Been on a Cloud VPS 20 with them since early 2024. It hosts my Nextcloud, a Gitea instance, Uptime Kuma and a few Docker side projects. 12 GB of RAM for what they charge is still hard to beat anywhere I've looked. Know what you're buying though. The vCPUs are shared and you can see steal time in htop during European working hours, so anything CPU heavy runs noticeably slower than on my Hetzner box. Disk is fast, no complaints there. Uptime has been decent for me. Two unplanned outages so far, one about 40 minutes, plus a maintenance reboot announced with very little notice. Support tickets get answered but slowly and the first reply is usually a template, so I don't count on them for anything. The panel looks old but does what I need: reinstall, snapshots, rescue mode. I keep restic backups off the server anyway. For self hosting by someone who can manage Linux it's great value. I wouldn't put a client's shop on it.
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A score out of 100. Negative and mixed reviews take points off, and so does having only a few reviews, so a handful of glowing reviews can’t beat a product many people like.
Cheap for the specs, and some customers run it for years without trouble.
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Customer reviews (361)
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Good for a month, then performance dropped until completely offline for three days with no support.
Contabo had horrible drive latency of 70-120 ms, poor support, and the machine became unusable after two weeks so they sought a refund.
Contabo is very cheap but their VPS went down without notice and stayed down for two days.
Used Contabo for a couple of years; performance and support were really bad and the hosts were heavily over-provisioned.
Server was offline three days and no support channel replied.
Fine for development but outages take weeks to fix and support is unreachable.
After a Black Friday upgrade the new node performed badly; support admitted it and three weeks later still no fix.
Support would not respond during outages and afterwards said they saw no problems on their end.
Production e-commerce down 72+ hours after maintenance and support sent a canned reply without reading logs.
Reported a demonstrated networking issue and support asked for root credentials instead of investigating.
A server of four years just disappeared with no notification, reason or communication.
Control panel broke so payment was not possible and tickets went unanswered.
Fourteen years on Contabo, which got so bad in recent years the poster moved to netcup.
Contabo server frequently down, a six-hour outage with a status page showing no incidents, and a joke of a customer service.
VPS deleted two days before a written payment extension deadline and no backups were kept.
Game-server VPS froze constantly with 1-10 second lags; benchmarks showed throttled CPU and support sent generic replies.
VPS went offline for a week and a ticket got no reply until they phoned the German support number.
Paid for Sydney but got Singapore routing, wildly variable speeds and support insisting otherwise.
Contabo VPS dropped off the network every two hours; another node was taking the IP and support asked for the root password.
Dedicated server was down over 106 hours with no resolution or technical update, and the status page showed nothing.
Says Contabo took down their stuff without notice for maintenance and support was even worse, so they switched to Vultr.
Contabo VPS support is slow and had downtime, so the poster is hesitant to use it as primary host.
Worst support ever and the EU location was fully down for days several times; only the St Louis location is stable.
Support was horrible with unannounced maintenance and servers down for many days.
Contabo is slow with old hardware and poor support.
Left Contabo after a two-week outage that was communicated only after it was resolved.
Says Contabo's real-world performance does not match the paper specs and support is close to non-existent.
IPv6 connectivity issues across 10 rented servers and dodgy support ended Contabo as their first choice.
Four years in, the last straw after over-provisioning, uptime issues and unannounced reboots.
Contabo had 20-30% CPU steal, bad support and a reactivation fee after they deactivated the server.
VPS took 24 hours to provision and support answered only after they asked for a refund.
Calls Contabo unreliable with disconnecting chat support, reactivation fees and an unrequested plan upgrade.
A dedicated server goes down every 2-3 months with days-long tickets and a dashboard with no IPMI.
A Contabo VPS could not receive HTTP traffic and repeated support contacts did not solve it, so they shut it down and tried Hetzner.
Could not SSH in production and support insisted the server was working, forcing a full reinstall.
Was satisfied at first but got locked out over a phishing claim and had to pay 41.40 euros to regain access.
Stable for six months then 48-plus hours of downtime twice in three days with non-existent support.
Support chat gave copy-pasted answers and confirmed the annual discount was not recurring after a price increase.
After an Easter upgrade, nothing but problems and DNS would not resolve across reinstalls.
Support ghosted them for three weeks while their server was apparently cloned with the same IP and MAC, and Contabo broke its own SLA.
Two years in, long unexpected downtime, weak support and no compensation.
