Contabo Review: A Hidden Gem for VPS Hosting

With the host of various IaaS service providers across the internet offering services varying from website hosting to managed databases to load balancers to direct access to VMs, it is hard to find the most performant, cheapest, and most reliable options. When push comes to shove, many larger companies go for large cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI, and others due to their ability to provide hundreds of servers to the consumer in under 60 seconds. However, as smaller consumers, we are much more cost-conscious and might not need the ability to scale our one or two servers to one or two hundred in a matter of seconds. Where must we turn?

Many IaaS companies are serving this consumer niche. Companies like Linode, Digital Ocean, UpCloud, Vultur, and many others see the value in offering packages that suit many consumers rather than enterprises. These competitors tend to have the same tiers of resources: $5 per month, $10, $20, $50, etc.… Usually, CPU, RAM, disk space, network throughput, and bandwidth all scale with price; however, many providers offer the same packages as others. Generally, $5/month gets you 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM, 1 TB of network throughput, and 15-25 GB of SSD storage. One of the main perks of these providers is the ability to spin up more VPSes as needed and gain access to many machines in a couple of minutes; however, for those of us who are okay with waiting for a little to gain access to our machines, there are other options.

It costs a lot of money to keep that many idle servers in data centers to offer every customer the ability to fire up ten more servers whenever they want. We tend to pay this cost with inefficient or costly deals for resources.

Providers such as yourserver.se or Contabo allow us to wait a few hours before accessing our resources, as they are physically added to racks and powered up once we order. At Contabo, a service that I use to host this website along with a whole range of other services, their VPS small tier is $6.45/month and offers 4 vCPUs, 8GB of RAM, 200GB of SSD storage (or 50GB of NVMe), 32 TB of bandwidth at 250mbps per second. The cost savings of potentially running one of these servers compared to 2 or 3 from another provider is worth the hour or two of waiting for resources to be physically provisioned in a data center for me.

I have had the cheapest plan (VPS small) running for 3 months, and it has never been shut down, the daily speed tests show that the server has a constant 250mbps ( plus or minus 10mbps) at all times during the day. Contabo even has a US Central location (STL), which many other providers do not offer.

When weighing the options for where to host anything you need online, one must consider all of the possibilities. Contabo is the best fit for me, and I am thoroughly impressed with the value and performance of my rented hardware. I hope you will see that too. Happy site engineering!