3d ago

An alternative to Contabo (VPS provider)

Hi!

For the past few years I've been hosting most of my services on Contabo VPSs (Immich, Nextcloud, and a few others).

They used to offer a great price to specs ratio, but have lately been awful to me as a customer. (drastically increasing the price to force me to change product, and then doing the same weeks after migrating to their new product).

I don't really trust them anymore, especially since the only way to make them react to my problem was to give them a bad trustpilot review..

So anyway I am looking for advice on a different VPS provider based on the EU. I mostly need a lot of SSD space (800Gb minimum), at least 4 vCPU cores, and a decent amount of RAM. The maximum I'm willing to pay per month is around 20€.

Anything you could recommend? Ideally with a good track record of maintaining their prices.

Have a good week end!

38 comments

Check out lowendtalk, it's often smaller providers but you can find some good deals there.

https://www.serverhunter.com/#query=stock%3A%28in_stock+OR+unknown%29
https://vpspricetracker.com/
https://lowend-deals.xbit.win/
- Oh! Great resources thanks

I've abandoned Contabo a couple of months ago and I've never been happier! One of the worst customer service ever and the resources that they specify in the plans don't seems real to me.

IONOS or Netcup or Hetzner
All of them are from germany, but provide various server locations
I use Netcup for cheap and powerful VPS (the ARM servers are awesome) and Hetzner for a dedicated server.
- I couldn't find similar products on Ionos and Hetzner (either too expensive or not enough storage).
  However I didn't know Netcup, and it seems to be a pretty good fit! Especially the VPS 3000.
  Thank you :)
  
  I did the same move from contabo to Netcup. Contabo I had all sorts of weird bandwidth limiting problems that I couldn't explain and which the continued to deny they were throttling. Netcup worked perfectly.
  
  I was in the same boat. Years at Contabo, until they became dogshit and then moved to Netcup. No problems with them so far.
  
  With Hetzner you can get "Storage Boxes" and mount those. They are pretty cheap for 1tb and 5tb. From my experience they are fast enough for media streaming for multiple people.
  
  +1 for netcup 👍
  
  They also have some sale coming up where you get more storage or extra cores for the same price: https://www.netcup.com/en/deals/easter-sale Usually these apply permanently.
  
  Glad you found a good VPS 👍
- Hetzner is fucking trash. Dare you to try canceling, I took me over 6 months to get them to stop billing me 80 fucking cents per month over a resource that I had no way to delete. Then they started threatening me with collections for like $3, fuck them.
  
  Never had problems with Hetzner 🤔
  
  Why did it take six months to resolve the issue? What steps did you take, how did they respond? Serious claims require proper explanation at the very least.
  
  Can’t recognise that, but unfortunate you have had such an experience with them.
  
  Never had any problems with Hetzner

Saving this thread just in case. I started my journey with Contabo a month ago and they seem pretty okay, so I'm sad to see they do not treat revising customers well 😟
Let us know what you went with, bro!
- I might have been unlucky, I hope you'll have a better experience than me! Let's not forget that I've been very happy with them for years before this happened.
  Still hesitating between Netcup and a dedicated Kimsufi, but I am most likely going with Netcup in a week when their Easter sale starts :)

Get a Hetzner dedicated server. Don't mess with vps once it gets that large. Look on hetzner.com/sb for auction servers that might be better deals than regular ones. And does your 800gb of storage really have to be all SSD? Hard disks still exist and cost lots less.
- Why should I stop using vps for my needs? I looked at the dedicated servers but they're all too expensive for me.
  And yea I would like it to be all SSD, to me it makes a big difference for browsing large file collections, pictures and videos.
  
  Dedi will perform a lot better and be more consistent and reliable. They're not THAT expensive if you're making nontrivial use of them. Otherwise maybe you can keep moving around between Contabo products. Keep in mind too that hdd performance will seem a lot better when you're not sharing it with dozens of other users. I have an HDD server and it's fine for browsing. Might not be great for large seek-intensive databases but I'm not currently doing that
  Anyway you can also ask on lowendspirit.com which is a forum about budget vps.
  
  Added: also look at kimsufi.com as an alternative to Hetzner.

I haven't used any of them, but in addition to the suggestions here, there is also Infomaniak which is a Swiss provider. They seem to have better reviews on trustpilot.
- I would have really liked to use their servers, but unfortunately they don't have the right combination of specs for me.
  Consumer wise though, they're great. I use their products regularly for my company.

If you want cheap and simple - Time4VPS. I am with them for a couple of years and for the price there is nothing really to complain about. If you take 2y contract, the cheapest plans are like €2.5/month.
If you do decide to maybe go with them, it would be appreciated if you could use my affiliate link, otherwise... just type Time4VPS into google. They are based in Lithuania.

One man's dream VPS is another man's nightmare VPS.
I do business with Contabo. They did raise my monthly by $1. I'm still with them, I have had no real issues with their service. I also do business with Ethernet Services. They are bare bones, no frills, hosters. I pay $25 per year with them so I don't really expect that much in return except for keeping everything online and they do a fairly good job of it. Their service tickets are slow, but they'll get around to you.
LuxVPS is my latest host. I get more bang for buck from them:
Black Luxury Deal #1

4 vCores (Xeon Gold 6150)
26 GB DDR4 RAM
150 GB Raid 1 NVMe
1 Gbit internet speed | 40 TB Traffic
1x IPv4
1x /64 IPv6
3.2Tbit Premium DDoS Protection
24/7 Ticket Support
4 Backups
For ONLY 10€/Mo (recurring)
Their only caveat is that you have to pay extra for mail ports.
- Yeah, wow, I was surprised and a bit concerned with OP's post. Except for never answering customer support tickets, they've been great, and the price increases have been both rare and low. I'd hate to have to migrate off.
  
  As I mentioned, one man's trash is another man's treasure. One thing I don't like about Contabo is that you can only maintain one snapshot at a time and there is no automatic way to create multiple snapshots. I did find an n8n flow that does just that.

I used to use prgmr, I still do but they call themselves TornadoVPS now. Haven't had any issues.

You could try getting your hands on an OVH dedicated server: https://eco.ovhcloud.com/en-ie/

Have a look to Netcup provider. They have easter specials coming up! I have three servers running there for longer time and am really happy with it (vps + root). But i am located in Europe, don't know if speed in US is okay..

38 comments