Contabo Review

Given Contabo's prowess at the VPS and dedicated levels of hosting, we're a little surprised at how the company structures its shared hosting plans, called Webspace Packages. We certainly appreciate the affordability and impressive perks, including free SSL certificates and DDoS protection, but the lack of other common shared hosting components leaves us scratching our heads a bit.

Webspace Packages start at less than $5 per month and range from 50GB to 500GB of storage, procured from an interesting mix of hard-disk drives and speedy solid-state drives. Although that should be ample space for most customers, many of our recommended providers remove storage capacit restrictions. Otherwise, shared hosting with Contabo comes with a solid number of features, including PHP support, MySQL databases, a free domain registration, email tools, and one-click installations of popular applications.

Where things start to fall apart for us, however, is the absence of a few seemingly standard hosting components. Just about every mainstream provider offers 24/7 support through various channels, but Contabo assistance is limited to an international phone number and email system that is staffed from 3 a.m. to 6 p.m. EST. We appreciate the effort to cover US business hours, but developers working on side projects in the evenings might have a harder time getting immediate help unless they pay for the emergency support upgrade.

Also of note is that Contabo does not offer a money-back guarantee. This might not be an issue for an experienced site owner who understands what they're getting into, but a refund policy or free trial exudes a company's confidence in their services. That, coupled with a below-standard 95% network uptime guarantee, can give the impression of substandard service instead of lean and streamlined business practices. Marketing Manager Markus Heimerl promised us that Contabo actually delivers the expected rate of 99.9% uptime but puts the lower figure in the Terms of Service agreement.

However, while these omissions are enough to raise your eyebrows, they don't have to be deal breakers. All in all, a confident and knowledgeable hosting customer can find quite a bit of success with Contabo's affordable Webspace Packages.

At Contabo, servers are stripped down to pure performance and name-brand hardware that customers can configure as they see fit. The company doesn't bog down site administrators with bulky security systems or proprietary management software, instead giving them a blank slate on which to create and grow.

We are suckers for hosting companies who own and operate their own datacenters, and Contabo runs two of them. Located in Munich and Nuremberg, Germany, the company has room for up to 15,000 servers and staffs the datacenters every day of the year.

Even though servers start as low as roughly $60 per month, Contabo does not scrimp on computing power. The company's starter server comes with a four-processor CPU with 8GB of RAM and 800GB of storage, and the Intel infrastructure can be customized with SSDs, additional RAM, and a 1Gbit/s uplink.

Customers have their choice of Linux or Windows operating system and have unrestricted root access. Operating installations, along with hard or soft reboots, can be performed seamlessly through the account management interface, or site administrators can opt to set up a control panel for other services.

While we appreciate the hands-free hosting experience, we're also pleased to see that Contabo offers a managed services upgrade to boost security and support. The company's team of well-trained technicians are at your beck and call for two hours every month to carry out tasks such as system or hardware optimization, security patches, operating system updates, or configuring backups.

Our favorite Contabo hosting service, the company's VPS plans are a cost-efficient solution that combines the best features of both dedicated and shared servers — and adds solid-state drives for even more performance.

Customers can choose to either combine HDDs and SSDs to balance copious amounts of storage with super fast read-write speed or opt for 100% SSD-powered environments. The SSD series of hosting plans supports snapshots, allowing for risk-free software installations or updates. Site administrators can also choose to add automated backups or managed services to handle website continuity precautions.

Contabo's Intel processors range from two to 10 cores, with ample memory and Contabo's signature promise of unlimited traffic. Virtualization is based on KVM, and site administrators can enjoy root access and a web interface for operating system management, reboots, and DNS oversight.

Servers are pooled to share bandwidth resources, and we appreciate that Contabo doesn't oversell its infrastructure. As such, the full port speed — either 100 Mbit/s or 1 Gbit/s — is provided to all customers, at all times.

VPS plans can be further customized with the addition of a Plesk or cPanel/WHM license, solution for backups, or around-the-clock monitoring services. As always, Contabo plans include virus scanning and DDoS protection, which recognizes 99% of all attacks.