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Review: 6 months with Contabo — boring in the best way

Reviews by quinnbizz 21 replies 1.8K views
quinnbizz

Member OP

#11

hankels said:
Did you ever test during EU evening hours?
Good catch. I just ran fio again, 21:30 CET: randread dropped to 890 MB/s, randwrite to 310 MB/s. So about 25% hit. Still usable for my workloads but if you're running prometheus with tight SLAs that's exactly the kind of variance that hurts.

uma said:
CPU steal 3-8% during 20:00-23:00 CET
Matches my timing. I see steal hit 6% tonight, normally 0-1%.

...
uma

Member

99.99% or bust

4 #12

quinnbizz said:
25% hit
Oof. My monitoring is more CPU-bound so the steal hurts more than IO degradation. I moved my smokeping off Contabo to a Hetzner CX11 in Helsinki specifically for that reason — €3.79/month to get clean baseline measurements.

Still keep the Contabo box for actual workloads though. The steal is annoying, not fatal.

436 days. reboot is surrender.
sarahjey

Member

#13

Thanks everyone for the nextcloud advice! I think I'll try the 2GB plan with sqlite and see how it goes, if it's too tight I'll bump up. Way better than oracle's constant anxiety.

One more question — does Contabo block port 25 by default? I want to run my own mail server for notifications.

learning on $5 VPS and prayers
jane_ffm

Member

1 #14

sarahjey said:
Does Contabo block port 25 by default?
Yes, outbound 25 is blocked on new VPS accounts. You can request removal through a ticket, they usually approve within a few hours if your account has a payment history. No student discounts currently, sorry — the base pricing is already pretty aggressive.

Re: IPv6 /64 — I should clarify, the Q4 roadmap is for automated delegation. Manual /64 assignment is possible today via ticket if you have a specific use case.

Single mode till I die 💀
FlowSana

Member

SRE

#15

RAJ said:
Did you finish that sentence?
Cut off, sorry. AWS t3.small averages 15-25% baseline steal in my experience, with burst credits depleting predictably under sustained load. Contabo's 3-8% is actually better for steady-state workloads, worse if you expected zero neighbor impact.

sarahjey said:
Run my own mail server
Please don't. Use Mailgun's free tier (5k/month), Postmark ($10/10k), or even AWS SES if you're in a supported region. Self-hosted email deliverability is a full-time job and your Contabo IP range likely has reputation issues from previous tenants.

It's always DNS. Always.
hankels

Member

52 VPS and counting

#16

FlowSana said:
Contabo's 3-8% is actually better
Only if you're comparing to burstable tiers. My OVHcloud VPS is on dedicated threads, zero steal ever. You pay for that of course.

sarahjey said:
Mail server
Seconding FlowSana. I tried running mail on a Contabo box in 2022. Gmail flagged me in 48 hours, Microsoft in 72. Not worth the headache.

seedbox, NAS, tape, and three offsite
LichunLars

Member

#17

quinnbizz said:
Randread dropped to 890 MB/s
Interesting — my Stockholm tests are from their Singapore location, not Frankfurt. 180ms but consistent. IO doesn't vary much there, maybe because fewer EU evening users hitting that DC.

For APAC users, Singapore is actually decent if you can stomach the latency to Europe.

1ms or I don't want it
SwapJones

Member

OOM killer's friend

#18

sarahjey said:
2GB plan with sqlite
SQLite on Nextcloud with 3 users will work until it doesn't. Concurrent uploads during photo sync = database locked errors. Been there.

My fix: 512MB swap on zstd-compressed zram. Costs maybe 3% CPU, saves you from OOM during spikes. Contabo's NVMe is fast enough that swap doesn't hurt too bad.

RAM is just fast disk, right?
svendeal

Member

Deal Sniper

#19

hankels said:
$1.80/GB
Just checked my notes — Contabo's 8GB plan is €10.99, so $1.37/GB. The value improves as you scale up, which is typical. Their 16GB at €17.99 is $1.12/GB.

Still not touching svendeal territory but I don't resell Contabo. Too much support overhead for my customers.

world record: 4min Arch install
sarahjey

Member

#20

Okay okay no mail server 😅 I'll look at Mailgun. Thanks for saving me from myself.

Signed up for the 2GB plan, provisioning now. Fingers crossed.

learning on $5 VPS and prayers

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