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Thinking of getting a Contabo VPS...
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Thinking of getting a Contabo VPS...

fixxationfixxation Member
edited August 2021 in General

I'm thinking of getting a Contabo server, specifically a "VPS M"-- definitely big value here. However, my application is time-sensitive and I'm concerned about what the CPU steal percentage might be here. Can anyone on Contabo let me know what their current 'steal' percentage is? Also, if it's high - is Contabo usually ok with moving your VPS to a different host machine altogether? Just trying to get an idea of what problems might lie ahead...

Many thanks.

Comments

  • FAT32FAT32 Administrator, Deal Compiler Extraordinaire

    Looking at the title I thought you are joining Contabo as a staff.

  • Use netcup, it will he better in your case ;)

    Thanked by 3fixxation AXYZE Haoya
  • skorupionskorupion Member, Host Rep

    if your app is uptime sensitive performance sensitive or production choose someone else (not ssdnodes tho). if it's a hobby app then contabo is the way to go

    Thanked by 1fixxation
  • @FAT32 said:
    Looking at the title I thought you are joining Contabo as a staff.

    Good point, thanks- title updated.

    Thanked by 1FAT32
  • @skorupion said:
    if your app is uptime sensitive performance sensitive or production choose someone else (not ssdnodes tho). if it's a hobby app then contabo is the way to go

    Thanks, definitely uptime sensitive - perhaps Netcup as suggested by @CalmDown is a better choice here. As long as I have peace of mind knowing that I can move to a different physical host in case of issues. I have a problem with a current provider that cannot move me to another host, they've asked me to just create a new server - not worth the hassle.

  • LeviLevi Member

    With contabo you will avoid questionable billing practices. They are good as hetzner on this matter.

    Thanked by 1Hetzner_OL
  • They oversell so CPU steal is often high, but they will move your to another node if you make a ticket.

    Contabo price is low for a reason. They limit IOPS to 1.3k (so thats ~4MB/s 4K read/write) and their "DDoS Protection" is just nullrouting your VPS, they wont invest to protect your server. Some people say that they can raise the IOPS limit if you made ticket, but I saw that recently they refused to do it, so keep that in mind. Even free tiers ex. Oracle will give you better IOPS. 4MB/s can be enough tho, you would need to check your app usage.

    I would never recommend them for anything more than development. Performance varies a lot. If you want cheap & good german VPS then I would suggest to go with Netcup or PHP-Friends - both providers give you dedicated resources so your performance is sustained and you wont be throttled. If you dont need annual/monthly plans and just want to spin up VM for some time then Hetzner is the way to go.

  • @fixxation said:
    I'm thinking of getting a Contabo server

    image

    Thanked by 1fixxation
  • skorupionskorupion Member, Host Rep
    edited August 2021

    @AXYZE said:
    They oversell so CPU steal is often high, but they will move your to another node if you make a ticket.

    Contabo price is low for a reason. They limit IOPS to 1.3k (so thats ~4MB/s 4K read/write) and their "DDoS Protection" is just nullrouting your VPS, they wont invest to protect your server. Some people say that they can raise the IOPS limit if you made ticket, but I saw that recently they refused to do it, so keep that in mind. Even free tiers ex. Oracle will give you better IOPS. 4MB/s can be enough tho, you would need to check your app usage.

    I would never recommend them for anything more than development. Performance varies a lot. If you want cheap & good german VPS then I would suggest to go with Netcup or PHP-Friends - both providers give you dedicated resources so your performance is sustained and you wont be throttled. If you dont need annual/monthly plans and just want to spin up VM for some time then Hetzner is the way to go.

    Honesly to get the IOPS limit lifted you just need to find a dumbass for it. This way I got enabled inside virt.

    Thanked by 1typicalGtaTG
  • @jmgcaguicla said:

    @fixxation said:
    I'm thinking of getting a Contabo server

    image

  • I use Contabo for personal use, and they have been great! No downtime or any real issues actually. I have heard mixed reviews online, but have only seen positives myself.

  • Thanks for all the replies guys - glad I posted here first. I think I'll give Contabo a miss now. Just don't feel very confident based on previous posts and I think Netcup sounds like it'll be a much better fit for me and my application. Thanks again, much appreciated

  • @fixxation said: However, my application is time-sensitive and I'm concerned about what the CPU steal percentage might be here.

    A lot, had like 30% steal for a week before (manually) requested migration. Seems like they don't really monitor those things and if you don't complain you are getting what you are getting. Had that high steal like 3-4 times in my 1.5 year there. Some were fixed, some needed migration.

    avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
              22.52    0.00    7.54    0.43    5.26   64.26
    

    This is my current one for 16 days uptime, but my CPU usage is still "low" and if you planning on hammering that CPU it will be much much more I guess.

  • @AXYZE said:

    @jmgcaguicla said:

    @fixxation said:
    I'm thinking of getting a Contabo server

    image

  • ArkasArkas Moderator

    Out of curiosity, for production, especially uptime sensitive, why not consider Hetner?

  • jsgjsg Member, Resident Benchmarker
    edited August 2021

    "High steal time, wohooo!"

