Contabo Review: Plans, Prices & Specs

What Contabo is

Contabo GmbH is a German hosting company founded in Munich in April 2003 (originally as Giga-International) and still headquartered there. It sells unmanaged KVM virtual servers, dedicated-core virtual servers, storage-heavy VPS, bare-metal dedicated servers and object storage, and its own company history page puts the fleet at roughly 450,000 servers across nine regions and eleven data centers. The positioning has not changed in twenty years: far more RAM and disk per dollar than the mainstream clouds, with a plainer feature set.

Who it is for

Contabo fits people who know their way around a Linux command line and want capacity rather than managed convenience: self-hosted mail and file servers, CMS and WordPress stacks, development and staging boxes, backup targets, Docker hosts, small SaaS backends and self-hosted AI tooling. It is not a fit for anyone who needs per-second billing, a managed application platform, or a hand-holding support tier included in the price.

Pricing and the billing model

There is no hourly billing. You buy a contract term of 1, 3, 6, 12 or 24 months, and the longer the prepayment, the lower the effective monthly rate. The price shown on Contabo’s product pages is the effective monthly rate on a 24-month term, and the fine print under the tables says so explicitly. The entry Cloud VPS 4 (4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 100 GB SSD) is $6.60 a month on a 1-month term and $5.28 a month on 24 months; Cloud VPS 8 (8 vCPU, 24 GB RAM, 300 GB SSD) is $16.80 versus $13.44. The price-to-spec ratio is the whole story here: 8 GB of RAM for $6.60 a month, or 24 GB for $16.80, is several times the memory per dollar of a comparable shared-CPU instance at DigitalOcean or Akamai/Linode, and the trade is older CPU generations on the Core line and no per-hour flexibility.

Setup fees and location fees

The one-time setup fee that Contabo has charged for years has not disappeared. Their Max Performance VPS FAQ states that the setup fee applies to entry-level Cloud VPS 10 and Storage VPS 10 plans on 1-month and 6-month terms, does not apply to any plan on a 12-month contract, and does not apply to Max Performance VPS at all; dedicated servers are advertised with “No Setup Fees”. The checkout wording confirms the mechanic is live: “This price includes Setup Fees and any One Off charges. You can discount your Setup Fee by selecting a longer Prepayment term.” The Core VPS page itself says all VPS plans come with no setup fee, and “No Setup Fee” promo badges appear on some products; the amount is never published, only calculated in the configurator.

The second charge to watch is the location fee. The base price is for the European Union region. On Cloud VPS 4, Contabo’s own add-on data adds $1.30 a month for US Central or the UK, $1.60 for US West, $1.90 for US East, $2.65 for Australia, $3.00 for India, $3.10 for Singapore and $3.15 for Japan.

Bandwidth and network

Traffic is sold as unlimited rather than metered, so there is no per-terabyte overage price to quote. Incoming traffic is unlimited and unmetered with no extra charges; outgoing traffic is unlimited subject to a fair-usage policy, and Contabo reserves the right to throttle servers with exceptionally high or disruptive usage. Port speeds run from 200 Mbit/s on the cheapest plans to 1 Gbps on larger ones, with a 10 Gbps option on the top dedicated servers, and the dedicated-server page notes that some locations such as Australia and Japan have specific transfer rates.

Support and management

Everything is unmanaged by default: you get root or RDP access, a customer control panel, an API and CLI that work with Terraform, cloud-init and custom ISO uploads. Support is advertised as 24/7, 365 days a year, through live chat, tickets and phone. If you want someone else to run the box, a Managed option is sold as an add-on at $144.99 a month, and control panels are licensed separately: Plesk Web Admin $15, Web Pro $25 and Web Host $45 a month, cPanel/WHM from $27.50 for five accounts, with Webmin free and Plesk free for the first month.

Backups and snapshots

Snapshots are included, one to three on Core VPS and five on Performance VPS, with 30-day retention. Auto Backup is a paid add-on, $2 a month on Cloud VPS 4, and gives daily off-server backups kept for ten days with two-click restore; Contabo lists it for Cloud VPS with Storage VPS and VDS support planned. Separate FTP backup space runs from $5.79 for 100 GB to $45.99 for 2 TB a month.

Verdict

Contabo is the value play in this market rather than the convenience play. Nobody else sells this much RAM and disk at these monthly prices in nine regions, and the billing is transparent once you understand that the headline number is the 24-month rate. The costs to budget for are the higher 1-month rate, the location fee outside the EU, the possible setup fee on entry plans with short terms, and the fact that support ends where the operating system begins. There is no free trial, no published money-back guarantee, and no hourly billing, so treat each order as a commitment for at least a month.