Contabo is not trying to be the fastest VPS. It is trying to give you the most resources per euro, and it does. The question is whether your workload is sensitive to the thing it trades away.
What you get for the price
A Contabo VPS around €4.50 a month gives you several times the RAM and storage of a similarly priced instance elsewhere. For memory-hungry workloads that are not latency-critical, that is a strong deal. Six datacenter regions including the US, Europe and Asia.
The catch: disk speed
Independent testing puts Contabo's NVMe random-read IOPS well below Hetzner's (roughly 12,000 versus 38,000 in one widely cited benchmark). For a user-facing database under concurrent load, that gap shows up as slower queries. For build farms, scrapers, CI runners, batch jobs and backups, it does not matter at all.
| Contabo | Hetzner | |
|---|---|---|
| RAM and storage per euro | Higher | Lower |
| NVMe IOPS (measured, directional) | ~12,000 | ~38,000 |
| Best for | Batch, build, storage, memory | Latency-sensitive apps and databases |
Who it fits
Self-hosters running memory-heavy services, CI and build infrastructure, media storage, game servers where RAM and slots matter more than tick precision, and anyone whose workload is throughput rather than latency. Not the pick for a high-traffic store or an API where database response time is the user experience.
Prices checked September 2026. Hosting prices change often and vary by region and term. Confirm the current number on the provider's own site before you buy. Where we could not verify a figure we left it out.