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Contabo offers crazy cheap specifications - What are the reviews and experiences?
aniirban101
Member
in Reviews
I came across this provider called Contabo which offers plans like 6gigs of ram at around 7 EUR. Their plans are listed in this page: https://contabo.com/?show=vps
If anybody has used their vps, I want to know about the experience and also the system benchmarks. Also how can they be profitable after offering plans like these?
Comments
Oooooooverrrrsell
Contabo has a somewhat questionable reputation among LET.
In Germany and on their FB people seem almost overall positive about their performance and pricing and I even know 2-3 friends who use them for Gameserver hosting.
The reason I never choose to go with them yet is this:
You can't even use that 100 Mbit/s without limitation. Lots of new providers offer 1 Gbit/s shared port yet they are stuck at 60 Mbit/s if used continously..
Other than that the way they make money is probably overselling (who would have thought that?! haha) and owned hardware?!
For me there really was no other reason to not try them out since they are a local provider (I am from Germany) but somehow I never felt like going for it. There were always some little aspects as mentioned above that held me back.
With that price though just try them out and report back in full :P
Their old brand Giga.. was having a somewhat bad reputation attracting Hackers etc but that seems to be a thing of the past.
I reviewed them a long time ago but nothing really important or demanding on the resources. I don't really get what the deal is with associating them with overselling when US LEBs are following shortly behind with similar offers.
The owner has a very shady past, ran an advertising network and left with a lot of unpaid ad revenue.
Does this apply to Quadix which is rebranding of VolumeDrive and what they did to BurstNET?
Well, its possible to do but you can be absolutely sure they are thin provisioning disk space as it is around 1 year ROI for the disk space alone never mind everything else, not necessarily a bad thing it allows greater density while providing prices people want.
No harm in using them, just have a good exit strategy if things do not work out 6 - 12 - 18 months down the line.
This and some other things that never became public. I would avoid them at all cost, but that's just me.
The rename of the company is also... weird... from the outside it looks a lot like moving assets for (we have the word 'Insolvenzverschleppung', "delayed insolvency filing for profit/flee etc.") or to avoid legal issues (generally court orders need to be re-done on rename and investigations are delayed).
Aside of the ad stuff and the extremely strange - designed to be not verifiable by customer also - BW limits i did expect them to go bankrupt much earlier at this prices, but somehow they survive.
Power in Bavaria is not cheap (Summer also hot, god) and their HW is not too old, they have either insane ROI or i miss something.
Generally, would use but not prepay for longer or expect to survive, it's not Leaseweb or Hetzner.
Had VPS, CPU was crap, RAM seemingly "dedicated" but not tested - Network meh, got kicked then for DDoS (justified) and refunded, not accepting new orders from me now either (always refunded with no ticket reply or any info).
No, as they did nothing directly criminal (Burst however later did.) - an ad network not paying for services rendered is a federal crime in Germany, namely depending on amount Betrug (Fraud) or Schwerer Betrug (major Fraud), and/or Vorsätzlicher Betrug (Intentional fraud) if there was no intention to pay at all form start.
All of these can get you jail (some mandatory), up to 10 years: https://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/263.html
They used to have some serious issues with DDoS back in the days, mid-size attacks took down their whole DC.
I actually had a dedi with them in 2013 and it was ok. Seems like they have finally invested in some DDoS protection now.
Hum, we can do that, except for the disk, that is insane disk amount, we sold cheaper with discount similar specs some years ago (no unlimited bw (2 TB traffic), twice the cores, real 1 gbps port and 8 times less disk)
Contabo is in business as a trademark for a long time, I have no idea about their accounting and companies, but if they survive in Germany doing that, they are either good at it, or follow the law. Either way, 2 thumbs up!
Looks like a decent storage for backups you don't need very fast, CPU is probably designed to be crap, as disk is most likely very cheap and slow, so until you hit disk limitation, you will hit CPU one, kinda insurance. You can't run much DB or gameservers, you don't need much RAM either, except you really know how to cache and have some app which benefits a lot from caching.
I can see some scenarios for usage there, at any rate, for any usage there is someone cheap out there, this is why it is best to have so many providers, competition and diversification
You have impressive theories in how good German laws are enforced also, money laundry is easier around there than in RO/BG (aka you just open a Döner store) but not like here in Croatia (unemployment is official 20%+ but i see everyone working, nobody pays income tax seemingly) and if the criminal is not German/in Germany the interest in investigations is... yea, no.
In an such a network you also have a funny side that the customer is most likely not running 100% legit sites either with this ads on, so not going to cops, which is ironic (or can be seen as intention, but that is for a court)...
Long time is...? Burst.net was in business since forever also, can mean things but usually does not - financing is more interesting, DO is not old but having VC cash/cash guarantees is better than a closed owner GmbH (same as SRL to you, just more expensive to open) as Contabo (or even Hetzner).
It's a transparency as well as an accountability thing in a way, the investors want money which keeps them in check of the company while a sole owner with full liability might be running to the ground.
IIRC (my VPS had a 2TB disk, still the same i assume now in use, not sure if it said SSD boosted then also) the performance of the HDD was ok, not dedicated levels but surely 50MB/s each way. I assumed back then it was one HDD in a larger array per user (RAID6 w/ 10 = 8 users), probably now same with 1/2 SSDs on LSI/similar HW caching.
CPU/Network was the main issue (both useless), RAM had IIRC the kernel sharing module loaded allowing memory deduplication but you can just blacklist the module and get "dedicated" RAM.
@Maounique: You have no and I say it again: no idea about the guys behind that shop. Will not say more in this thread, but please refrain from putting your thumbs up. Simpler people might take it as a recommendation when it's coming from you.
That costs 20 Eur now, storage of 1 TB is around 10 Eur mark these days.
