☁️ Hosting Solutions Contabo VPS quality?

[Tracy]

Anyone using them?
They seem to have some decent prices for their VPS offerings. I am looking at getting another VPS to offload some of my lower traffic sites (and @Opus X site) to so that I can free up more space for my primary that I will keep on Hetzner since I am happy with them, even though they are almost twice in price what Contabo would be for similar setup.


The package I'm looking at is their Cloud VPS 1. Have gone over their "right of refusal" agreement and it's weird somewhat but acceptable.
One of my big concerns is that of all "cheaper" hosting providers... the tendency to over provision a server so that your service suffers. I have read several reviews that have indicated that Contabo is another that tends to do this and that it is not an infrequent occurrence to have CPU cycles being "stolen" so that you do not get what you contracted for.

 

[Darth Cognus]

I'm not sure where I read it from (I know it was AJ initially) but I hear they oversell very heavily, among the worst offenders for what you're concerned about. That weened me off from trying them, my particularly low traffic projects are nearlyfreespeech now and hetzner for heavier lifting, I tend to look at hostinger as something in the middle although I don't use them currently. But I digress in favor of authoritative opinions.

 

[cpvr]

I'm not sure where I read it from (I know it was AJ initially) but I hear they oversell very heavily, among the worst offenders for what you're concerned about. That weened me off from trying them, my particularly low traffic projects are nearlyfreespeech now and hetzner for heavier lifting, I tend to look at hostinger as something in the middle although I don't use them currently. But I digress in favor of authoritative opinions.

This is true. Their hosting services are pretty bad along with their customer service. There’s a lot of topics on reddit about their company.

https://www.reddit.com/r/VPS/s/ODjTagDsht

https://www.reddit.com/r/VPS/s/3mu7hqfMaF

https://www.reddit.com/r/VPS/s/e5SVzo3NE4

 

[Tracy]

I'm not sure where I read it from (I know it was AJ initially) but I hear they oversell very heavily, among the worst offenders for what you're concerned about

Yeah, that has been a concern. I had read them being pushed as a good hosting provider over on XenForo and something "smelled bad" as I thought I had looked into them before. Almost every review I have seen has been horrid about them recently (within last -2 year period).
I will probably end up looking at Hetzner again for a smaller one for my Wordpress and a few other sites. Since Brandons site uses the ES add-on I'll probably let him keep it on my site for now as it gets very little traffic. I'm about to renew the domain for him as a favor, and his site really does not impact the server that much.

 

[Cedric]

I’m with them and have never experienced a problem.

 

[Tracy]

I’m with them and have never experienced a problem.

Have you ran any terminal level measurements (like htop, glances, nmon and others) to check the stability of the performance of it? Almost across the board I keep reading bad reviews of their service, the primary two being that they oversell/over provision the servers with clients, banking on the fact that few will use the maximum services being sold to them so giving them some "fudge" room.
The other reported major issue is the fact that the throttle the SSD throughput, pushing you to their NVMe solution.
I'm also not a fan of the fact that they charge you a "surcharge" for certain locations.

I am still tempted to grab one just to play with for a few months and see how "reliable" they are. With my backup scripts, if they do turn out to be a crappy provider it's easy enough to move the sites over to another VPS in less than an hour once the images are transferred over to the new VPS.

 

[Tracy]

OK... grabbed a Cloud VPS 1 config. Since it's only around $7 a month, I'll give up a Cream & Coffee stop.

The actual provisioning took longer than my experience with Hetzner (which was almost instantaneous).
Am in the process of installing CentMin Mod on it. It is very similar in specs to my Hetzner install.

