X-ZoneServers
Alternatives guide

Contabo alternatives: six options, and what each is actually best at

Contabo wins on one number and it wins on it decisively: RAM and disk per euro. People look for an alternative when a different number starts to matter — usually port speed, since Contabo's entry Cloud VPS runs a 200 Mbit/s port and reaches 1 Gbit/s only at €37.00/month, or hourly billing, which the Cloud VPS range does not offer. Six providers below, with figures read from their own pages on 28 August 2026.
Published by X-ZoneServers · competitor data read from public pages · verify prices at the source before you buy
TL;DR
If port speed is what pushed you to look, X-ZoneServers gives every KVM VPS from €4.00/month a shared 1 Gbps port that bursts to the full gigabit (100–300 Mbps minimum), and a shared 10 Gbps VPS from €9.99/month. If you want cheap CPU, Hetzner. If you want similar value with better memory, netcup. If you want phone support and a money-back guarantee, IONOS. If you want bundled anti-DDoS, OVHcloud. If you want reach, Vultr's 36 regions.
01How it works

How this list was put together

Each provider here is one our own customers actually weigh against Contabo, and each entry states what that provider is genuinely best at rather than why it is worse. Figures come from the provider's own public pages on the dates listed under Sources. Where we publish a full head-to-head comparison for a provider, the link sits under its entry.
02Alternatives

Six alternatives to Contabo

  1. 1

    X-ZoneServers

    Best at: Unmetered traffic and guaranteed 1–200 Gbps ports across 12 EU and US metros
    If port speed is what pushed you to look, this is the direct fix: a shared 1 Gbps port on every KVM VPS from €4.00/month, with a 100–300 Mbps minimum and bursts to the full gigabit, a shared 10 Gbps VPS from €9.99/month, and hourly billing from €0.0056/hour that Contabo's Cloud VPS range does not offer. Twelve metros in eleven countries, Layer 3/4/7 DDoS mitigation included, dedicated servers by guaranteed port from 1 to 200 Gbps. We publish this page, so weigh it accordingly.
    This is us. We publish this page, so read our entry with that in mind — the disclosure below explains the method.
  2. 2

    Hetzner

    Best at: The lowest price per CPU core in Germany and Finland
    The classic step up in CPU value: Hetzner has run production hosting since 1997 from its own datacenter parks in Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki, and its AX dedicated line is the European reference point for cost per core. Cloud types carry less RAM than Contabo's at the same price, but deploy in seconds, bill hourly, and sit behind a mature API, CLI and Terraform ecosystem.
    Read the full comparison
  3. 3

    netcup

    Best at: DDR5 ECC memory and NVMe at value prices, from Germany
    The nearest thing to Contabo value with better hardware: VPS 500 at €5.91/month including German VAT with 2 vCores, 4 GB of DDR5 ECC and 128 GB of NVMe. Less RAM per euro than Contabo, but ECC memory, NVMe instead of SSD, hourly billing, and five locations — Vienna, Nuremberg, Amsterdam, Manassas and Singapore.
    Read the full comparison
  4. 4

    IONOS

    Best at: A large brand with 24/7 phone support and a money-back guarantee
    For Contabo customers whose real complaint was support: IONOS offers 24/7 support by phone, chat and email, a 30-day money-back guarantee and a published 99.99%+ uptime figure, with unlimited traffic on a 1 Gbps connection. Note that the headline VPS price is an introductory rate for the first three months on a one-year commitment; regular prices are stated as $11–$68/month.
    Read the full comparison
  5. 5

    OVHcloud

    Best at: Bundled anti-DDoS and daily backups on a backbone they own
    A bigger vendor with the protections Contabo makes you add yourself: OVHcloud bundles anti-DDoS and daily backups into every plan in its VPS 2027 range, runs AS16276 across datacenters it builds itself, and reaches Asia-Pacific. Public port speed is capped per plan, from 500 Mbit/s on VPS-1 to 3 Gbit/s on VPS-4 — still faster at the entry tier than Contabo's 200 Mbit/s — with unlimited traffic.
    Read the full comparison
  6. 6

    Vultr

    Best at: 36 regions — the widest reach of any host on this list
    If Contabo's eleven locations did not include the one you need: Vultr publishes 36 cloud datacenter regions across six continents, with bare metal, GPU, Kubernetes and object storage in the same account, from $2.50/month. Bandwidth is an allowance per instance rather than unmetered, with overage at $0.01 per GB in North America and Europe.
    Read the full comparison
03Comparison

Why people look for a Contabo alternative

  • 1The port: Contabo's entry Cloud VPS runs 200 Mbit/s, and you reach a full gigabit only at €37.00/month on Cloud VPS 16. Anything that serves media, backups or many concurrent users hits that ceiling first.
  • 2No hourly billing on the Cloud VPS range, so short-lived staging, CI or test machines cost a full month each.
  • 3Setup fees and long contract terms on some products change the effective price for anyone who does not keep a server for a year.
  • 4Support and provisioning speed: community reports describe deployments measured in hours and ticket queues measured in days, which matters more once the server is in production.

