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If you’re choosing between Contabo and Hetzner for a VPS, the short answer is this: Contabo gives you more RAM and storage per euro, Hetzner gives you faster NVMe storage, hourly billing, and no long-term lock-in. For most self-hosters who just want the cheapest beefy server, Contabo wins. For developers who want reliable performance, predictable billing, and US data centers without a 24-month commitment, Hetzner is worth the higher price. Here’s the full breakdown.
Quick verdict
- 🏆 Best raw value (most RAM/storage per euro): Contabo — Cloud VPS 4 starts around €5.50/month for 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM and 100 GB SSD.
- ⚡ Best performance and flexibility: Hetzner — NVMe on every plan, hourly billing, 20 TB of included traffic, no setup fee.
- 🇺🇸 Best for US latency: Hetzner, if you need Ashburn or Hillsboro; Contabo if you want more US region choices at the entry price.
- ⏱️ Skip the 24-month contract: If you won’t commit for two years, Contabo’s best price evaporates and Hetzner’s no-commitment hourly billing wins.
How we compared
For this head-to-head we compared the two providers on the four things that actually decide a VPS purchase: price per vCPU and per GB of RAM, storage type (SSD vs NVMe), billing flexibility, and support. Every price below is from the providers’ published pricing pages, checked on October 27, 2026, and listed excluding VAT. We did not run our own performance tests; storage and network figures come from each vendor’s published specs and third-party trackers like VPSBenchmarks.
What a year actually costs
The monthly headline number hides the real difference. Run a comparable 4 vCPU / 8 GB server for a full year and the totals diverge:
- Contabo Cloud VPS 4: about €5.50/month on a 24-month term — roughly €66 a year, plus a one-time setup fee (often a few euros, sometimes waived by promos). Commit for 24 months and you lock in the low rate.
- Hetzner CX33: €8.99/month with no term — roughly €108 a year, no setup fee, and you can delete the server after a single hour and pay only for what you used.
Over a year, Contabo is still cheaper even after the setup fee. The picture flips for short projects: run a server for one month and Contabo’s month-to-month rate (about $6.60) plus a setup fee can cost more than Hetzner’s €8.99 for the same 30 days. Long-term, Contabo wins on price; short-term, Hetzner’s hourly billing wins on flexibility.
Contabo: the raw-specs king, with three catches
Contabo’s pitch is simple and it works: nobody sells you this much server for this little money. The base Cloud VPS line starts at Cloud VPS 4 — 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 100 GB SSD for about €5.50 a month on a 24-month term (roughly $6, billed in EUR). The line scales fast: Cloud VPS 6 (6 vCPU, 16 GB), Cloud VPS 8 (8 vCPU, 24 GB), up through Cloud VPS 12, 16 and 18 — the top end reaches 18 vCPU and 96 GB of RAM for a fraction of what the hyperscalers charge.
You manage everything through Contabo’s Customer Control Panel, with optional one-click add-ons and paid cPanel or Plesk panels if you don’t want to admin the box by hand. But the base tier is strictly unmanaged: you install, patch and secure the OS yourself.
That’s the headline. Here’s what you give up to get it.
The slow-storage catch. The base “Cloud VPS” tier runs on regular SSD, not NVMe. Hetzner ships NVMe on every single plan. On a disk-heavy workload — a busy database, a large mail spool, anything with lots of small random reads — NVMe is meaningfully faster. To be fair, Contabo does sell NVMe: its newer “Performance VPS” line (AMD EPYC plus NVMe) and the Windows-oriented “Cloud VPS Plus” tier both use it, but both sit well above the base Cloud VPS price. The ultra-cheap VPS 4 that makes Contabo famous is SSD-only.
The port-speed catch. Entry Contabo plans come with a 200 Mbit/s port, not the 1 Gbit/s+ you’d expect. Higher tiers raise it, but if you’re serving media or running backups, that entry port is a real ceiling. Contabo’s fair-use policy also reserves the right to throttle “exceptionally high” usage, so “unlimited traffic” has an asterisk.
The setup-fee-and-commitment catch. Contabo’s €5.50 headline price requires a 24-month term, and shorter terms cost more per month (the same VPS 4 is roughly $6.60 on a month-to-month plan). You’ll also often pay a one-time setup fee, which promos sometimes waive. Hetzner has no setup fee and no minimum term at all.
Support is the last tradeoff. Contabo is strictly unmanaged and support tickets are slower than Hetzner’s — that’s part of how the price stays low, and it’s fine if you’re comfortable running a Linux box yourself.
Hetzner: NVMe everywhere, hourly billing, higher price
Hetzner is the German provider developers actually trust. Its cloud lineup splits into three families, and the key thing to know is that Hetzner changed its pricing significantly in June 2026 — the old “CPX11 for €3.85” era is gone, with the shared-vCPU families repriced roughly 2.4x to 2.75x.
The Cost-Optimized tier is Hetzner’s budget line, built on older but proven hardware: CX23 (2 vCPU, 4 GB, 40 GB NVMe) at €5.99/month and CX33 (4 vCPU, 8 GB, 80 GB NVMe) at €8.99/month. There’s also an Arm option (CAX11, 2 vCPU, 4 GB at €6.49). The Regular Performance tier uses newer AMD hardware and costs a lot more — CPX22 (2 vCPU, 4 GB, 80 GB) is €19.99/month, and CPX32 (4 vCPU, 8 GB, 160 GB) is €35.99/month. General Purpose dedicated-vCPU plans start around €43.49.
