Contabo: Is It Reliable? Find Out in Our Review

A popular website hosting service that first opened for business in 2003, Contabo is a hosting-customization-giant. Businesses, developers and administrators can customize their server hardware here, unlike many other comparable web hosting solutions.

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    Our Contabo review examines the pros and cons of this German web hosting service. We will assess their web hosting plans from shared to VPS, dedicated, and colocation hosting to find the perfect hosting service to match your unique demands.

    This award-winning hosting service provider is versatile for small and big businesses alike. While affordability is their highlight, there are many more features that make Contabo’s hosting service worthy of your attention.

    Contabo Hosting Pros & Cons

    Pros

    • Eco-Conscious Web Hosting Service: Contabo cares about energy efficiency and lowers its carbon footprint with its Green data center.
    • Excellent Responsiveness: With over 200+ templates and mobile optimized presets, your web content will be displayed sensibly on all kinds of devices.
    • Free Domain With Every Plan: Depending on the hosting plan you choose, you may be entitled to one or three domains, totally free.  
    • Server Customization Option: With over thousands of servers owned by Contabo web hosting, you have the option to configure your own server according to your needs.
    • Unlimited Traffic on All VPS Hosting Options: The web hosting service provides unlimited traffic for VPS subscribers by combining multiple servers to share their bandwidth.
    • Easy to Install WordPress: With the help of Softaculous, you can automate installation of hundreds of applications including WordPress to your website.

    Cons

    • Lowest Uptime In The Industry: According to the company, they offer an annual mean of 95% uptime, meaning the downtime translates to roughly 8 hours per week.
    • Upgrades Cost Extra: Common features often offered by competitors for free such as automatic backup, cPanel via VPS or dedicated hosting options are only available for additional fees from Contabo.

    Contabo Prices and Payment Methods

    Offers:

    • Dedicated servers free for one month

    From shared hosting to VPS hosting, dedicated hosting and colocation services, Contabo features among the most diverse arrays of web hosting plans.

    The shared web hosting features four plans- Website Package M, L, XL and XXL. The first shared plan M is priced at €2.99 per month with 50 GB storage, 1000 e-mail addresses, 1000 FTP users, 20 MySQL databases and one domain. The second plan is Website Package L that offers the same benefits as the first plan with upgrades such as 2000 email addresses and 100 GB web space at €4.99.

    When you upgrade to Website Package XL for €7.99, you will also get two domains, 5000 emails addresses and 250 GB storage space with special customer support. Their biggest shared hosting package is Website Package XXL at €9.99 which provides three domains, unlimited emails, 500 GB storage and Ecommerce options.

    If you are looking for the fastest VPS hosting plans, choose a plan by RAM capacity specified in the name of VPS hosting options available from Contabo. The basic hosting plan here is VPS 300 at €3.99, followed by VPS 700 at €7.99 and VPS 1400 at €12.99 per month.

    The next four VPS plans are distinguished by size such as VPS S SSD priced at €4.99 with 200 GB RAM. If you need 400 GB RAM, VPS M SSD at €8.99 will do. The last two VPS plans are- VPS L SSD at €14.99 with 800 GB RAM and VPS XL SSD at €26.99 with 1600 GB RAM.

    Dedicated hosting plans on Contabo starts with Quad at €39.99 EUR per month with 8GB RAM. For those looking for 12 GB RAM, the Dedicated Core i7 at €49.99 will perform very well. Dedicated 6 Core on the other hand is a 24 GB RAM plan available for €69.99; but, if you need more, the Dedicated Server X at €79.99 per month offers 64 GB RAM. For medium-sized businesses, Dedicated Server Dual Xeon at €99.99 128 GB RAM works superbly with its Gigabit port. The best VPS plan is the Dedicated Server 10 core at €109.99 with 256 GB RAM and Gigabit ports.

    With a Contabo voucher code, you can get attractive discounts on every hosting plan. If none of the plans above impressed you, you can customize and create a new colocation hosting plan based on the number of servers, bandwidth and power too.

    To pay for Contabo hosting services, the company accepts payment through bank transfer, PayPal, and Skrill.

    Contabo User Experience

    While there are no setup fees, the Contabo user experience is not quite intuitive. Often called a vintage style web hosting service with a retro design, Contabo offers traditional HDD and modern SSDs as webspace.