What Contabo still does better than most

  • RAM and disk per euro: Cloud VPS 4 at €5.50/month with 8 GB of RAM and 100 GB of SSD is a ratio the others do not match at any tier.
  • Storage-heavy options make it a sensible home for archives, media libraries and cold data that never touch the port ceiling.
  • Eleven locations across Europe, the US, Asia and Australia for a budget host — wider than most value providers.
04Guide

Before you move off Contabo: a checklist

Five things that decide whether the switch goes smoothly. Most of them are about the invoice and the features you forgot you were using.
  1. Measure your actual peak throughput on the Contabo box (vnstat or your monitoring) — if it flat-lines near 200 Mbit/s during busy periods, the port, not the CPU, has been your bottleneck.
  2. Contabo's generous disk is easy to fill; check how much of your 100–400 GB is live data versus logs and old backups before sizing NVMe on the target.
  3. Snapshot restore does not cross providers: rebuild from your deployment scripts or rsync the application directory, and migrate databases with a dump and restore rather than a disk copy.
  4. Note the contract end date and any setup fee already paid — Contabo bills monthly in advance, so time the cut-over for the last week of the paid month.
  5. If you move to hourly billing, keep the old server alive for one full traffic cycle and then destroy it; the new one only costs hours during the overlap.

When to stay with Contabo

Switching has a cost. These are the cases where Contabo is still the right answer and this page should not change your mind.
  • RAM and disk per euro is genuinely the number you are optimising, and a few hundred megabits of port is plenty for what you run.
  • You need a low-cost instance in one of their eleven locations, in a region the alternatives here do not serve.
  • You are parking a large dataset and want capacity at commodity prices rather than throughput.
05Questions

Frequently asked questions

What is the best Contabo alternative?

It depends which Contabo limitation you hit. If it was the 200 Mbit/s entry port, X-ZoneServers gives every KVM VPS from €4.00/month a shared 1 Gbps port that bursts to the full gigabit, with a 100–300 Mbps minimum, and sells a shared 10 Gbps VPS from €9.99/month for sustained throughput. If it was CPU performance, Hetzner. If it was hardware quality, netcup ships DDR5 ECC and NVMe from €5.91/month including German VAT. If it was support, IONOS answers the phone.

Is anything as cheap as Contabo?

For RAM and disk per euro, very little. netcup comes closest with 4 GB of DDR5 ECC and 128 GB of NVMe at €5.91/month including German VAT, and Hetzner is competitive at the small end. Most alternatives on this page are not trying to beat Contabo on that metric — they win on port speed, support, locations or bundled protection instead.

Does Contabo offer hourly billing?

No hourly option is listed on their Cloud VPS range; plans are billed monthly. Of the alternatives here, X-ZoneServers bills every KVM VPS from €0.0056/hour capped at the monthly price, netcup offers hourly alongside contract pricing, OVHcloud offers hourly on Public Cloud rather than its VPS range, and Vultr bills hourly.

Which Contabo alternative is fastest on the network?

X-ZoneServers on port speed: the 10Gbps VPS line puts a shared 10 Gbps port on plans from €9.99/month, sustaining about 1–2 Gbps on Starter and 5–6 Gbps at the top, and every KVM VPS from €4.00/month shares a 1 Gbps port with a 100–300 Mbps minimum. OVHcloud reaches 3 Gbit/s at VPS-4 with unlimited traffic. Both top out well above Contabo's 200 Mbit/s entry port.
06Related

Sources and check dates

Every statement about another provider on this page traces to one of these public pages. Where a provider does not publish a figure, this page says so instead of estimating.
  1. Contabo Cloud VPS — specs, port speeds, prices
    https://contabo.com/en/vps/· checked 2026-08-28
  2. Hetzner Cloud
    https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/· checked 2026-08-28
  3. netcup VPS — plans and prices
    https://www.netcup.com/en/server/vps· checked 2026-08-28
  4. IONOS VPS
    https://www.ionos.com/servers/vps· checked 2026-08-28
  5. OVHcloud VPS range
    https://www.ovhcloud.com/de/vps/· checked 2026-08-28
  6. Vultr public plans API
    https://api.vultr.com/v2/plans· checked 2026-08-28
07Legal

Disclosure, method and limits

We are one of the providers compared

This page is published by X-ZoneServers (X ZONE IT SRL, Bucharest, Romania). We sell one of the two services compared, so this is a vendor comparison rather than an independent review. Our method is to quote each provider's own published figures, name the date we read them, and state plainly where the other provider is the better choice.

How the numbers are gathered

Competitor data is read directly from that provider's public website — pricing pages, specification sheets, network and location pages — on the dates listed under Sources, plus public network registries such as PeeringDB and bgp.he.net for ASN details. We do not benchmark competitor hardware ourselves and we do not republish figures from review sites or affiliate directories.

How to read the prices

List prices only. Promotional offers, first-term discounts, renewal rates, setup fees, add-ons, region surcharges and currency all differ per provider and can change without notice. X-ZoneServers prices are in EUR excluding VAT. Where another provider publishes in a different currency or inclusive of VAT, that is marked in the table — those figures are not directly comparable to ours without adjustment.

Accuracy and corrections

The goal is that every claim here can be verified at the source in under a minute. Nothing on this page is a benchmark result, a prediction, or a statement about a competitor's internal operations. If a figure has drifted or is wrong — including where the error favours us — write to us and we will correct it and move the review date.

Trademarks and affiliation

All company and product names are the property of their respective owners and are used here for identification and comparison only. X-ZoneServers is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or a reseller of any other provider named on this page.
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