Contabo "Seedling" plan: a year of actual uptime and support

Contabo "Seedling" plan. €4/mo when I bought July 2024. 128MB RAM, 5GB SSD, 100GB transfer. I wanted to see what actually happens.

PING Contabo-seedling (10.x.x.x): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.x.x.x: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=187.2 ms
64 bytes from 10.x.x.x: icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=186.9 ms
64 bytes from 10.x.x.x: icmp_seq=3 ttl=55 time=189.4 ms

Route via Cogent adds 12ms versus their premium routing. Expected.

Uptime: advertised 99.9%. Actual: 97.3% over 12 months. 4 multi-hour outages, 0 proactive notification. Support tickets answered in 14-72 hours. One ticket closed without response.

The twist: month 8, performance suddenly doubled. RAM appeared as 256MB. Support response time dropped to 2 hours. I tweeted about the experiment (no provider name). Someone claiming to be from Contabo DMed me: "saw your post, upgraded your account, would love feedback."

Data compromised. Experiment ruined. Started over on OVHcloud "Pico" plan — https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/vps/ — €4/mo, no social media this time.

Honest assessment: cheapest plan is viable for static sites, DNS secondary, low-stakes monitoring. Anything else: you're the product, or the provider is losing money and will fold.

€4/mo is a steal. Or a trap. No difference sometimes.

I ran Hostinger "Nano" for 18 months. $2/mo. Deal of the century. Then they vanished. No announcement. Just gone. My "steal" became lesson.

No location in posts but I will say: if deal is too good, you are the inventory being sold to someone. Or the host is burning investor money. Either way, backup everything. Trust nothing.

Free trials are just delayed bills with better marketing