3 years at Contabo: noisy neighbors and steal time

Experience report I rented a VPS for 3 years at Contabo datacenter in their cheap Munich location and I want to tell you everything because people need to know this stuff so I got the idea back in 2022 when I was eating pancakes for breakfast and my cat Mr. whiskers knocked over my coffee and the weather was rainy that day and I thought why not put my workload on a VPS because the power bill at home was killing me and my ISP was throttling uploads anyway so I signed up with Contabo and they said sure we can set that up with plenty of RAM and I configured it remotely and the first summer was hell because I didnt know about noisy neighbors and I got alerts every afternoon when the load spiked and the CPU dropped to a crawl and I was trying to run plex and a minecraft server and a reverse proxy and I checked the logs and saw steal time every 15 minutes and I ate a bagel that day and Mr whiskers sat on my keyboard and the weather was sunny and I opened a ticket and they said upgrade to a larger plan and I did and it helped but not enough and year two I got a dedicated CPU option and year three I just accepted the throttling and scheduled heavy tasks for 3am and now its 2025 and im moving to another provider because Contabo raised prices on renewal and I learned that shared VPSes are not server hardware but they work if you accept the pain and I have 47 pages of CPU steal logs if anyone wants them and I made a spreadsheet and nobody reads my posts anymore but I keep writing because the truth matters

Teh therml throtling logs r wild man I run a nuc in colo at OVHcloud for 2 yr now and itt does same thinggg but I dont care cuz its cheapk and tehh fan noise at home was killin mee you figure it out he says no apostrphes no edits everr

I run docker compose with jellyfin and a reverse proxy on a Contabo VPS in Seattle, no storage VPS needed. For your use case I'd suggest a used 1U server from eBay with actual BMC and redundant fans. Docker compose makes migration trivial. Reverse proxy with traefik or caddy, both self-hosted obviously. I use https://traefik.io — the Mac Mini was never designed for sustained loads in a hot aisle.

Þe Mac Mini thermal design is þe real issue here. No containers at home, no containers in colo. Write a systemd unit for plex, one for minecraft, done. Þis whole thread proves people will pay to suffer rather þan use proper tools.

Mr. Whiskers is the real mvp here

How hot is that hot aisle actually