    It seems many haven't understood how VPS hosting works. A X86 processor has Y (physical) cores and (usually) Y x 2 "vCores" that is, basically hardware threads. So a say dual 8-core E5-26xx node has 32 vCores and if loaded with jobs (like VMs) it costs about Z dollars per month (node/mo, colo/mo, typ. bandwidth used, el. power, staff) and when running a nice and clean config with say 16 dual vCore VMs everything is fine - except customer who complain about the high price of say $25 for their VDS (because that's what we are basically talking about here).

    So, how can the provider offer cheaper VPS products? Reducing tech or support staff will lead to unsatisfied customers who complain and hence to less revenue, getting and using a cheaper upstream will lead to similar unpleasant results. Etc.

    But hey, there is one seriously major "resource" available: most customers buy way too big and use only a fraction of their resources. Let's make use of that! Welcome to the world of VPS ...

    What is a VPS? A VPS is a VM whose vCores (usually) are not a full HWT but rather a fraction of a HWT. So, to stay with our example above, the provider, instead of providing 16 dual vCore VMs (basically VDSs) could sell 48 dual vCore VPSs with each vCore actually being 1/3rd of a HWT. Et voilà there we, the customers, have much cheaper VMs for only say $9 (instead of $25).

    But there is an ugly 'but': that only works fine if and as long as the customers don't use more than 1/3rd of their HWT fractions. Which is the case normally ... but not always. You can call that "CPU steal" or "bloody abusers!" (which technically is kind of correct although often there is no evil intention whatsoever), "overselling" or whatever.
    But at the end of the day it's just something that is bound to occasionally happen even with the best providers. Plus the situation actually is worse, much worse for a simple reason: we don't want to pay $9, nope, we want that tasty 2 vCores, 4 GB mem. plus 25 or more GB NVMe for $5 and on BF we even want it for $2 - which invariably translates to 'even more vCores per HWT' which again leads to more steal time/percentage.

    As for Contabo / @contabo_m and netcup (not here at LET afaik) I happen to have VMs from both and I happen to have both of the benchmarked. Neither of them can do miracles but both offer good products and usually at reasonable or even attractive prices. Plus I personally can not confirm a high steal on my Contabo VPS but maybe that's just me being lucky and on a good node.

    And now I'll let you in on kind of a little secret, namely one of the reasons I love NexusBytes / @seriesn so much: In short, size of company/operations. Explanation: tiny providers just can't offer certain things due to being too small. Large or even very large providers (like netcup or Contabo) usually can't near real time observe all their thousands upon thousands of nodes. NexusBytes is in a sweet spot; they are big enough but not too big plus they seem to observe their nodes with eagle eyes. Result: really fast, really good VMs with low steal at a very attractive price.

    That said, I like my Contabo and my netcup VMs a lot too, just not as much as I love my NexusBytes VMs. All three of them are good, even great providers (but NexusBytes is the prettiest of them).

    TL;DR (1) "Contabo is bad!" is BS. Contabo is a fine provider but low, low price invariably brings some weak spots along. And (2) VPS is basically just another word for "CPU steal". It's inherent in VPSs. The important question is how fast and how hard a provider reigns in on (or gets rid) of customers using more than their share.

  • ArkasArkas Moderator

    That is one of the best posts I've seen anywhere!

    Thanked by 1fixxation
  • @Arkas said:
    That is one of the best posts I've seen anywhere!

    Agreed! Thanks for all the detail @jsg - I think I had a half-decent understanding of how VPS hosting works but that post certainly clears up a lot of the areas that I didn't know about. Thanks for taking the time to put that together. Should be on a Wiki page somewhere!

    @Arkas - most of my instances for the 'core' of my project are on Hetzner Cloud, although a few I have hosted outside of HC for redundancy, these are mostly scrapers and are time-sensitive as the data is constantly changing. I tried to start a couple new instances on HC over the past week and they're all appearing with either Russian or USA IP addresses according to Maxmind, so even though I know they are in Nuremberg/Falkenstein it just wasn't worth the hassle of waiting for Maxmind to update their database. I needed a
    German IP for some APIs I connect to. Advice from HC support was to keep creating new instances until I get a good IP. It became tiring after a while... ;-)

    ** First four hours with Netcup now and steal is averaging about 0.1% - I'm happy! Thanks for all the advice and replies, appreciate it. **

  • jsgjsg Member, Resident Benchmarker

    @Arkas said:
    That is one of the best posts I've seen anywhere!

    In case you mean mine, thank you!

    Thanked by 1Arkas
  • ArkasArkas Moderator

    @jsg said:

    @Arkas said:
    That is one of the best posts I've seen anywhere!

    In case you mean mine, thank you!

    Of course I mean yours! AMAZING POST! It should be pinned in the entry of every forum that talks about Servers in general and VPSs specifically

    Thanked by 1jsg
  • Contabo VPS is heavily oversold, they have had the worst CPU steal of any provider I have ever used. They did move me to a different node but it was back to the same 60% steal within a week. I have never seen > 10% steal with any decent provider.

  • jsgjsg Member, Resident Benchmarker

    @itsnotv said:
    Contabo VPS is heavily oversold, they have had the worst CPU steal of any provider I have ever used. They did move me to a different node but it was back to the same 60% steal within a week. I have never seen > 10% steal with any decent provider.

    Sorry but if I have to choose between a couple of unhappy users and hard data gathered through hundreds of benchmark runs, I'll pick the latter.

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