In the winter of 2014, Contabo rose from the ashes of the Giga-International company, which was formed a decade earlier. In all fairness, the company was good at doing business in its own right, but it focused heavily on the German market. Hence, somewhat paradoxically, the company Giga-International changed its name to Contabo to mark its transition from the German to the international market (since Giga-International did not sound international enough). Funny stuff (and whatever it's called) aside, this company has grown steadily, from a single data center in Germany (in Munich, to be precise) to a deployment of over ten with zero servers in this area, in this instant. In response to the demand for VPS and dedicated servers, Contabo launched its second data center in Germany (Nuremberg) in XNUMX and added colocation hosting to its range of suggestions.
The Contabo network has grown considerably since 2013 (Image credit: Contabo) Four years later, they would open another, and for the first time outside the borders of Europe. Located in the United States (St. Louis), this data center was meant to attract users from the Americas, promising lower latency, lightning speeds, and exceptional overall performance. Today, they employ five data centers in total: one in the United States, three in Germany, and one in Singapore. In addition to its perpetual expansion, Contabo likes to congratulate itself on the "many" accolades it has received (rightly), such as the German Data Center Awards in 2017 and first place in the CHIP Hotline test and the achievement of a "Great Uptime badge "" at HostAdvice. Contabo's main website benefits from a clear and up-to-date design to ensure user-friendliness and easy tracking of site content. It is available in German and English, and although translation into English is questionable at times, it should present only a slight grammatical and stylistic discomfort. The same goes for the official Contabo blog which, although not very active, posts new content at least once a month. If you like social media, you can follow them on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Contabo offers reasonably priced shared hosting packages in addition to VPS and dedicated servers (Image credit: Contabo)
Packages and prices
If you take a closer look, you'll notice that Contabo offers a currency preference where you can choose between EUR and USD, which is nice to see because most of the time you get one or the other. Whatever your choice, the price of all Contabo products will be displayed there. And if you decide to sign up with them, your account will be fixed in the currency you originally chose. Contabo provides four shared hosting packages (simply titled M, L, XL and XXL), four for VPS (all with SSDs), four for VDS (virtual dedicated server), four for standard dedicated servers and (finally) three for storage - optimized VPS. All of these plans are quite reasonably priced considering everything they include. For example, l'hébergement partagé le moins cher nommé M vous fournira jusqu'à 50 Go d'espace de stockage, 20 bases de données MySQL, 1000 adresses e-mail, un nom de domaine (qui est gratuit), cPanel standard et even more. 300+ apps available, and all for just €3.99 a month. However, there is a catch, the minimum billing period you can choose is for one full year. Contabo does not offer a money-back guarantee or withdrawal period, which may put off many of its potential users. If you want to pay for Contabo's services in USD, you can use credit cards or PayPal. However, if you pay in EUR (which is actually recommended), in addition to the above, you can pay via bank transfer or Skrill.
Ease of use
Those looking for a beginner-friendly web host that will pamper you with all the little details one could want, may want to continue their search. Contabo is by no means arrogant, but it also does not try to be an all-in-one provider. Some particularly missing features that one would expect to get with a well-known host are one-click installs, CDN, and a money-back guarantee. On the plus side, setting up an account with Contabo is something anyone can do in about five minutes tops. However, sometimes (and this is when) being as simple as possible isn't particularly helpful for less tech-savvy users who are likely to be left in the dark from time to time due to an addiction to overly technical jargon. Fortunately, you can still google it. After choosing the most suitable hosting plan, you will need to decide on several things: a domain name (you can register a new one or transfer an existing one), plugins (for an additional fee), CGI support (it costs you €1.29 per month to activate) and backups (you can get them for €2.59 per month). Keep in mind that domain names are billed monthly, so don't be fooled by a small amount listed on your order summary. Subsequently, you will need to provide a considerable amount of personal information, including your phone number (as explained, for password recovery purposes). Here you may notice that you cannot choose your password right away. It will be automatically generated and sent to your email address (with all the information needed to create your account), but you will have the possibility to modify it later.
This is the somewhat outdated interface of Contabo's Webmin control panel (Image credit: Contabo) Now, let's move on to the bad news and onto the good news. Contabo's UI feels counter-intuitive at times, so if you're not a UI veteran who's seen it all, you might feel lost from time to time. The good news is that Contabo provides a standard, Linux-based, easy-to-use cPanel control panel, and it's as intuitive as it gets. In addition to cPanel, users have the option of using Plesk or Webmin, with the latter being offered free of charge. Another thing you'll get for free is Contabo's own easy-to-use website builder that has more than enough mobile-friendly templates.
We use GTmetrix to test the uptime and response time of Contabo's main website (Image credit: GTmetrix)
Speed and experience
While introducing himself, Contabo doesn't fail to mention that he emerged as the winner in the "Speed" category as part of the CHIP hotline trial in 2015. However, since this happened years ago, we've had to check how they is going. now. in terms of speed performance. After putting their main site to the test (via GTmetrix), we have to say: wonderfully. The time it took for the page to fully load, total page requests, and all basic speed-related metrics were all well above average, resulting in a staggering A (96%) as the final grade. As for uptime, if you're wondering if they managed to refrain from mentioning the badge they earned for "Excellent Uptime" on HostAdvice, you can already guess your answer. That said, if we could donate badges to unlock the same achievement, (we have to admit) one would go to Contabo, and UptimeRobot (our preferred uptime testing tool) would totally agree with our decision. After monitoring the uptime of Contabo's main website for a period of one month, we were unable to capture a single second of downtime, which is commendable.
You can contact Contabo by phone or email for assistance (Image credit: Contabo)
Support
Knowing Contabo's propensity to boast proudly and publicly, we were not surprised to see many promises regarding its "world-class" customer support, the quality of which has been recognized "year after year" by the CHIP hotline test. aforementioned (a name that should inspire confidence, right?). Despite our skepticism, our own experience with the Contabo support team was a pleasant surprise, as was the agent we contacted: quick to respond, knowledgeable and friendly.
Contabo also offers a series of tutorials on common web hosting tasks on their site (Image Credit: Contabo) If you're the DIY type, Contabo will provide you with an extensive FAQ section, knowledge base (titled "Overview of tutorial") and a server status section (containing the latest updates on power outages, scheduled outages, and maintenance for your servers). While it hasn't aged well in terms of style, the knowledge base is full of fairly detailed articles (all with images) covering various hosting-related issues, and is likely to prove very useful to most users. However, if you prefer to take a glass of mains, Contabo's assistance staff can be reached by telephone number (from 8:00 a.m. to 22:00 p.m. CEST) and by e-mail (aux mêmes horaires) on open days, week-ends and the holidays.
Competition
The main difference between Bluehost and Contabo is that one is based in the US (as well as its data centers) and the other is in Germany (with data centers in Germany, Singapore, and the US). In terms of hosting types and features, they are somewhat similar, however, Bluehost packs a bit wider range of features into the advertised price, while Contabo tends to charge extra for these. Just like Bluehost, HostGator is a US-based web host with a wide range of hosting options, features, and applications available at affordable costs. One notable feature that sets them apart from Contabo is their refund policy, where Bluehost offers a more standard 30-day, while with HostGator you get a generous 45-day money-back guarantee. On the other hand, Contabo does not give any refund at this stage. Host Europe and Contabo are hosts based in Germany, and Host Europe usually gets the lion's share of attention for the two. However, since Host Europe is (ironically) more geared towards German-speaking service customers,...