Contabo: My Experiences

Contabo is a German based hosting company often known for their very cheap services. I’ve read the previous less than stellar reviews in the past and wanted to see how true they were.

I ordered a vps from here for a running monthly cost of around 10 dollars for a server with 8 gigs of ram and 200 gb of hard drive space. Nothing can match this price but there is the other cost. Reliability and support, which I soon found out, are the real costs that aren’t provided by this host.

This was being used for personal use but I still expected this machine to remain online more than it was. They tout an uptime of 99.996% which isn’t good to begin with but I already knew this going in.

A 99.996% uptime equates to a downtime/unavailability as shown below

Daily: 3.5s
Weekly: 24s
Monthly: 1m 44s
Quarterly: 5m 13s
Yearly: 20m 52s

The real issue was that my machine was offline for periods of up to 12-24 hours multiple times over several months.

The ticket times were slow as to be expected but often strange. I had one incident where the customer service representative wanted me to email them the login credentials to “troubleshoot”. I could believe what I was reading and of course let them know.

Most of the times the server would simply go unreachable. Luckily I had no data loss not that it mattered as everything was being backed up anyhow.

The cpu and hard disks were clearly oversold as any type of benchmarking would often not be great. I could put up with some of this but if the machine cannot remain online reliably there’s no point in paying for this service.

Every incident was downplayed in their verbiage as “isolated”, “small incident”, and “will not happen again”. Of course it always did until I finally canceled.

After canceling I decided to try leaving a Trust Pilot review to see how the company handled themselves. The review sat published for around a month until I received a challenge from Contabo on the legitimacy of my review. I must provide proof to TrustPilot who could then verify I was an actual customer or they would remove the review from their site.

I provided a redacted cancellation email and the review remained on the site. Soon enough I found out this is very common with them. This is a great way to scrub negative reviews as most people can’t be bothered or miss the email that’s sent weeks later after their initial review.

Further digging was done on TrustPilot themselves and how they operate and I discovered many little things I don’t agree with. Their business model is interesting to say the least but that’s for another time.

As for Contabo, there is a way to remove your personal information after leaving.

For questions on data protection or exercising your rights under data protection law (see Section_4), you may contact our data protection officer either by post at Herrn Rechtsanwalt Dr. Karsten Kinast, LL.M. KINAST Rechtsanwaltsgesellschaft mbH, Hohenzollernring 54, 50672 Koln or by email at datenschutzbeauftragter@contabo.de

I never even received a confirmation after emailing this address not that I’m surprised.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this host for anything. The reviews were right! Don’t believe those telling you otherwise. This is too bad as I see why they’re cheap based on the hardware provided but something has to give. Reliability and customer support are parts of the overall package and they are severely lacking here.