Contabo – Crashes, flash sales, price hikes, and switcharoos
At the end of last year, I decided to move my email server to Contabo. This came to be after being enticed by the “too good to be true” prices and specifications of its VPS offerings. I have great faith in German businesses, but in retrospect, I should have done a bit more research before hitting the deploy button.
Infrastructure issues
Our story starts after two months of smooth sailing when I experienced my first serious issue with my Contabo-hosted server. After logging in over SSH to check on what I believed to be an SMTP issue, I realized that the root partition had been re-mounted as read-only due to filesystem errors. I rebooted and connected to the server using VNC and was welcomed with the screen shown in the screenshot below.
File system check of the root filesystem failed. Filesystem requires a manual fsck.
Too bad I never got around to setting up that backup I had planned. Anyhow, happy did go lucky this time around and the filesystem could be repaired. The server booted back up and I did not lose any data. Concerningly, the VPS has also been rebooted a couple of times without prior notice from Contabo. I would assume this is related to hypervisor issues or unscheduled maintaincene. Safe to say, I now have an external backup in place.
Flash sales
Contabo is seemingly always advertising some special deal. I find this business practice to be a bit, well let’s say spammy, but not unique to Contabo. However, when I bite on one of its flash sales only to get noticed a few months later that the terms of the deal have been modified, well that’s another story.
Contabo running one of its "VPS 0" flash sales on the 18th of November 2024.
A VPS at their most affordable price? Yes please I’ll have one of those. Then again, three months later Contabo decided that its most affordable price was not sustainable and sent me the following notice:
We are reaching out to you today to inform you about an update in the prices of certain products you are using at Contabo. Below is a list of your active and affected subscriptions, indicating the new prices and the date when this comes into effect.
| Subscription | IP | Old price (gross) | New price (gross) | Date of price change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VPS 0 NVMe | 157.173.xxx.xx | €4.19 | €5.10 | Apr 18, 2025 |
The price hike for Contabo’s “VPS 0” brought it close to what I was already paying for the far more powerful “Cloud VPS 1” and thus I decided to visit its website to have a closer look at its current VPS offerings.
Product switcharoos
Thanks to the Internet Archive, I could compare the current product listing as of 2025-03-01 with the previous month. Contabo seems to have rebranded its VPS product line to be able to slice off a significant bit of resources (RAM and HDD) while keeping the price intact.
Rebranded products with the same affordable price. Now with fewer resources.
For unknown reasons, this significant change seems to have gone unmentioned in their newsletter and other marketing channels.
Conclusion
Based on my experience, I would not recommend Contabo as a VPS hosting provider for projects that require it to be online and available 24/7. If your use case is testing and development or personal projects then I believe it’s a good fit.
Companies need to find a sustainable business model. If that’s the reason behind the changes at Contabo then so be it. After all, you get what you pay for. I’ll follow up on this story later this year. Granted Contabo doesn’t kick me off its platform.