    Though the Contabo cPanel is slightly old fashioned, it does have a few unique functions. The best thing we liked about Contabo is its simple website builder offered for free across all its hosting plans. It is easy for beginners to use and comes with 200+ templates, SEO tools, social media widgets, and Ecommerce functions that your business needs.

    You can install Softaculous scripts once you have membership plans of L or higher on the shared web hosting list and there are interesting tutorials available directly from Contabo describing how to make Softaculous integrations work instantly on your website.

    Contabo Load Times and Reliability

    With two data centers located in Munich and Nuremberg, Contabo offers the luxury of picking the server that best serves the location of your customers. However, our Contabo speed test produced a neutral outcome.

    While the loading times recorded on Contabo are 5x lesser than competitors at 527 milliseconds to 1.598 seconds on average according to our tests, they still arrive below Google’s suggested 2 seconds and their uptime reached 99.9% over the 30 days we tested the hosting provider. Please keep in mind that the guaranteed uptime of Contabo in their service level agreement terms and conditions is 95%, which gives you very limited protection against frequent downtime.

    Still, we found Contabo to be reliable due to their exemplary DDoS protection which help keep the cyber-attacks away from your website. I was impressed by the inclusion of PHP version 5.6, which is still the most stable version. If you create a periodic schedule to do manual backups, you will not miss the unavailable automatic feature.

    Given that most Contabo customers live in EU time zones, visitors from the US will be able to load pages quickly, even during peak traffic times.

    Contabo Main Features

    • Build your own dedicated server
    • Raid-6-array technology
    • Unlimited traffic bonus

    In an effort to help beginners and professional users set up websites, Contabo offers the unique ability to build your own dedicated server. Their colocation plan enables users to customize the housing, bandwidth or power by choosing from 1 to 40 server spaces, 100 Megabit ports to 10 Gigabit ports, and fixed price to 16A Flat rate, respectively.   

    When you sign up for Contabo, you will also obtain 300 domain extensions that you can use for expanding your website gradually. With additional features such as automatic daily, weekly, and monthly backups accessible for nominal costs, you receive a sweet deal given your data is protected by RAID-6-array technology.

    On top of the absence of a setup fee, you never have to pay extra for expanding traffic with Contabo hosting unlike other hosting service providers. This is due to the added value of an unlimited traffic bonus you receive from this hosting service across all the available membership plans.

    Contrary to most web hosting services, this company also owns its own servers, counting upon approximately 5,000 at present with room for an additional 15,000. They have two data centers in Munich and Nuremberg, each of which was recognized with the German Data Center Award for two consecutive years. The best bit is that you can also use both the data centers for your Contabo server hosting for better performance. With RAID mirroring, you will get high performance via this web host, no matter where you are doing business.

    Contabo Customer Support

    This website hosting provider has a superfast responsiveness score for customer service and support via email and phone. However, if you are from outside the European Union, make sure to check their operational hours with your time zone first.

    If you need quick customer service support for help with immediate problems, sign up for their emergency support upgrade to resolve problems in less than 60 minutes day or night, even on weekends. You will also receive an emergency phone number in case you experience problems reaching the customer care department. 

    For personalized support from IT professionals remotely, just pay €25 which is billed at the start of every 15 minutes of support. The Contabo datacenter is built on the belief that the customer is king. Owing to that, you will find a wealth of information on finding resolutions via their support page that lists 70+ FAQ questions on web hosting packages, servers, colocation and IPv6. There are also extensive tutorials online that you can check for troubleshooting your website hosting problems on your own.

    Contabo Hosting for Free

    During our Contabo review, we discovered that there are no free trials available for Contabo server hosting. You can take a glimpse at the cPanel on Contabo with the demo account details provided on their main website next to the cPanel test to take a closer look at the service. They also offer a WHM demo link on the ‘test us’ page. Yet, you can contact the customer service directly to access a 1-month free trial of dedicated servers.

    Our Final Thoughts on Contabo

    Contabo offers unique technologies in distinct sections of the hosting environment, making it an excellent choice for small and large European companies seeking affordable web-hosting services. Given its proven premium features, our Contabo review clarifies many of the pros and cons of this hosting service with so that you can buy with assurance.

    To learn more about how to use this service exclusively for your web niche, read through the reviews submitted by subscribers who have also used Contabo hosting under our Contabo Expert Review.