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Any experience with Contabo in EU location?
What does Contabo mean by "EU location"? It's a large region and could mean very different pings depending on which country it is.
I suspect they mean Frankfurt in Germany, but why are they hiding it? Right now they seem to have a good Black Friday deal, given the hardware they are offering seems very good for the price.
How is the stability/uptime though? Any negative experiences in that "EU location"?
I remember using their Singapore location two years ago and tickets took days/weeks to respond. Maybe things have changed.
Thanks!
Comments
Contabo sucks overall but I don't see why their EU location would be worse than others. They are famous for very high CPU steal.
They don't have servers in Frankfurt.
They are in Nuremberg. Tho kinda funny that they just say "EU"
Nuremberg isn't a premium location, but it isn't bad either. So not really a reason to be ashamed of.
But they suck everywhere. Heavily oversold and kinda crappy support.
I never tried the EU DC, but the Singapore one was terrible.
I seem to remember that they have (among others) Duesseldorf and Munich locations and that all their "european" locations in fact are in Germany.
Re "good or bad", you'll probably read both but more of the "they are bad" kind as there seem to be quite a few LET users who obviously hate Contabo.
My personal view is positive (as in "7 out of 10") which is based both on having a couple of VPS all over the world from them as well as benchmarking them quite extensively a few years ago. Back then at least I found them quite performant (not top class but still quite performant) based on my benchmarks. Also noteworthy I found them not trying any tricks but being very open to me. For example one of their higher up techies made a screenshot and edited any personal/identifiable info out while on the phone with me, clearly showing that their nodes (usually at least) are not brutally oversold but have a quite decent vCPU/HWT ratio.
My major points of criticism were their panel incl. in particular the lack of free ISO upload/install and their monitoring. AFAIK that problem still exists and seems to lead to quite or even very slow reaction time on abuse simply because their monitoring seems to not allow them to see abuse and/or "fair share" violations early and to react quickly. Finally their network was a bit inconsistent that is, some location were fast but some were quite slow and in a way that seemed weird, otoh their network team proactively worked with their carriers to get routes optimized.
That, again, was a few years ago and maybe that has changed, maybe not.
Finally, as a customer I mainly care about what I get for my money ("bang per buck") and in that regard I liked what I saw and still am happy with it. At least back then their bang per buck value was unique and great and probably still is OK although nowadays there are better offers available.
Re support I can't say much because as a customer I hardly ever need support and as a benchmarker I of course got top support and even had access to management (they knew who I am).
The proof is in the pudding as the saying goes. Well, here's my "pudding": I still have my VPS from them because all in all I found them very reliable and quite performant (hint: I don't care about steal, I care about the the performance I get).
As far as I know, Contabo does not have any systems directly in Frankfurt. I only know the locations in Munich, Nuremberg and Düsseldorf in Germany.
However, the Nuremberg site is apparently being closed, as many of the systems there are being relocated to the new Hub Europe on the German-French border.
Contabo sucks
Consider switching to another provider instead. Once you check it out, you'll see that Contabo is really one of the poorest options available. They have issues with high CPU steal, poor network speeds, and slow disk performance, among other things.
its 2025 soon why's anyone still using Contabo
Their main EU location is now “Hub Europe” in Lauterbourg (on the FR-DE border, FR side). They have built their own data center park but since it is Contabo I would still avoid using them.
they haven't deadpooled yet and they haven't stole 22k which is better than some providers promoted here.
I have one VPS at Contabo in Germany location for running old/archive versions of two e-commerce sites for customers that still may want to check their orders from older ordering systems.
Got it last month and last week there was a 24h+ downtime, because node failed. After repairing the node I also needed to start the instance manually. IO performance is horrible, just 1.3K IOPS, but I expected it.
I wouldnt recommend this host for anything other than using 32TB of traffic on their 4.50euro plan.
They did not improve with time, its simply too cheap to provide usable service.
I just finished a surprise benchmark run (and am running more). The result:
Processor (Epyc 2nd. gen), 4 cores and memory (8GB !): not bad but neither great, that may be due in part to the "steal", but both multicore benchmarks show that the vCPUs are doing fine and scale very well.
And please note: 4 vCores and 8 GB memory for about a fiver per month!
