Hosting – 🫨 Morgan Wattiez

TLDR: In December 2023 I picked this low-cost VPS provider. I do not recommend them, and I hope this writing will save people from wasting any time or money on Contabo.

They claimed "German Quality, Always". It's neither good quality, neither always.

For the most part, from December 2023 to September 2024, I could almost live without caring too much about managing my server, whose setup is mostly delegated to Cloudron. And I had no problem using Cloudron for my web apps on this cheap VPS; my Cloudron backups were also configured in Cloudron to use Contabo Object Storage. No problem on the surface. Until Murphy's law enter the game:

An outage in September 2024 broke availability in Nuremberg Data center and so my backups and my Cloudron instance were unavailable. I entered panic mode because there was nothing I could see or do. Contabo offered no support because their customer portal was impacted as well and no fail-over mechanism had been put in place. That tells a lot. Fortunately this was solved after a few days.
Quickly after this outage resolution, I noticed too that rclone and Cloudron backups were acting weird, mostly due to the slowness or rate limiting of Contabo Object storage API. I couldn't find an explanation so I just contacted Contabo support, which fixed my problem without saying much, sadly.
Few weeks later still in September 2024, my DNS config on my VPS starts to cause issues, but only to the light of problems encountered in WordPress, Miniflux and Changedetection. All those issues exploded to my face in the form of timeouts or unreachable URLs. Fortunately I found this write up https://www.thomasmartens.eu/contabo-dns-lookup-timeouts/ and could just fix my default NetPlan configuration and switched from Contabo DNS to 1.1.1.1 (CloudFlare) and 9.9.9.9 (Quad9).
I noticed too that my object storage space was filling up constantly, causing me some anxiety. And I couldn't clean anything. The backup cleanups were also silently frequently in Cloudron as a result. In the end I couldn't find the root cause but switching to Hetzner storage instead of Contabo Object Storage fixed and made the whole process faster.

Unfortunately I went through those issues. But I could have avoided them. When one have to pick a product or service, it's better to do more research and ask around for advice.

Use ChatGPT to be brutally honest when giving you advice and saving you money and pain.

Or just visit forums and communities like Reddit;

Lessons learned

Some products and services are cheap for reasons: quality for free is often a scam.
I should have checked internet before. Be more picky, check the community forums and reviews. Avoid unneeded pain.
Do not put all your eggs in the same basket, i.e pick different locations and providers for your compute and data.
Monitor the health of your backups and storage location.
Plan for disaster.

Specs comparison

If you ever need to battle test your VPS, have a look at some of those VPS benchmarking scripts: https://monovm.com/blog/vps-benchmark-tools/.

I've picked the first from the list, namely bench.sh https://github.com/haydenjames/bench-scripts/blob/master/README.md#benchsh in order to compare the specs of my Gitea runner running on Hetzner vs my main Cloudron instance running at Contabo.

Here are the specs and price on paper:

Contabo VPS M SSD https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/hosters/contabo/plans/m-ssd (deprecated plan)

CPU 6 cores
Memory 16 GB
Disk 600 GB (100% SSD)
Port 400 Mbit/s
Price €11.25 / month

Hetzner - CX32 https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/hosters/hetzner/plans/cx32 (still available on Nov 13, 2024).

CPU 4 cores
Memory 8 GB
Disk 80 GB
Price € 8.09 / month (https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/).

Both are in the same region. The amount of CPU and disk space vary, but overall there is a clear winner about performance.

