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| title | description | date | categories | tags | draft | toc | |||||
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| My two years at Contabo | It's been a great run, but we have to say our goodbyes! | 2024-08-06 00:00:00+0000 |
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I wanted to host a few services for myself in 2020 and have decided to rent out a medium VPS at contabo. I stayed at them for exactly two years then I got some servers at home and decided to cancel my subscription. It was a pleasureful experience with them during that time period. Despite many controversies I saw on some reddit posts I had 0 downtime and 0 techinal difficulties. My use case consisted of hosting a website, matrix server and a bunch of privacy respecting services. Obviously your usage case might vary from mine so its a great idea to take in some information before using their services. I would call them the quantity over quality type of hoster. I paid about 12 euros a month for 24 months meaning in total I've spent 288 euros. It was a 100% worth since I was still a student with no stable income so I couldn't have bought a big DELL server or something like that.
Why is contabo so cheap
Contabo is dirt cheap. Compared to many other hosters like Vultr or Digitalocean you can see that they almost have 2x cheaper options. But obviously this comes with some compromises.
Contabo doesn't use any fancy enterprise level KVM software.
They use Proxmox. It's an awesome suite of linux tools bundled together that makes virtualization really easy. It also offers an API which contabo 100% uses for their business. As an user of their VPS services you are most likely will notice none of this only if you use VNC and log in before the vps starts. (the proxmox bios logo shows up).
But since Proxmox is a free and libre software this means they have to pay $0 to use it. This results in cheaper prices.
You don't own your CPU cores, and neither are they fast
8 cores, 12 cores or hell even 24 CPU cores might seem exciting at first until you see the V before CPU. In short this means that you are getting shared virtual cpu cores. You are sharing your cpu cores with the hundreds of other virtual servers on that one big physical server. This results in slower/degraded performance. If you intend to run CPU heavy applications on the VPS you are better off buying a dedicated VPS with dedicated virtual cpu cores.
Contabo is known for having older reused/refurbished servers. Meaning even tho you might get 24 cores with their strongest VPS plan you might just end up with a slower cpu. Compared to other hosters out there, most of them give out details on what you're getting. Contabo never dares to mention it.
Also there is no support outside of office hours. Meaning you will only get support if the staff is at the computer during a 9-5. This was not really a deal breaker for me as I never needed support.
Good things at contabo
Zero downtime
During my stay, I really had 0 downtime. ZERO. well.. zero caused by contabo. I have restarted my vps a few times in that period and even ran rm -fr / once by accident.
Snapshots
Based on your tier, contabo offer a few snapshots that you can manually create. This allows you to switch back to older versions of your server's state in case you do something horrible like I did.... AFAIK there is no option to automatically schedule snapshots and delete older ones, but I might be wrong