The Hetzner install when I was installing the CentMin Mod BETA

Total Curl Installer YUM or DNF Time: 76.7443 seconds
Total YUM Time: 31.975657296 seconds
Total YUM or DNF + Source Download Time: 50.7932
Total Nginx First Time Install Time: 212.0399
Total PHP First Time Install Time: 412.9353
Download From Github Time: 0.8017
Total Time Other eg. source compiles: 215.1361
Total Centmin Mod Install Time: 890.9045
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total Install Time (curl yum + cm install + zip download): 968.4505 seconds
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AlmaLinux 8.7 Stone Smilodon  (4.18.0-372.32.1.el8_6.x86_64)
4 AMD EPYC Processor
4 2445.406
PHP VERSION: 8.0.25
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Centmin Mod Version: 130.00beta01.b244

The CentMini Stable install on the Contabo VPS instance

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total Curl Installer YUM or DNF Time: 124.2977 seconds
Total YUM Time: 90.879310178 seconds
Total YUM or DNF + Source Download Time: 118.9238
Total Nginx First Time Install Time: 96.2693
Total PHP First Time Install Time: 683.8422
Download From Github Time: 1.9983
Total Time Other eg. source compiles: 327.6698
Total Centmin Mod Install Time: 1226.7051
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total Install Time for curl yum + cm install + zip download: 1353.0011 seconds
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AlmaLinux 9.4 Seafoam Ocelot  5.14.0-427.31.1.el9_4.x86_64
4 AMD EPYC 7282 16-Core Processor
4 2794.748
PHP VERSION: 8.3.10
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Centmin Mod Version: 131.00stable.b043
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

About 400 seconds (7 minutes) longer to install CentMin Mod.
I'll be doing some testing to see how the disk performance and similar is. One thing I did notice is the repository set for Contabo's AlmaLinux 9 install was barebones minimum.

 

[Tracy]

Just a little more info.

Hetzner 4vCPU/8GB instance running 6 sites on CentMin Mod with Redis, Memcached and ES server running.

The new Contabo install 4vCPU/6GB running the same but with zero sites running.

 

[Tracy]

Tonights plan is to move my WordPress site over to the Contabo server.
I will also be moving @Opus X site over to it since I have ES now running on it successfully.
This should give some breathing room to my site for space and allow the other sites to have their own environment.
I plan on financing the hosting for the PipeStand forum since the owner is a close friend and it will not be a major impact for me and it allows me to also gain some exposure to yet another VPS provider.
If they end up being horrible, it's easy enough to restart the sites on my Hetzner VPS.
I still need to do a little more work on the ES server to get it as a standalone node and not part of a group of ES replication nodes.

 

[Ravenfreak]

Just curious, how much are you paying for Hetzner compared to Contabo? I'm guessing you're paying more for Hetzner? Either way I'll keep an eye on this thread, in the case that I ever want to switch to VPS and need to do research.

 

[Tracy]

Just curious, how much are you paying for Hetzner compared to Contabo? I'm guessing you're paying more for Hetzner? Either way I'll keep an eye on this thread, in the case that I ever want to switch to VPS and need to do research.

The 4vCPU/8GB/160GB (NVMe) VPS at Hetzner runs me about $16 USD a month.
The 4vCPU/6GB/400GB (SSD) VPS at Contabo is around $6 USD a month. I could add about $3 to this one and get 200GB NVMe, but I wanted to try the SSD option to see if it is as throttled on throughput as it is reported.

Just a quick GTMetrix site between my forum home page and @Opus X landing page (which is the default forum itself).

The Pipe Stand site has been moved to it already (as well as my blog).
One thing to remember if you move an XF site over that uses DigitalPoints CloudFlare add-on is to update your API for the site with the new IP address.
There is a third site I will be moving over to it also that I am hosting as a favor.
Honestly... if the Contabo VPS stays the way it is working, it may be worth it.
I would not use them for an email server though, only for websites and do your transactional email through a 3rd party service.

 

[Cedric]

I’d copy the same forum/site to both VPS and then run it through the speedcheck. Doing two different websites doesn’t give the accurate results. I’ve been running close to 100 for mine on my VPS. I also have a WHM and 5 cPanel account addition to the VPS.

 

[Tracy]

I’d copy the same forum/site to both VPS and then run it through the speedcheck. Doing two different websites doesn’t give the accurate results. I’ve been running close to 100 for mine on my VPS. I also have a WHM and 5 cPanel account addition to the VPS.

