contabo is easy to buy and harder to run. The order form is simple, but the servers are fully self-managed, so you install and secure everything yourself.

The configurator asks for a term, a region, storage, an image, backups and networking, then shows the monthly price, any one-time fee and the amount due today. According to Contabo's FAQ, the server is ready a few minutes after your payment clears. If you don't pay by credit card, you send the first payment yourself, so a bank transfer or a manual PayPal payment can hold up the start.

After that, you manage the server in the Customer Control Panel: snapshots, reinstalls, firewall rules, networking, DNS and upgrades. Contabo's support covers the network, the hardware and getting its one-click add-ons installed, and says that maintaining and troubleshooting the software is the customer's job.

Upgrades are simple, since you can add vCPUs, RAM and storage from the panel. Downgrades aren't: you buy a smaller plan, move your data and cancel the old server yourself. If you'd rather not manage a server at all, compare the managed options in my VPS hosting guide.

Price

Score: 9.0/10

Contabo is one of the cheapest VPS hosts per GB of RAM I've reviewed. It loses a point for setup fees, location surcharges and the long prepayment needed for the lowest price.

Core VPS plans

The Cloud VPS 4 order page: $6.60/month with a $2.40 setup fee on a monthly contract, $5.61 on 12 months and $5.28 on 24 months (November 8, 2026).

A 12-month term saves 15% and a 24-month term saves 20%, and both are paid upfront: $126.72 for two years of Cloud VPS 4. The one-time setup fee applies only to a monthly Cloud VPS 4; Contabo blames the fee on RAM prices, which have climbed sharply.

Prices are for the European Union region. Add the location surcharge for any other region, plus extras such as Windows, cPanel or Auto Backup, and the small plans lose some of their lead.

Performance and Max Performance VPS

Max Performance VPS (Cloud VDS) plans with dedicated AMD EPYC 7282 cores, in US dollars (November 8, 2026).

The dedicated-core VDS plans are where Contabo stops being a bargain on CPU. $52/month for 6 dedicated cores is fair, but it's no longer the giant price gap you see on the Core plans.

Contracts, refunds and payment

There's no hourly billing. The configurator offers 1-month, 12-month and 24-month terms, and contracts renew for the same length unless you cancel; prepaid contracts need no notice, while postpaid ones need 4 weeks' notice.

Contabo doesn't offer a money-back guarantee. Its terms give consumers the legal right to withdraw within 14 days, and say plainly that this right doesn't apply to businesses, so test with a monthly plan before you prepay two years.

Payment in US dollars works by credit card or PayPal. Euro accounts can also use Skrill, bank transfer and, for qualifying customers, direct debit. Contabo doesn't accept cryptocurrency, and the currency you pick at the first order stays fixed for the account.

Reliability and Support

Score: 6.8/10

Contabo's support page claims a 2-hour average response time and 21,000+ requests resolved each week (November 8, 2026).

Contabo support works through the Customer Control Panel. You first chat with ContaBro, a virtual assistant, and if it can't help, you're passed to a person; tickets handle more complex problems. Contabo's help center says you need to be logged in to use the support chat, so pre-sales questions go through the contact links on its sales page.

The company says it has 64 support specialists in three tiers, an average response time of 2 hours, and support in English and German only. I haven't contacted Contabo support myself, so I can't confirm those times, and I found no published phone line or support hours on its official pages.

Customer feedback is mostly positive. On Trustpilot, Contabo had a 4.6 rating from 11,684 reviews as of November 8, 2026, with 77% five-star and 11% one-star reviews. Happy customers praise the price and the hardware; unhappy ones describe slow or templated ticket replies, billing problems that led to suspensions, and slowdowns at peak hours, which one reviewer blamed on overbooking.

Those are individual reports, not measurements. The terms also let Contabo ask for extra proof of identity when it doubts a customer's details, and suspend a server for unpaid invoices, with a possible reactivation fee.

Conclusion: Is Contabo Right for You?

Contabo gives you more RAM and disk space per dollar than almost any VPS host. For a mail server, Nextcloud, a staging server, a VPN or a handful of cached WordPress sites, $5.28 to $7.20 a month buys a lot of room.

It's a weaker choice when speed under load matters. My tests of three live Contabo websites gave a median server time of 521 ms, rating E, and rank 22 of 31 VPS hosts, and one load test had to be stopped. The Core line's shared, unnamed CPUs are the likely limit, along with each site's own setup.

If you're comparing, the closest rival is Hetzner, which I cover in Contabo vs Hetzner. If you want hourly billing and a more polished cloud platform, read Contabo vs DigitalOcean before you prepay two years.

I'd choose Contabo for RAM-hungry, CPU-light projects run by someone who can manage Linux. For a busy store or a site that must stay fast under traffic, pick its dedicated-core VDS line or a host higher in my benchmarks.