The verdict
Contabo is a German provider famous for offering exceptionally high specs — RAM, storage and vCPUs — at some of the lowest prices in the industry, popular for self-managed projects, game servers, and storage-heavy workloads.
The full picture
Contabo is a German provider founded in Munich in 2003 that sells one thing better than anyone: quantity. For the price of a small instance elsewhere, a Contabo VPS gives you four or eight vCPU cores, eight to thirty gigabytes of RAM and hundreds of gigabytes of storage. For workloads that need headroom more than they need peak single-thread speed — game servers, development environments, media libraries, self-hosted applications, backup targets — the value is hard to argue with.
The trade-offs are consistent and well documented by its users. The CPU cores are shared and can be contended during busy periods, storage is often SATA or slower NVMe rather than the fastest tier unless you pay for the NVMe option, provisioning can take hours rather than seconds, and support is email-based with a slower cadence than a cloud provider. Snapshots and backups are extras.
Contabo is not a cloud in the modern sense, and it is not trying to be. It is cheap, large virtual machines from a company that owns its own data centres in Germany and rents capacity in nine other regions worldwide.
What you get
- High RAM-to-price ratio
- NVMe & object storage options
- Multiple global regions
- Snapshot backups
- Root access included
Every hosting type it sells
| Product | From | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud VPS | $4.99/mo | Large shared-core instances with generous RAM and storage. |
| VDS | $29.99/mo | Dedicated cores for consistent performance. |
| Dedicated servers | $49/mo | Bare metal from its own German facilities. |
| Object storage | $2.99/mo | S3-compatible storage priced well below hyperscaler rates. |
| Web hosting | $3.99/mo | Basic shared hosting, a minor part of the catalogue. |
Plans & pricing
- 3 vCPU
- 8 GB RAM
- 6 vCPU
- 16 GB RAM
What the price actually costs you
- A one-off setup fee applies to many plans — factor it into the first month.
- Prices are among the lowest per gigabyte of RAM anywhere.
- Backups and some storage upgrades are paid add-ons.
- Billing is monthly with no long contract, but no money-back guarantee.
Technical specification
| Control panel | Customer control panel; cPanel, Plesk and Webmin available as options |
|---|---|
| Virtualisation | KVM, with shared cores on VPS and dedicated cores on VDS |
| Storage | SSD standard, NVMe optional, very large capacities included |
| Traffic | 32TB included per month on most VPS plans in Europe |
| Operating systems | All major Linux distributions plus Windows Server licences |
| Backups | Auto-backup available as a paid add-on, snapshots included on newer plans |
| Locations | Germany, United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, Japan, Australia, India |
| Provisioning | Can take hours rather than minutes, especially on first order |
| Support | Email and ticket support, no live chat |
| Uptime SLA | 99.9% network availability |
Performance in practice
Generous on paper and variable in practice. RAM and storage are exactly as advertised and enormous for the money; CPU is shared on the standard VPS range and can be contended, which shows up as inconsistent response times under load. The VDS range with dedicated cores fixes this and still undercuts most competitors. Storage speed depends on which tier you buy, so specify NVMe if input and output matters.
Infrastructure & support
Support channels
- Ticket system
- Email support
Data centers
- Germany
- United States (St. Louis, MO)
- Singapore
- Japan
- Australia
Security & compliance
- DDoS protection included at the network level
- ISO 27001 certified German data centres owned by the company
- Snapshots on newer plans and paid automatic backups
- Private networking available between instances in the same region
- Operating system patching and hardening are entirely your responsibility
Moving a site in
Self-service only. Custom ISO and rescue system support make moving an existing image in straightforward for a competent administrator, but there is no migration assistance.
The trade-off
In its favour
- Unbeatable specs per dollar
- Good for storage-heavy apps
- Multiple worldwide regions
Worth knowing
- Support response can be slow
- Fully self-managed
Who should look elsewhere
- Latency-sensitive or CPU-bound production workloads on the shared-core tier
- Anyone needing fast provisioning or live chat support
- Managed hosting buyers — everything here is self-administered
- Workloads that need a rich managed service catalogue
The company behind it
| Ownership | Backed by Oakley Capital since 2019 |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Munich, Germany |
| Founded | 2003 |
| Scale | Hundreds of thousands of servers across 10+ global regions |
| Notable | Among the lowest cost per gigabyte of RAM in the industry |
How it got here
- 2003 Founded in Munich as a dedicated server provider.
- 2012 Launches the low-cost VPS range that defines its reputation.
- 2019 Receives investment from Oakley Capital and begins global expansion.
- 2021 Opens data centres in the United States, Singapore, Japan and Australia.
- 2023 Adds S3-compatible object storage and NVMe storage options.
Common questions
Is Contabo good for beginners?
It is better suited to users comfortable managing their own server stack.
The bottom line
Unbeatable for cheap bulk compute and storage: development environments, self-hosted applications, media servers and backup targets. Pay for the VDS dedicated-core tier if the workload is production, specify NVMe if disk speed matters, and do not expect cloud-grade provisioning or support.