Contabo rents virtual and dedicated servers out of Germany and a few other regions at prices that make the big clouds look like a joke. You get a plain Linux box with a public IP, a panel for reboots and snapshots, and nothing else.

How I use it

I keep a handful of small VPSs there for the things that have to run all month: a self-hosted database, a scraper, a monitoring page, a CRM I did not want to pay per seat for. Each one is a Docker Compose stack behind nginx, and I reach them over my private network instead of opening ports. The boxes have been up for over a year with one reboot I caused myself.

What surprised me is how much machine you get. A 4-core, 8 GB VPS runs three or four containers without noticing, and I have never hit the traffic cap. What annoys me is everything around the machine. The panel looks ten years old, sessions expire while you are still reading, and the first invoice includes a setup fee that the headline price does not mention. The cheapest rate also needs a 24-month commitment; month to month the same box costs noticeably more. Support exists but works at ticket speed, so I keep my own snapshots before every upgrade.

Who it is for

Developers and small teams who need a server, not a platform. If you can install Docker and write an nginx config, the price is hard to argue with. Skip it if you want managed databases, autoscaling or a support chat that answers in minutes; that is what the big clouds charge for, and here you simply do not get it.

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