Contabo is cheap for reasons

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.

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.

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