I have been a Contabo customer for fourteen months under their "Managed Business" tier. The following events occurred during a routine migration:
- Contabo initiated an OS upgrade without notice
- The upgrade broke custom kernel modules I require
- Support declined to troubleshoot, citing "custom configurations fall outside managed scope"
- I spent six hours rebuilding the environment myself
- Contabo then billed a €150 "incident response" fee
From what I recall of the Contabo TOS, managed services are described as proactive administration of the operating environment. I think there's also something about customer-installed software being excluded, though I don't remember kernel modules being mentioned specifically.
I am seeking clarification on where the boundary lies. My understanding of "managed" was that the provider handles infrastructure-level issues. Contabo's position appears to be that "managed" means "we will watch it break and charge you."
Has the industry definition shifted, or is this provider-specific? I have reviewed the SLA and find no explicit kernel module exclusion.
RR