Disk (still SSD, not NVMe), 4KB/4t: a bit over 6 MB/s and a bit over 1500 IOps. I think this poor result is due in part to it being a SSD, in part due to IO limiting (which makes sense, but one could argue whether a bit over 1.5 k IOps is not a bit too tight a limit), but again, we're talking about a VPS for a fiver a month.
Connectivity: Most european targets about 175 - 185 Mb/s, a few in the 100 - 120 Mb/s range, but quite good results across the Atlantic e.g. East coast almost 120 Mb/s, Asia&Ozeania quite acceptable as well, e.g. Tokyo 40 - 45 Mb/s, Mumbai over 80 Mb/s, Ozzyland a bit over 40 Mb/s, not top-class but certainly not bad at all. And even Johannesburg, South Afrika a not crappy 34 Mb/s.
Again, that's based on only a single run, we'll have a clearer picture in a couple of days.
But for me that's a VPS I'll keep (disclosure: I don't care a whole lot about high performance and while 6 MB/s certainly is poor, even for a SSD, (a) that's just a single result and I'm used to see wildly different disk performance numbers with many VPS over two or more dozen runs, and (b) for what I use that VPS for mainly processor and memory are important and even a rusty spindle would be good enough).
And I happen to know that the vCPU/HWT ratio is really decent, so I think for about €5/mo that's a good deal, plus: nowadays they sell ŃVMe and newer gen Epycs AFAIK, I just didn't care to upgrade. IIRC my SGP VPS is NVMe, I'll look at that one as well.
Is it a great VPS for everyone that I'd recommend? Nope (maybe the newer ones are),but neither is it crappy (nor is Contabo IMO, although there certainly are some quirks, no free ISO upload and install is one example).
P.S. As @AXYZE happened to mention it (and remind me), yep the 32 TB traffic are a big plus.
Escape as you can. don't be fouled by their offers and discounts.
they don't have support team. they will not respond to your phone or emails.
server/vps will be down for no reason
and after all,, Contabo before 2023 is not Contabo after 2023.. so don't even think to read reviews of old clients
I don't know about the EU location, but my friend's SG location has been pretty good. Just a slight CPU Steal and IO Wait, which is a common thing for shared nodes (VPS). As long as it's within a tolerable range, I think it's ok.
@Calin I think he's talking about you😁
What's acceptable range for IOWait on a shared VPS? I have a VPS with about 25% IOWait average, monitored by HetrixTools, is it normal?
Webtropia has comparable prices, and although they aren't the best provider out there, they are still way better than Contabo.
Contabo’s "EU location" likely refers to their main data center in Frankfurt, Germany, as this is a central hub for European hosting. They might generalize the term to appeal to a broader audience, but transparency could help users gauge latency better. Their Black Friday deals are indeed attractive for the hardware offered, but stability and uptime can vary. While uptime is generally solid, some users report delayed ticket responses, which aligns with your past experience in Singapore. Alternatives like Redswitches, Hetzner, and OVHcloud are also worth considering for competitive pricing and support reliability.
If you want to know about Contabo's experience, search on the internet and you will realize that Contabo has more complaints than solutions, its system crashes every moment.
Uhm, my @contabo_m VPSs have uptimes of multiple hundreds of days ...
I do have a vm with them as a backup uptime monitor. It was pretty solid for the last 2yrs or so.
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1d9dfgh/contabo_going_down_the_drain/?rdt=45825
I neither care about accusations by who-knows-who, and especially on reddit and the like. Please note that I do not assert that @contabo_m never has problems, downtimes, etc.
All I can reliably talk about is my 3 Contabo VPSs - and those had uptimes north of 99.9% and of hundreds of days. But it's possible of course that out of thousands of nodes there occasionally are one or a few which experience problems of some kind. But then, show me any provider with even "only" 100+ nodes who never has failing nodes, some downtime, etc...
General summary of my POV: I do not think that Contabo is a significantly better provider than others. But I also do not think, and have no factual reason to think, that Contabo is significantly worse than others.
Plus: I don't look at what I don't get (e.g. "steal") but rather at what I do get and for what price. And with that in mind I'm still a happy customer who gets a lot for relatively little money.
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/197431/contabo-strange-behavior/p1?new=1