Contabo Review
Contabo is a well-respected web hosting provider in the industry. It established in Germany back in 2003. With a single server and with their persistent team, they became a highly successful company over the years. Right now, they are one of the experienced providers that you can absolutely rely on, offering a wide range of services for bloggers, online store owners, affiliate websites and more.
If you want a powerful server for gaming, Contabo offers those kinds of services as well. For example, you can seamlessly run Minecraft on it with low latency even during high traffic. Of course, there are many other games, even more demanding ones that can run on Contabo’s servers without any problem. If you want to ensure an enjoyable gaming experience for all players, it is always a good idea to host the game on your own server.
At Contabo, everyone can find a web hosting plan that fits their needs. Shared hosting, VPS and dedicated servers are all available and you have numerous plans to choose from for each type of service. Once you establish your online presence with a website, it can start to grow rapidly, asking for more resources to handle the traffic. Even if your website attracts a huge amount of traffic, you don’t need to worry about the performance as long as you choose a hosting plan at Contabo.
After you finished signing up to one of their plans, it will be instantly active and you can start working on your website. Their packages are designed to be highly flexible, allowing you to configure features as you prefer and scale up resources whenever needed. In the rest of this review, we are talk a bit about each plan, the prices, the reliability of Contabo’s servers and their customer support.
Contabo Plans and Pricing
Shared Hosting Plans
Contabo is striving to provide a reliable shared hosting service, offering plans that are up to the standards for affordable prices. Every shared plan allows you to use one-click install scripts for all the additional software you need for your website. They are quite generous with the applications, as you can find hundreds of them in the package that can be quickly installed and also make your life easier.
Also, they don’t limit your traffic, so it only depends on you to decide whether your website can run seamlessly on the current plan or you need a better one. However, they limit the disk space and the amount of MySQL databases and email accounts you can have. This is not necessarily a downside, since most people don’t exceed these limits anyway.
You get a free SSL certificate even with the cheapest plan, so you don’t need to buy one separately. It is crucial to have an SSL certificate if you want to build up trust in your website visitors. The other thing you don’t need to pay for is their website builder which is available for everyone. You can get a shared hosting plan for as low as 2.99 EUR per month with 50GB of storage, 20 MySQL databases, 1000 email addresses and 1000 FTP users.
If you need a stronger one, you can choose from 3 additional plans. The most expensive one costs $9.99 EUR per month and it upgrades the specs to 500GB of storage and unlimited MySQL databases, email and FTP accounts.
VPS Hosting Plans
If you check out their VPS section, you will realize that they offer traditional HDD and SSD hard disks as well in their plans. Even if you choose the cheapest package, you get to choose between those two types of storage drives. If you know exactly how much resources your website requires, you can set up your plan accordingly.
Contabo allows you to put together a custom VPS plan with the required RAM, CPU cores and SSD or HDD storage. There is no shortage of options, ensuring that you don’t pay for more resources than the amount you actually use. This makes their service completely cost-effective, giving a perfect value for your money. Since the provider gives you root access to the server with all VPS plans, you are free to install any software you need manually.
If you check out the VPS section at Contabo, you can see that the plans are divided into HDD plus SSD Boost and 100% SSD plans. Each category offers 3 different plans. The first plan with HDD costs 6.99 EUR per month and gives you 2 CPU cores, 6GB of RAM, 500GB of SSD boosted storage and a 100Mbit/second bandwidth per port.
The first 100% SSD VPS plan at Contabo costs only 8.99 EUR and you get 4 CPU cores, 12GB of RAM, 300GB SSD storage and the same 100Mbit/s bandwidth per port. You can choose between Linux and Windows. If you choose the Windows Server, you can pick the 2012 version for the HDD plans and the 2016 version for the SSDs.
Dedicated Hosting Plans
Contabo offers dedicated server plans right from the start. In fact, this was the only type of service that the company offered back in the day and as the years gone by, they included the other typical services such as shared and VPS hosting. Therefore, dedicated servers are the field they are mostly specialized in. At first, they had only one data center available, but now you can choose a dedicated server relatively close to your location no matter where you live.
Their plans are not only highly customizable, but you can also choose your preferred operating system. All dedicated plans support Windows and Linux as well and if you want to manually install software on their servers, you can do so thanks to the root access that comes with the service. They have their so-called starter model for those who want a cheaper dedicated server with a price of 39.99 EUR. It comes with a 4-core CPU, 8GB of RAM and 800GB of disk space.
The prices for their more expensive dedicated plans start from 49.99 EUR all the way up to 109.99 EUR. The first one comes with a 4-core i7 processor, 12GB of RAM, 200GB storage and 100Mbit/s port for the bandwidth. You can scale this up to a 10-core Intel Xeon CPU, 256GB of RAM, 1Gbit/s port for the bandwidth and the storage space of your choice. By clicking the Customize & Order option, you can freely customize the plans before you pay.
Contabo’s Server Locations and Hardware
In order to ensure quick page load times for your website, a strong hardware is not the only important factor. You should also choose a data center that is the closest to your location so that the response time is as low as possible. If you find a web hosting company that provides top-notch service but their closest data center is on the other side of the globe, then it becomes impossible to establish a good connection.
Fortunately, the data centers of Contabo are spread all around the World, providing a rather close location for every client. Also, there are thousands of servers in each location so they can hardly be outsourced. They have two quite big data centers in Germany with a whopping 4000 servers running. Back in 2009, Contabo established a data center in Munich, which later got rewarded for using green energy to power the servers.
The biggest data center is established in 2014 in Nuremberg. It enabled the company to add up to 10,000 dedicated servers if necessary to serve the growing number of clients in the region. They invested a lot of money into this project, but it undoubtedly paid off in the end. It is also worth mentioning that Contabo got a German Data Center Award in two separate occasions for their dedicated work.
Contabo Server Uptime
Contabo is striving to improve their services in many ways, and this includes keeping their server uptimes as high as possible. They are so dedicated in achieving their goal that they guarantee a 99.99% uptime for your website. One of the reasons why this provider is so reliable is they ensured 100% redundancy for their hardware.
What this means is they constantly monitor every element in the server with all the software running on them and if anything crashes, they are there to fix it instantly. There is no downtime, as the backup element will be active right away. Contabo uses the latest servers and they are completely secured not only with protective software, but plenty of security cameras as well.
Customer Support at Contabo
At Contabo, once you sign up to one of the hosting plans, their team will do everything to guarantee you a seamless experience. They have more than a decade-old support system that has never been outsourced. The company always makes sure to hire and train enough experts so that their clients can get a quick response.
Although the customer support team has a narrow schedule for phone calls, you can still reach them via email at any time. Both the email and phone support (if you call them during working hours) is quick and highly effective. When it comes to the knowledge base, Contabo has a great collection of tutorials and an extensive FAQ that you can check out whenever you get stuck or have a simple question in mind.
Although they don’t have a live chat or ticketing system, this doesn’t make their support bad because they try their best to be reachable and helpful through their two available channels. All in all, you can get a 10/10 support from the Contabo team whenever you face an issue on your website or with your hosting plan. Their staff is well-trained, ready to solve even the most unusual problems.
