Contabo vs Hetzner Cloud
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Contabo and Hetzner Cloud.
Quick Verdict
3.4/5
Contabo
0 reviews
4.4/5
Hetzner Cloud
0 reviews
Hetzner Cloud is rated higher (4.4 vs 3.4). German budget host known for lots of RAM and CPU for the money. Cloud VPS from about €5.50/month (4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM) on a 24-month term; performance reviews are mixed. German cloud provider offering the best price-to-performance ratio in the market. CX22 (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 40GB NVMe) costs €4.35/month. Loved by European developers for fast NVMe, generous bandwidth, a
Contabo Affordable VPS hosting with generous resources at predictable pricing | Hetzner Cloud Affordable VPS hosting with fast deployment and transparent pricing | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.4 (0 reviews) | 4.4 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | paid | paid |
| Starting price | From $5.5/mo✓ | From $5.99/mo |
| Best for | Budget-conscious developers, self-hosters and teams running dev/staging, side projects or bulk capacity where specs-per-euro and unlimited traffic matter more than guaranteed IOPS and fast support. | Developers and small teams who want unmanaged Linux infrastructure at the lowest cost per unit of compute, especially for European workloads with data-residency requirements, dev/test environments, CI runners, and price-sensitive production web apps. |
| Specifications (entry plan) | ||
| CPU cores | 4 vCPU✓ | 2 vCPU |
| RAM | 8 GB✓ | 4 GB |
| Storage | 100 GB✓ | 40 GB |
| Bandwidth | — | 20 TB/mo |
| SLA uptime | 99.9% | 99.9% |
| Data-center count | 13✓ | 6 |
| €/vCPU/mo | €1.38✓ | €3.00 |
| €/GB RAM/mo | €0.69✓ | €1.50 |
| Performance | ||
| CPU score (sysbench) | — | 4,820 |
| Disk read (fio) | — | 2,100 MB/s |
| Disk IOPS (4K random) | — | 42,000 |
| Network out | — | 1 Gbps |
| Latency (TTFB) | — | 18 ms |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ✓ | |
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | Germany (5 facilities), UK (Portsmouth), US (New York, St. Louis, Seattle), Singapore, Japan (Tokyo), Australia (Sydney), India | GermanyFinlandUnited StatesSingapore |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | nvme storageipv6ddos protectioneu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenterwindows available | hourly billingnvme storageipv6ddos protectionbackups includedsnapshotseu datacenterus datacentergdpr compliantterraform providerapi access |
| Visit Contabo → | Visit Hetzner Cloud → | |
Contabo
Pros
- + Best raw specs-per-euro in the budget class: 4 vCPU / 8 GB / 100 GB SSD from €5.50/month including VAT
- + Unlimited data transfer and free always-on DDoS protection on every plan
- + Nine regions including Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney, India, three US regions, UK and Germany (five facilities)
- + Independent uptime monitoring repeatedly shows 100% availability over multi-week windows
- + Two decades of continuous operation (2003, ex Giga-International) with 450,000 servers running
Cons
- - Aggressive oversubscription: third-party testing grades disk I/O and performance stability weakly (D/F on contended plans)
- - Location fees of up to ~€2.35/month on entry plans (scaling with size) outside the EU change the price comparison
- - Unmanaged only, with ticket-based support and widely reported slow response times
- - Intro rates are for the first 24 months — renewal pricing steps up
- - Recycled IP addresses with abuse history occasionally trigger immediate suspension workflows on new accounts
Hetzner Cloud
Pros
- + Best CPU-per-euro in our 2026-04-01 benchmark run: the CX22 outperformed plans costing up to six times as much
- + Strong NVMe throughput: 2,100-2,400 MB/s sequential reads and 42,000-48,000 random 4K IOPS in our tests
- + Transparent hourly billing with a monthly price cap and no setup fees or contracts
- + Six cloud locations with owned, ISO 27001-certified EU data centers and GDPR-compliant processing
- + At least 20 TB included transfer at EU locations, plus free DDoS mitigation for all customers
- + Mature automation: REST API, Terraform provider, official Go/Python libraries, cloud firewalls and private networks
Cons
- - Backups and snapshots are paid add-ons rather than plan inclusions, which erodes the headline price advantage
- - Email-only support with no phone option and no managed tier for cloud customers
- - Entry plans use shared vCPUs and Hetzner offers no bandwidth guarantee (typical 300-500 Mbit/s stated by Hetzner)
- - No supported Windows installs and a smaller managed-ecosystem than larger providers
- - Default resource limits on new accounts require a support ticket to raise; cost-optimized stock is periodically unavailable
- - Object storage only available in the three European locations
Stay in the loop
Get weekly updates on the best new hosting and infrastructure providers, deals, and comparisons.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.