I'm not concentrating as much on the GTMetrix ratings... but the speed of the actual connections along with other performance related aspects.
They are close, but Hetzner seems to win. Of course, Hetzner is about 3 times as expensive also.
Just some quick disk speed tests.

Hetzner (write speed)

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test1.img bs=1G count=1 oflag=dsync
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 0.886827 s, 1.2 GB/s

Contabo (write speed)

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test1.img bs=1G count=1 oflag=dsync
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 7.61411 s, 141 MB/s

Hetzner server latency (disk)

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test2.img bs=512 count=1000 oflag=dsync
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
512000 bytes (512 kB, 500 KiB) copied, 0.00191423 s, 267 MB/s

Contabo server latency (disk)

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test2.img bs=512 count=1000 oflag=dsync
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
512000 bytes (512 kB, 500 KiB) copied, 0.911949 s, 561 kB/s

Using hdparm to test read/write disk cache on Hetzner

sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   25190 MB in  1.99 seconds = 12641.60 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 7646 MB in  3.00 seconds = 2547.35 MB/sec

Using hdparm to test read/write cache on Contabo

sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   15666 MB in  1.99 seconds = 7857.82 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 2158 MB in  3.00 seconds = 718.92 MB/sec

Other testing I have done has been similar.... Contabo does not perform as well. On the SSD, it's entirely possible they are throttling the VPS installations.

 

[Opus X]

i do notice a difference when i am in the control panel.
it seems to have some pauses in it that it did not have.
i do not know if that is because the slower disks or TOR just acting up.

 

[Tracy]

Just an addendum. I am looking at adding another VPS to do mail hosting for some of the lower needed domains I and some friends own.
But I have an issue when a sites sales processing shows this

I think they would be smart enought to translate safe to save in the long run. It does present questions on whether to continue to purchase process. And yes, this is at Contabo.

 

[Tracy]

First hiccup found. The VPS instance has been running since I obtained it with no reboot.
Today I was trying to do some updates to PHP and NGINX and kept getting a seg fault. The VPS was even giving me that when trying to use the reboot command and the shutdown -r now option. I had to go to the Contabo control panel and have it restart the VPS instance. Once that was done, everything went back to working like it should have been. So there was some type of hardware issue or their VM software that they use that was reflected in the seg faults. Almost any program that was a service resulted in a seg fault.

 

[Tracy]

For clarity, I have recently moved my site (Astro What?) to an OVH KimSufi offering that gives me full dedicated server benefits that exceeded my Hetzner VPS offering by 3 times in storage capacity, 4 times the RAM and twice the vCPU. And this was for almost $2USD less than what I was paying for the VPS - thank you Black Friday sales and me reading my emails.
Yes, it is vitally important that I keep reliable backups as the dedicated server, being older hardware, may not be as reliable. But if it shits on itself, OVH will have to replace it and at the worst I am out 24 hours of any content, which currently I am the main provider of and can easily regenerate.
I realize the KimSufi server offering are the "low end" for OVH and generally entail their outdated hardware... but in many caes this can exceed the VPS offerings that cost more. And if simply a website based need, they are an economical benefit.
I have dealt with OVH in the past, and for websites themselves I have had no issues. The big issues I have had was when I wanted to use one of their servers for email. Their ASN generally seems to be thrown into the dumpster and lots of sh*t compacted on top if it for that.
I still am hosting XenForo Help and The Pipe Stand on the Contabo server. That VPS instance is ran as a favor to some close friends (one IRL and one internet based). My OVH server is mine, oh all mine! Yes, I'm a greedy SOB.

 

[Tracy]

Well, still having fun with the slow disk thru-put on the Contabo server. Frequently when accessing via SSH I am getting pauses. In fact, it's so bad that the older HDD based servers I used to run were more responsive and had a higher throughput.
I am contemplating grabbing another OVH KimSufi server with 4 2TB HDD drives for my smaller sites that I run and a few that I host for others. That way I can also use it for storing my backups off the other site server ( keeps those SSD drives space free) and also set it up so that I can host some of the resources for my Astro site on it on a sub-domain and lock those directories down for access only from my website.
It's only about $9 a month more to do that, and I know the performance will be much better.