Contabo GmbH Experiences and Test

I strongly advise against using this service.

We used Contabo VPS services for more than four years to host our websites. Unfortunately, based on our experience, we can no longer recommend this provider and now strongly advise others to stay away.

The price of the same VPS package was repeatedly increased every few months. As a result, the cost of our service nearly doubled within one year, while, in our opinion, the quality of customer support did not improve at all.

However, the most serious issue has been the way our services are suspended following complaints. Based on our experience, Contabo can completely suspend an already paid service solely on the basis of a complaint, without any court order or decision from a competent authority establishing that an actual violation has occurred.

At different times, we received allegations related to phishing, alleged use of third-party bank accounts, and other violations. At the same time, we were provided with links or materials that were difficult or even impossible to properly read and verify. What is particularly concerning is that we were never contacted directly by the people who allegedly submitted these complaints.

Instead, our services were completely suspended solely on the basis of the complaints received. There was no court decision or official ruling from a relevant competent authority confirming that our websites had actually violated any law or regulatory requirement.

The most absurd part is that after the server is completely suspended, we cannot even access it to investigate the complaint or fix the alleged violation, even if we assume for the sake of argument that such a violation actually occurred. To have an already fully paid service switched back on, Contabo requires — and continues to require — an additional payment. In other words, the customer is placed in a situation where access to their own fully paid server is completely cut off, and then they are required to pay additional money simply to have an already paid service switched back on.

We consider this approach extremely unfair and unfriendly towards customers.

We have also experienced an extremely inflexible approach from customer support. Based on our experience, almost every request is accompanied by an offer of an additional paid support service.

I would also like to highlight the situation faced by customers in Ukraine. We are located in a country at war, where power and internet outages regularly occur, and sometimes we do not even have access to email. Despite explaining these force majeure circumstances, we are still required to respond to support requests within 12 hours. Failure to meet this deadline also results in additional charges for further handling of the request.

For transparency, our Contabo customer ID is 679436. We provide this information so that our experience can be verified and to make it clear that this review is not based on a short-term or one-time interaction with the company. We were Contabo customers for more than four years.

After more than four years of using the service, our experience has unfortunately led us to an unequivocal conclusion: we strongly do not recommend Contabo.

We strongly advise potential customers to carefully consider alternative hosting providers before choosing this service.

At the end of our correspondence with Contabo, they added the following statement. I am quoting their message verbatim, including the grammatical errors:

"Your are not obligated to process the payment, we also provide you with the option to process cancellation for your services so that there are no recurring payments for suspended services.

If you have any questions or need help, please do not hesitate to contact us."

In other words, after suspending our already paid service and requiring additional payment to have it switched back on, Contabo's response was essentially that we could simply cancel the service if we were not willing to pay.

We find this attitude extremely disappointing, especially after being a customer for more than four years. Instead of addressing the underlying issue or providing a reasonable way to regain access to an already paid server so that any alleged violation could be investigated and, if necessary, resolved, we were effectively told that we could simply cancel our service.

This is not the kind of customer support or attitude we expect from a hosting provider, especially one that has been trusted with our projects for more than four years.

Do not buy anything from Contabo! I am a backend developer running a business, and this is by far the worst hosting experience I've ever had in my entire career. They are shamelessly overselling their host nodes to an unethical degree. You pay for an "8-core" CPU, but the performance is so severely throttled that it can barely handle basic operations. The disk I/O speeds are a complete joke (55 MB/s read, 34 MB/s write with massive latency). The CPU spends more than 50% of its time just waiting for their failing, ancient disks to respond (IOwait).

What makes it completely unacceptable is the support. I have experienced this exact same severe performance issue MORE THAN 5 TIMES! Every single time my server freezes or crawls, I open a detailed support ticket. And every single time, their support team just brushes it off with copy-pasted, generic excuses like "shared resources" or "temporary node load." They NEVER investigate deeply, and they NEVER provide a permanent solution.

They do not care about your operations crashing; they only care about charging your card. I am now forced to initiate a chargeback with my bank just to get my money back for a service they failed to provide.

Avoid Contabo at all costs if you value your business, your data, and your sanity!

Red alert ❌ never buy contabo server they will deleted your data and will never take responsibility here is the reply of my email

"Unfortunately, all associated services have been deleted, and I'm unable to recover any data, as we do not retain backups."