Contabo VPS Review

I’ve looked at dozens of VPS hosts over the years, but have always ended up going with one of the big guys. I’m glad to have found Contabo. Their performance is similar to the big boys, but their prices are much lower. You can get a VPS with more resources for less money with Contabo.

Check their plans here:

Watch our video where we run Contabo through a wide range of performance benchmarks. We also compare Contabo Vs Vultr and Contabo Vs Digital Ocean:

We found that while the RAM and CPU and transfer allowances are excellent, it doesn’t quite have the sheer network speed that you’d get from Vultr High Frequency, or Digital Ocean premium droplets. I’d still recommend Vultr high frequency if you are after pure performance per $, you can get a free Vultr trial here too:

However, if you just need the highest amount of server resources to host many websites or other resource hungry applications (file sharing, game servers, video hosting) then Contabo maybe just perfect for you.

Contabo with CyberPanel and Openlitespeed

As an alternative to cPanel, we used Cyberpanel. Cyberpanel is a free web control panel that uses the open source software Openlitespeed to deliver an excellent web experience. Your web hosting panel is then powered by Openlitespeed. The software is open source, i.e. it is made available free of charge. Cyberpanel has been using Openlitespeed exclusively to deliver the excellent service that it does.

For the full server setup method using Cyberpanel, we use this tutorial as a guide here:

The install command for Cyberpanel is given here.

How Contabo compares to other VPS providers.

Contabo has one significant advantage over other VPS providers: Their resources are generally 4-8 times higher than that of their competitors. However, the tradeoff is that the network speed is limited to 200 mbit/s. This doesn’t really affect most VPS users though, since this is usually more than enough bandwidth.

Is Contabo Fast?

The host is quite fast in most cases, in fact it scored 99/100 on the Google PageSpeed Insight test running Kadence theme on WordPress. However, this is a relative speed. The network speed is 200mbit/s, much lower than the 1+ Gbit you will find elsewhere. However, you can still probably host a large number of websites on the host. For example, you will not experience any problems if you stream a video from the host. This network limit only becomes a factor under heavy traffic load.

The Main Advantage of Contabo

The big advantage of the Contabo cloud hosting platform is its scalability. You can add 10s or even 100s of websites to a fairly cheap VPS and not worry about the server’s performance. This can be a huge advantage for new businesses, as they can start out small and expand as they receive more customers.

Contabo Uptime

Contabo had solid 100% uptime during our review process:

Contabo Vs DigitalOcean Vs Vultr

Which One Is Better? If you are a small business owner or just a blogger and you have a website that is getting a lot of visitors every day, you probably know how much traffic is very important for your business. If you site is slow and has a low loading page, you might lose a lot of your customers. In the video above, I will compare the performance and quality of service from one of the best hosting providers, Contabo, and some of the biggest hosting providers, DigitalOcean and Vultr. I will also check the price differences between both providers to see which one is a better deal.

Key Differences:

Contabo: 200mbit/s , 8GB ram, 4 vCPU, 32TB per month data.
DigitalOcean: 1000mbit/s+ 1GB ram, 1 vCPU, 1TB per month data.
Vultr: 3000mbit/s+ 1GB ram, 1 vCPU, 1TB per month data.

You can see how these differences play out in terms of benchmark performance in our review video.

Overall, if you are on a tight budget and looking for maximum RAM, CPU and data transfer allowance to host a large amount of of websites or other applications, Contabo is a nice choice. Get started here:

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