Contabo vs DigitalOcean

Confused between Contabo vs DigitalOcean? Welcome to the ultimate comparison, where we will see all the factors to compare the two big hosts.

To get a sneak peek, we found DigitalOcean better in most cases. We would still recommend you to use the one that suits your need.

Let’s start with the basic overview, and then we will jump to all the comparison factors.

Contabo Vs DigitalOcean

Let’s begin with the overview.

Contabo overview

Contabo is known for offering cheap VPS with high specifications. They offer a wide range of cloud VPS plans.

Pros of Contabo

• There are servers across 3 continents in 8 different locations.
• You can choose your OS as well as control panels.
• The pricing is affordable, and you can even add add-ons at a cheap rate.
• Colocation services are also available. Co-location allows you to rent a space for your servers.

Cons of Contabo

• Their support is extremely slow.
• The performance is unreliable.
• You can’t buy individual domains without purchasing the hosting.
• There is a setup fee if the tenure is less than a year.

Visit Contabo

DigitalOcean overview

DigitalOcean is a cloud provider offering affordable droplets. Droplets are a part of the cloud that can be considered cloud VPS.

Pros of DigitalOcean

• Their plans are affordable.
• You can also try the cloud for free.
• Easy to use and set up your projects in the cloud.
• There are a wide range of products.
• The pricing is transparent as well as they offer a pay-as-you-go model.
• There are no service disruptions, even during maintenance.
• At first, they used to offer just droplets. Now, they offer many more services.

Cons of DigitalOcean

• It’s recommended only for advanced users.
• There is no live chat or phone support
• DDoS protection is not included.
• You can only use Linux cloud as Windows cloud is not available.
• Their IP’s blocklist reputation is bad. There are many complaints regarding the same.
• They have an easy control panel, but there are no managed servers

Visit DigitalOcean

Contabo Vs. DigitalOcean: Features

Ease of Use

Contabo: Ease of Use

The server interface seems a bit outdated compared to others. So, oftentimes, you might feel old-school while using it.

DigitalOcean: Ease of Use

DigitalOcean offers a pleasant and super-easy-to-use interface. All options are easy to find and navigate.

Backups (snapshots)

Contabo: Backups

Contabo offers paid backup space starting at $5.79/m for 100 GB. They use RAID 6 array, and you will get another account to store the backups. You get unlimited bandwidth as the transfer (of backup files) will be internal.

You can get up to 2 TB of storage space.

DigitalOcean: Backups

DigitalOcean allows you to take up to 4 backups per month, and the cost of the backup space is 5% of the droplet cost. Talking about the base plan, it will cost you $0.20 per month.

Datacenters locations

Both hosting providers have servers across 3 continents, but which one has more locations? Let’s find out.

Contabo Locations

Here’s the complete list of Contabo datacenter locations:

1. New York City
2. San Francisco
3. Amsterdam
4. Frankfurt
5. London
6. Toronto
7. Bangalore
8. Singapore
9. Sydney

DigitalOcean Locations

Here’s the complete list of DigitalOcean datacenter locations:

1. East USA
2. West USA
3. Central USA
4. Munich
5. Nuremberg
6. Falkenstein
7. England
8. Singapore
9. Sydney
10. Japan

Contabo Vs. DigitalOcean: Performance

Even though Contabo offers better specs, DigitalOcean has better performance as they don’t share the resources recklessly. Moreover, DigitalOcean uses better hardware.

CPU

Contabo CPU

There are no restrictions on CPU usage as per Contabo VPS policy. The bad news is that your neighbors can also do the same, and this decreases the overall performance.

Contabo uses older CPU Xeons or Xeon Silver. They use shared Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v4 @ 2.20GHz.

DigitalOcean CPU

With DigitalOcean, you will get a dedicated CPU. So they are more stable. As mentioned above, the CPU version is also the latest.

They use Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6140 CPU @ 2.30GHz.

Provisioning time

Contabo Provisioning

• The VPS is set up between 10 minutes to 2 hours.
• Dedicated servers take up to 48 hours (only on workdays).

DigitalOcean Provisioning

DigitalOcean server provisioning is automated. It hardly takes a few minutes to set up your server, and you can configure a few technical stuff before the server is ready to use.

