Contabo Hosting is one of those hosting companies that offer higher value at cheap rates and combines technical expertise with customer-focused service in its shared, dedicated, and VPS hosting packages.
Current Pricing: $3.99/month
Contabo Pros
High Value to Your Money
Self-installable applications
99.99% Up Time
Free SSLs and Unlimited Traffic
Free Domain Included
Contabo Cons
Advanced hosting solution
Limited Online Support
Domain is provided only with hosting
No Live Chat Support
How Contabo differs from other hosting providers
Contabo has 10 data centers in the EU, USA, Singapore, and the UK. Contabo’s objective is to offer hosting and server packages at competitive costs and huge discounts.
It offers shared hosting, VPS and dedicated servers, and each of those services has several plans to choose from.
Contabo offers self-installable applications and it is very easy to operate multi-sites like WordPress through its cPanel.
The fundamental objective of the cpanel of Contabo is to facilitate the administration of the servers and the websites. Contabo also offers “Website Builder” to create a website, design and customize it in a few steps.
Features & Services
Contabo is a good All in One Hosting and supports all small websites hosted on the Shared plan. That includes hosting online stores, business sites, blogs, portfolios etc. It also has options to upgrade for when your site gets traffic.
Contabo Pricing
Shared Plan
(per month)
- 50 GB Space
- 1 Free Domain
- 1,000 Email Accounts
- 20 MySQL Databases
VPS Plan
(per month)
- 4vCPU Cores
- 200 GB Space
- or 50GB NVMe
- 8GB RAM
Dedicated Plan
(per month)
- 8 Physical Cores
- 64GB RAM
- 480GB NVMe Storage
- 32TB Traffic
Hosting Features
Contabo offers several hosting packages designed to meet the requirements of websites both large and small.
Contabo Dedicated Servers
Contabo offers five dedicated server options to choose from.
Dedicated servers can be configured prior to ordering, with basic specifications listed under dedicated server hosting package. Both Linux and Windows operating systems can be availed with RAID storage as standard.
Whether you’re running services and apps in staging or production environments, Contabo’s six global Regions give you reliable service with minimal latency and SLA-backed availability.
Dedicated plan price starts from $137.99 per month offering 8 physical cores, 64GB RAM, 480GB NVMe Disk Space.
Most importantly, Contabo also offers a Server Outlet feature to customize your dedicated plan according to your requirement.
VPS Hosting
I have found that while the RAM, CPU and transfer allowances are excellent, it doesn’t quite have the sheer network speed that you’d get from Vultr High Frequency, or Digital Ocean premium droplets. I’d still recommend Digital Ocean high frequency if you are after pure performance per $, you can get a free Digital Ocean trial here too:
However, if you just need the highest amount of server resources to host multiple websites or other resource-hungry applications (file sharing, game servers, video hosting) then Contabo maybe the perfect choice for you.
Contabo offers two type of VPS hostings: Cloud VPS and Cloud VDS.
Cloud VPS package starts from $8.49 offering 4vCPU Cores, 50GB NVMe and 8GB RAM that is much better than any conventional hard drive option and gives you more storage space at a lower cost, and an SSD upgrade gives you faster read and write speeds. You’ll also need to choose your specific plan, and the option that’s right for you depends on the amount of CPU, RAM, storage space, and bandwidth you need for your site.
Cloud VDS combines the best of both Cloud VPS and Dedicated Servers so that you can run the most intensive compute workloads. Each VDS comes with 100% dedicated RAM, processors, and Enterprise-grade NVMe SSD storage. This package starts from $57.99 offering 3 physical cores (AMD EPYC 7282 2.8 GHz), 24GB RAM and 180GB NVMe disk space.
How Contabo Compares to Other VPS Providers
Contabo has a huge advantage over other VPS providers: their resources are usually 4-8 times more than those of their competitors. However, the trade-off is that the network speed is limited to 200 Mbit / s. This does not affect most VPS users, as it is usually more than enough bandwidth.
Contabo VPS Plans Include:
Regardless of which disk storage option you choose, you can run either Linux or Windows on your VPS environment.
All plans come with:
- Root access
- Web interface reboot capability
- Access to OS installation and management
- VNC access
- 1 dedicated IP address
- DNS management
- Unlimited number of domains
Webspace Packages
Shared hosting is available through Contabo, under the name of webspace packages.
Disk space, MySQL databases, and email addresses are limited, but more than enough if you are planning to launch your website from fresh.
Webspace packages offer the use of SSL certificates, PHP, WordPress, Joomla, Typo3, and Magento, there’s a one-click installer featuring 300+ web applications. You’ll also receive protection against DDoS attacks.
Share plan price starts from $3.99 offering 50GB space, 1 Free Domain and 20 MySQL Databases.
Domain Name
Contabo is also a domain name registrar, you can register a new domain name or transfer an existing domain name to the company but you must be a Contabo customer to take advantage of the company’s domain name services. Currently, Contabo offers over 300 domain extensions.
However, it offers at least one domain name for free with the purchase of any hosting package.
All domains registered with Contabo come with a client control panel that makes it simple to create and update different DNS records with ease.
If you haven’t purchased a domain before, don’t worry, I have published a detailed article to buy domains from top domain registrars. One of these methods will also get you a free domain name for the first year.
Contabo offers a number of email accounts as compared to other hosting providers in the same package range.
The number of email accounts you can configure depends on the plan you have purchased.
For the plan “WebSpace Package M” gives 1000 email accounts. The “WebSpace Package L” plan includes 2000 mail accounts, the “WebSpace Package XL” plan brings 5000 mail accounts and finally the “WebSpace Package XXL” plan offers unlimited mail accounts.
Backup
Contabo offers a backup plugin that allows users to store encrypted backups via FTP. There is also another service, 100% Auto Backup, which provides automatic and regular backup of all the content in the web hosting account.
With this plugin, daily, weekly, and monthly backups are performed, but to recover a backup, customers must contact support to request a file.
There doesn’t seem to be any free backup solution included with any plan.
Contabo Performance
The host is pretty fast for the most part, in fact it scored 99/100 in the Google PageSpeed Insight test running the Kadence WordPress theme.
However, this is a rush. The network speed is 200 Mbit/s, much lower than the 1+ Gbit you’ll find elsewhere. However, you can still host a large number of websites with a web host. For example, you won’t have any problem if you are streaming a video from a host. This network size becomes the only reason for heavy traffic.
Final Words
I have looked at dozens of VPS hosts over the years, but have always ended up going with one of the big guys. I’m glad to have found Contabo. Their performance is similar to the big boys, but their prices are much lower. You can get a VPS with more resources for less money with Contabo.
But if you are a non-techie then it may consume your time to get used to their operating environment.
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