-------------------- A Bench.sh Script By Teddysun -------------------
 Version            : v2024-11-11
 Usage              : wget -qO- bench.sh | bash
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 CPU Model          : AMD EPYC Processor (with IBPB)
 CPU Cores          : 6 @ 2799.996 MHz
 CPU Cache          : 512 KB
 AES-NI             : ✓ Enabled
 VM-x/AMD-V         : ✗ Disabled
 Total Disk         : 593.5 GB (53.7 GB Used)
 Total Mem          : 15.6 GB (4.9 GB Used)
 Total Swap         : 4.0 GB (268.2 MB Used)
 System uptime      : 6 days, 17 hour 31 min
 Load average       : 0.67, 0.85, 1.09
 OS                 : Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS
 Arch               : x86_64 (64 Bit)
 Kernel             : 5.15.0-124-generic
 TCP CC             : cubic
 Virtualization     : Dedicated
 IPv4/IPv6          : ✓ Online / ✗ Offline
 Organization       : AS51167 Contabo GmbH
 Location           : Nürnberg / DE
 Region             : Bavaria
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 I/O Speed(1st run) : 131 MB/s
 I/O Speed(2nd run) : 98.0 MB/s
 I/O Speed(3rd run) : 94.4 MB/s
 I/O Speed(average) : 107.8 MB/s
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Node Name        Upload Speed      Download Speed      Latency     
 Speedtest.net    399.41 Mbps       399.48 Mbps         11.37 ms    
 Los Angeles, US  378.05 Mbps       401.30 Mbps         155.48 ms   
 Dallas, US       390.21 Mbps       402.25 Mbps         127.98 ms   
 Montreal, CA     44.98 Mbps        400.75 Mbps         105.08 ms   
 Paris, FR        404.24 Mbps       397.38 Mbps         18.16 ms    
 Amsterdam, NL    392.33 Mbps       396.11 Mbps         23.08 ms    
 Beijing, CN      275.61 Mbps       410.68 Mbps         241.41 ms   
 Shanghai, CN     129.99 Mbps       362.16 Mbps         428.46 ms   
 Hong Kong, CN    224.22 Mbps       386.99 Mbps         284.37 ms   
 Singapore, SG    93.82 Mbps        362.53 Mbps         329.19 ms   
 Tokyo, JP        302.55 Mbps       393.36 Mbps         256.67 ms   
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Finished in        : 5 min 43 sec
 Timestamp          : 2024-11-13 09:18:58 UTC
----------------------------------------------------------------------

-------------------- A Bench.sh Script By Teddysun -------------------
 Version            : v2024-11-11
 Usage              : wget -qO- bench.sh | bash
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 CPU Model          : Intel Xeon Processor (Skylake, IBRS, no TSX)
 CPU Cores          : 4 @ 2099.998 MHz
 CPU Cache          : 16384 KB
 AES-NI             : ✓ Enabled
 VM-x/AMD-V         : ✗ Disabled
 Total Disk         : 75.0 GB (3.5 GB Used)
 Total Mem          : 7.6 GB (632.2 MB Used)
 System uptime      : 39 days, 14 hour 22 min
 Load average       : 0.03, 0.02, 0.00
 OS                 : Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
 Arch               : x86_64 (64 Bit)
 Kernel             : 6.8.0-41-generic
 TCP CC             : cubic
 Virtualization     : Dedicated
 IPv4/IPv6          : ✓ Online / ✓ Online
 Organization       : AS24940 Hetzner Online GmbH
 Location           : Nürnberg / DE
 Region             : Bavaria
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 I/O Speed(1st run) : 846 MB/s
 I/O Speed(2nd run) : 795 MB/s
 I/O Speed(3rd run) : 929 MB/s
 I/O Speed(average) : 856.7 MB/s
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Node Name        Upload Speed      Download Speed      Latency     
 Speedtest.net    2292.48 Mbps      2473.56 Mbps        0.66 ms     
 Los Angeles, US  605.99 Mbps       2986.01 Mbps        157.65 ms   
 Dallas, US       702.97 Mbps       3420.20 Mbps        128.18 ms   
 Montreal, CA     175.26 Mbps       937.60 Mbps         90.89 ms    
 Paris, FR        7119.88 Mbps      9681.24 Mbps        13.65 ms    
 Amsterdam, NL    4993.84 Mbps      7353.62 Mbps        10.41 ms    
 Beijing, CN      627.18 Mbps       2611.88 Mbps        187.03 ms   
 Shanghai, CN     1.34 Mbps         1791.62 Mbps        325.14 ms   
 Hong Kong, CN    352.36 Mbps       2526.89 Mbps        234.43 ms   
 Singapore, SG    181.44 Mbps       670.17 Mbps         194.45 ms   
 Tokyo, JP        313.71 Mbps       2686.38 Mbps        236.80 ms   
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Finished in        : 5 min 48 sec
 Timestamp          : 2024-11-13 09:25:24 UTC
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Conclusion and what's next

I still have my main VPS at Contabo, however my storage and backups are with Hetzner, migrating to Hetzner should be a no brainer, thanks to the built-in quality of Cloudron.