After many good years, a new plan's server vanishes every hour for weeks and support cannot be reached.
Dedicated hardware is unbeatable for the price, but one server kept losing network and support could not fix it.
Several-year customer told by email they will not be sold any new products for unexplained internal reasons.
48+ hours of downtime with tickets and phone unanswered.
Support is virtually non-existent and a server outage lasted 44 hours with only snarky emails, so they restored a backup elsewhere.
Contabo is cheap but messy: slow support, random shutdowns and restarts, and CPU specs changing.
Support insisted VPSs be reimaged to add a private network interface so they cancelled the add-on.
Servers were rebooted at peak hours on five minutes' notice and many never came back online.
Paid first and only then was asked for lots of sensitive information by email.
Had a server re-provisioned without warning when asking about an upgrade, with no apology or compensation.
Very bad experience with Contabo, especially support, versus good Hetzner and OVH.
Nothing but trouble with Contabo support staff.
Server deleted after five years when a payment failed while the customer was travelling.
VPS stopped for two days from a host-node problem with no ETA and unanswered messages.
Server deleted after one failed auto-payment with no reminder, taking the website and data offline.
Bought a service that was never delivered and says they lost about 80 euros; PayPal sided with them.
Contabo support is the worst experienced.
Long-time Contabo user says customer service has really gone downhill over the past five years.
Contabo cancels the VPS if attacked and keeps prepaid money.
Five years on Contabo but the server is unusable and support has not answered for two days.
Multiple 24-hour-plus outages in a month, and support praised its own quick resolution.
Servers were slow enough that whoami took 30 seconds and support took three days to reply.
A client's VM was down two days for unplanned maintenance that the status page never mentioned and support ignored contact.
Client sites ran fine for a few months then had regular unannounced downtime, server relocation and poor support.
Cheap but weekly problems and support that can take two days to answer while VPS or VDS are down.
Second server had terrible disk performance that support only briefly improved, so they moved to Hetzner.
Top-tier VPS slow for eight days, SSH unusable and support emails unanswered.
Reports the worst customer support, frequent networking problems and slow replies; moved to OVH.
Contabo support was very good for years but has not kept up with their growth.
After 2.5 quiet years, outages of several hours in January and over 30 hours in March, with a ticket answered a week later.
After over 10 years and a dozen servers they are leaving over extra fees, payment-gateway suspensions, slow support and no firewalls.
Best price to performance for cheap Asia VPS but slow support and several planned and unplanned maintenance windows.
Two weeks of downtime, a very slow VPS, vague support and a refused refund forced a bank dispute.
VPS shut down without warning and emails to support went unanswered for days.
VPS unreachable for a full day with nothing on the status site; support said the VPS cluster was overloaded.
Dusseldorf VPS servers were down with no reaction and the phone line closed until morning.
After six years, asked support to migrate a production VPS that kept crashing on host-side errors.
Had the same problem for weeks and was charged for server installation that left drivers uninstalled.
Common questions about Contabo
What do customers say about Contabo?
Cheap for the specs, and some customers run it for years without trouble. Many others report outages, sometimes lasting days, slow or templated support, and slower real-world performance than advertised from overselling. Happier users tend to run side projects or non-critical services on it.
Is Contabo worth it?
Of the 211 reviews with a clear verdict, 29% are positive, 16% mixed and 55% negative. The praise mentioned most is reliable. The most common complaint is outages.
What do people like about Contabo?
The praise reviewers mention most: reliable (43 reviews), great value (37 reviews) and helpful support (16 reviews). For example: Five years that were pretty solid, though it depends on which node the VPS lands on and the CPU steal there.
What are the most common complaints about Contabo?
The complaints reviewers mention most: outages (63 reviews), poor support (61 reviews) and slow (41 reviews). For example: Server died and would not boot or reinstall; support fixed it with some magic but they would not trust Contabo.
What does the signal score of 67 mean?
It's how well reviewed Contabo is, out of 100. Negative and mixed reviews take points off, and so does having only a few reviews: a service needs plenty of them, compared with the most-reviewed services here, to reach the high 80s and 90s. It's worked out from reviews only, needs at least 5 of them, and updates as new ones come in.
What are the specs of Contabo?
Category: VPS hosting.
Where do these Contabo reviews come from?
360 are quotes from Reddit, each linked to the original. 1 was written by customers here. Customer reviews are checked for spam before they appear. Every review, written here or quoted, is read as positive, mixed or negative.