Now let’s discuss the speed of Contabo vs DigitalOcean.

Speed

Contabo speed

Contabo offers faster performance in a few countries outside Europe. Notably, the Asia continent has better speed.

DigitalOcean speed

DigitalOcean offers excellent speed across all continents.

Storage

Contabo storage

Despite Contabo offering SSD storage, they have terrible read/write speed. The speed is throttled down on purpose.

Therefore, you won’t get the best speed of an SSD. The usage is divided; you can expect up to 100 MBps of speed.

They also offer NVMe storage which has an average performance.

The base plan offers 50 GB NVMe or 200 GB SSD.

Here’s a quick overview of object storage.

DigitalOcean storage

DigitalOcean offers SSD with fantastic speed.

The base plan starts with 10 GiB of storage.

Network

Contabo network

The outgoing traffic is limited to 32 TB, whereas incoming traffic is unlimited. The port speed is at 100 Mbps for VPS plans.

The VPS is often down due to maintenance.

The overall network speed is too slow.

• Download: 45 Mbit/s
• Upload: 97 Mbit/s

DigitalOcean network

DigitalOcean doesn’t offer any guarantee on network speed. However, each droplet is capable of pushing up to 2 Gbps. As per reviews, you will get enough speed.

Coming to bandwidth, they have limited bandwidths starting at 500 GB per month.

The servers hosted by fdcservers.net (Frankfurt) [0.53 km] gave a great speed of 1.545 ms

• Download: 30 Mbit/s
• Upload: 01 Mbit/s

Contabo Vs. DigitalOcean: Security

Contabo

• You can install a firewall from the software level. However, it lacks support.
• They have DDoS protection. However, it’s pretty unreliable. (If an attack occurs, your IP is null and unrouted at Contabo within a few seconds. If your VPS is null routed, it becomes unreachable. So, you can expect protection only from minor attacks. If the attack continues, they will disable your IP and even suspend your account for a couple of days.)
• SSL certificates are a paid add-on.

DigitalOcean

• They don’t provide DDoS protection. So, if you are using their droplets, you are pretty much on your own. However, they recommend using Cloudflare anti-DDoS feature to protect your cloud.
• They are improving their service and security monitoring mechanism, which ensures excellent protection.
• You can only use their free SSL if your domain’s nameservers are registered with DigitalOcean.

Contabo Vs. DigitalOcean: Support

Contabo

• Their support is not available 24/7.
• The ticket support is extremely slow. It might even take several days to get a proper answer.
• Their slow support even creates problems with their 14-day money-back guarantee. So you might not be able to cancel them.
• The technical support is quite limited as the staff doesn’t have enough knowledge to handle significant issues.
• You can submit a ticket or use their phone support.

DigitalOcean

• DigitalOcena offers 24/7 support.
• You can request support via their forum, ticket, email, and even social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook).
• The support is often slow.
• As they are unmanaged hosting services, you can expect a bit of slow support.

Contabo Vs. DigitalOcean: Pricing

You can pay via credit card or PayPal for both of these hosting providers.

Contabo

• The pricing starts at $8.49. If you go with a less than 12-month plan, a small setup fee is charged up to $8.49.
• They even charge up to $3.50/m if you select another location except Germany.
• You can request a refund within 14 days. It’s relatively short, but we can count it as an advantage as most VPS providers don’t offer money-back.

DigitalOcean

• The plan starts at $4 per month. If you wish to use your droplets only for a specific time, you will benefit from DO as they charge per hour.
• There is no setup fee, nor will you have to pay extra for specific data centers.
• There is a 60-day trial.
• Strick identification process is sometimes a big problem which even leads to suspension.

Conclusion

Contabo is a cheap option with average service. On the other hand, DigtialOcean requires a bit of technical knowledge to handle your server.

Use Contabo if:

• You want to use it for personal projects or small business projects.
• Your web apps are burner projects or experimental.
• You want to host your side projects here with some occasional downtime.
• Your target audience is the Asian market.

Visit Contabo

Use DigitalOcean if:

• You have the technical knowledge, or you are a developer/system admin.
• You want to use it with excellent uptime for your apps, blogs, and websites.
• Your main goal is to host it for a sandbox or staging environment.
• You or your team want to manage the server on your own.

Visit DigitalOcean