I've also configured another VPS with Hetzner, with satisfaction, for running Gitea Actions, because there is no way I rely on GitHub.

So you know. Move away from them, unless for cheap, non business critical workflows where performance and reliability are not a concern.

i.e UX patterns that make me feel like I should report to https://grumpy.website/.

I'm regularly battling to browse the web like before and maintain Inbox Zero for my work and personal mailboxes and I have to say it's not a fun game. Especially when some crappy tactics at are play like below.

Let's start a collection with the patterns I criticize and update this post regularly with findings.

CloudFlare (via RYM / rateyourmusic.com and many others)

Every few clicks when browsing their website with my paid account, I'm facing this "human status check" which is a big annoyance. I've informed them it's a pain, especially every few clicks and as a subscribed user. They promise their developers are working on it. We will see...

Elastic.co

First example is Elastic (elastic.co), with a work email I never asked for, inviting me to a local event. The email is long and I don't care about the Pizza party at all which is the first thing they mention in their agenda. I want to stop receiving such emails.

Looking at the bottom of their email, I notice a first unsubscribe button.

It redirects to a subscription page... (see below). Clever... !

When looking more closely, there is a second unsubscribe button, very hard to see due to the lack of contrast.

Who has then time to fill their unsubscribe form ? Not every weirdo. But that's it seems the effort which is due just for allowing me to regain a little more quiet in my mailbox. So now you know.

Homebrew (Mac)

You use brew install to run a small utility binary and ... you scroll through 630 lines of output and recompilation to see if your utility is finally there. WHY. SO. MUCH. OUTPUT.

Medium

No, you shall not ask my private data show me some HTML on the web. Well tried but nope.

I won't trust your doomed kingdom. Related: Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms.

OpenAI / ChatGPT

I regularly have to play a few puzzles successively. In average 2 or 5. If you fail, you start over. It's very time consuming.

OrbStack updates

Leave me develop please.

RateYourMusic / Sonemic

This ones make me sad as RYM belongs to my favorite bookmarks. We are punished with this "prove you are human" form every few clicks. So annoying.

And also, from time to time.... Thank you CloudFlare.

NodeBB

Preventing users from contributing a forum for some arbitrary period is quite stupid especially if done AFTER you accept their account registration.

Once the waiting period is completed, the post is queued. This is better, yet annoying of course.

OVH

After months with Contabo (VPS), I decided it was time to close my domain and hosting subscriptions managed at OVH. I disabled the automated renewal a few weeks ago, and managed to setup redirects on my old websites. My subscriptions should be cancelled automatically but I can't wait and I want to get that out of my mind, so I want to force a manual cancellation.

To my surprise, it took me a lot of emails and exchanges with support. I understand the security measures and no one would like its accounts and services revoked by accident.

The problem is mostly the poor UX and customer support for getting this done. Let dig deeper.

When trying to cancel any service, I just get error without explanation nor resolution steps.

Later did I find emails from OVH asking me to confirm my revocation, so I could at least complete some of the steps, but it required me to leave my workflow and switch from my admin panel to emails, then manage those emails, then double check my admin panels for updates of services statuses...

In the end I opened a ticket to OVH support asking them to delete my account and the related services. They closed the ticket asking me to close my account only after services are revoked, which let me again with an unresolved solution.

I had to reopen the ticket and provide them the evidence above so they know I can't close some of my services. Closing a customer complaint on user's behalf without asking feedback is probably a tactic for improving their KPIs, but it ultimately tell they consider their customers to be nothing more than complainers with no real problem to be solved. This also tell the culture of OVH has diverged from customer first. No wonder I'm leaving you, OVH, as I'm expecting more from a service provider.

Category: Hosting

Dark patterns collection