Well, I always assume there are better and easier ways to make money than run such a shop, a runner pulls it fast, these are not the regular constantinos, if they are indeed that shady, it may very well be a cover up for illegal things, i.e., we get a lot of shady customers, in all that noise, we can easily pretend we missed some check or something when police comes to the door and say have no identification data to show.
Otherwise, it would take too much effort for too little money for too long.
I never recommend something implicitly, 2 thumbs up is for being able to keep afloat if they are so well known for shady things. Or two thumbs down for the police, as William said, maybe police does suck in DE, I know for sure it sucks in Italy, but it is not that bad in Romania.
For now i coined "Pulling an Ecatel" for the more extreme side and "Pulling a Voxility" for getting shit at by everyone and stopping your money generator earlier... not sure if we have to coin "Pulling a Contabo" at one point and for what
I have dealt with them since 2003 or earlier, iirc, they offered a VoIP service (that is why the name Voxility) and I have used at my company for cheap international calls first, then cheap local calls, they were cheaper than Romtelecom even when calling Romtelecom compared to Romtelecom-Romtelecom calls. Voxility is just one of the numerous companies created by Romtelecom, through outrageous monopoly pricing and very bad service. People literally were dead for decades when they finally reached you to install the phone, even in the nineties, they have not cleared the backlog from communist times.
The problem was they did not carry fax signals correctly, so, eventually, since my company at that time was faxing extensively, changed them for GTS. I have dealt with their support many times, saying, hey, Sweden number x or y does not work for faxing, they say, ok, try now, and it usually worked, but stopped working again in a month or two, so it wasn't really acceptable, having to route calls depending on so many prefixes and from some extensions only, those with faxes, we had a TDA 100 with dialers, because they did not support the direct connection for VoIP, what to say, was a mess, but the prices from Romtelecom were so unreal, I did it more in spite because i hated them from the late nineties when I had a rented line for 4K internet access which was more like 2.5 at best and dropped whenever the wind gently pushed a bit the wires and costed 100 USD a month which was huge for a romanian at that time. That money can now buy me 1 Gbps line "clear channel" sorta, i.e. behaves like one
Was that GTS international at the time or GTS RO? GTS is... complicated, but a large player especially in CZ and HU, did not know they did much RO though (Business only? They have much transport going down, but not really end-users).
Yea, solution, what i did manage at a former job for a UA location, is VOIP usually - ASA/Software router there, route back to provider with sense or a local office to beat someone up. ASA UA -> DTAG DE -> Public. But yea, relies on your internet quality then.
Well well well, they did not want to renew the lines in either communist or private times (and still do not want to, i know someone in Cluj (Marasti, one of the communist massive blocks) with 1024kbit ADSL, his DB indicates 5km(!) wire, just loss by quality on maybe half a km real) - same everywhere. Costs too much and MAYBE they even realised copper has no future. Though likely not, just the cost too high. He has fiber now with 300Mbit, for half the price.
Your luck is fiber/HFC and not much regulation/total ignorance (similar to JP wiring on poles en masse, but gov) then, while Asia just never really had copper/destroyed and wired up entire cities (HK, JP, even CN now) with fiber.
Africa turned into mobile and long haul wireless mecca and the US is a bit of everything by vast size and different geography/population density/etc. EU sadly, nothing really working out for now, i still hope for FTTH or at least "fake FTTH" (GPON) everywhere
GTS the good guys. They called when the "lady with the vacuum cleaner" unplugged something for a minute, they monitored the connection that much.
It was an arm and a leg, though, compared with what appeared after a year, so we had to ditch them as their pricing was inflexible, but never had an issue while it lasted.
They had to, as the communist lines were aluminium, at least the last mile, but connections are, indeed, very meh, I had to climb the pole and clean up their mess as I had intermittent contact about half the day for both humidity and wind. It was so bad, people said even phone lines didn't work enough to be usable. Then they started using contractors :P
They did realize copper has no future, bringing fiber on new lines, I have my own line to the router, unlike RDS with the damned PPPoE and UTP, but while I have static IP finally, I lost IPv6 natively which RDS had so I have to tunnel.
There are still vDSL lines in the country, probably still deploying because not every city is a netcity, as the saying goes, however, some 10 years ago, vDSL2 I had was pretty impressive, for the time, 100/30 with TV on, I think, I heard even in some relatively small villages they reach with 30 mbps.
But who cares, people remote will use wireless of some sort, those in cities too, if not really after big speeds and low latencies, Telekom saw it is fiber or die in the towns, if they do not see it in Cluj, that is probably because they were kicked out of the market already and it is not worth it maintaining the infrastructure. Bucharest is still on their map, there were many people with Romtelecom which still kept their lines never changing since before 1989.
Since they didn't change when alternatives were 1/2, 1/4 of the price, wont change now when it is about the market price.
VDSL generally made/makes sense if you have a lot of customers near the DSLAM/exchange, you can at times wire up half+ the population of an entire town with just the center - good to reuse copper on one side, but bad as it delays the inevitable fiber deployment on the other. If the profit of this would be bound to be used for new fiber i would much more like it.
They have an office there, which is like 50 people (compare to BUC where they should still have a large building and hundreds) and the support staff is meh, the city also has lots of expats by now (or time living foreigners like i plan at one point for some months) which expect English/German... that they don't really do contract and support wise..
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ro&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https://www.birouinfo.ro/articol/stiri/Telekom-ramane-inca-cinci-ani-in-birourile-City-Gate-din-Piata-Presei-Tranzactia-arunca-in-aer-o-intelegere-semnata-in-2014-cu-Papalekas&edit-text=
hehe yea, i see where that modernisation money for the copper network went and what Chinese corporation bribes them with HW deals