What you get for that premium, on every tier:
- NVMe storage on every plan, not just the expensive ones.
- Hourly billing with a monthly cap. You pay for what you use and delete servers anytime; Contabo bills in fixed terms.
- 20 TB of included traffic on EU locations, with extra traffic at €1 per TB — generous where Contabo’s “unlimited” is subject to fair-use throttling.
- No setup fees, no minimum term.
- US and Singapore locations. Hetzner runs data centers in Ashburn (Virginia), Hillsboro (Oregon), and Singapore alongside its German and Finnish parks. That US presence is why Hetzner answers the “best Hetzner alternative in the USA” question on its own — though Contabo also has US regions.
- A stated 99.9% uptime SLA and 24/7 support, with ISO 27001 certification on its German and Finnish parks.
Hetzner also ships a genuinely good developer experience: an intuitive console, one-click apps (WordPress, Docker, GitLab, Nextcloud and more), and a full REST API with CLI and Terraform/Ansible integrations for automating infrastructure as code. Contabo’s API exists but the automation story is thinner.
The catch on Hetzner’s side is availability: the cheapest Cost-Optimized plans are frequently marked “currently unavailable,” because Hetzner deliberately keeps stock of those older-hardware machines limited. You may find the €5.99 CX23 you wanted is sold out, and the next realistic option is the €19.99 CPX22 — at which point the price gap to Contabo gets very wide.
Head-to-head comparison table
| Contabo Cloud VPS 4 | Hetzner CX33 (cost-optimized) | |
|---|---|---|
| vCPU | 4 | 4 |
| RAM | 8 GB | 8 GB |
| Storage | 100 GB SSD | 80 GB NVMe |
| Price | ~€5.50/mo (24-mo term) | €8.99/mo (no term) |
| Billing | Fixed term (1–24 mo) | Hourly, monthly cap |
| Port | 200 Mbit/s | 1 Gbit/s+ (shared) |
| Traffic | “Unlimited” (fair use) | 20 TB included |
| Setup fee | Yes (often waived) | None |
| US data centers | Multiple regions | Ashburn, Hillsboro |
The pattern is consistent across the range: at every size, Contabo offers more vCPU, RAM and GB for less money, while Hetzner offers faster storage, a faster port, and cleaner billing.
Support and reliability: where the money shows up
The two providers sit at opposite ends of the support spectrum. Hetzner publishes a 99.9% uptime SLA with defined service credits, runs 24/7 support by email, and holds ISO/IEC 27001 certification on its German and Finnish data centers — the kind of paperwork a business buyer wants to see. Contabo is explicitly unmanaged: you get the box and the network, and troubleshooting the operating system is on you. Ticket response is slower, and that’s a deliberate part of the pricing, not an oversight. For a hobby project or a server you’re comfortable adminning yourself, Contabo’s thinner support is a fair trade for the price. For anything client-facing, the SLA and support gap is worth paying Hetzner for.
Who should NOT buy Contabo
Skip Contabo if you need low-latency storage performance — the base SSD tier will frustrate a database-heavy workload. Skip it if you’re only running a server for a few weeks: the setup fee and the term discount math work against short projects. And skip it if you need responsive support or a fast, predictable network port; both are where Contabo cuts cost.
Who should NOT buy Hetzner
Skip Hetzner if your only goal is maximum RAM and disk for the absolute lowest price — Contabo will give you more of both for less. Skip it if you’re price-locked into the cheapest tier: those plans are often out of stock, and the jump to the next realistic plan (CPX22 at €19.99) is a big one. And skip it if you want an expansive menu of US regions; Hetzner has two US locations, Contabo lists more.
How to choose
Pick Contabo if you’re running a long-term self-hosted stack — a Nextcloud box, a mail server, a game server, a media host — and you want the most RAM and storage per euro, and you don’t mind a 24-month commitment and managing everything yourself. Read our Contabo review for the full picture, and see how it stacks up in our best cheap VPS roundup.
Pick Hetzner if you need predictable hourly billing, fast NVMe, or a US data center without a two-year lock-in. Developers spinning up ephemeral test environments, CI runners, or short-lived projects will prefer Hetzner’s “pay for the hours you use” model. Our VPS vs cloud hosting guide explains the difference if you’re still deciding between a VPS and a managed cloud service.
Need a domain alongside the box? Neither provider’s sweet spot is domains — Namecheap is the better place to register, and it’s where we’d point you for a registrar to pair with either server.
One more note for US buyers. Both companies are German (Contabo is based in Munich, Hetzner in Gunzenhausen), but both operate US data centers, so “which is closer to me” usually isn’t the deciding factor — price and storage type are.
If you’re still torn, the deciding questions come down to two things: how long will you keep the server, and does your workload hammer the disk? A long-term, RAM-hungry self-host points to Contabo. A short-lived, database-driven project points to Hetzner.
FAQ
Is Contabo better than Hetzner?
It depends on the metric. Contabo is better on raw resources per euro — you get more vCPU, RAM and storage for less money. Hetzner is better on storage speed (NVMe everywhere), billing flexibility (hourly, no setup fee, no term), and reliability. If you want the cheapest beefy server, Contabo wins; if you want a fast, predictable developer cloud, Hetzner wins.
Why is Contabo so cheap?
Contabo keeps prices low by running proprietary data centers, buying hardware in bulk, selling strictly unmanaged hosting (no managed support included), using SSD rather than NVMe on its base tier, capping entry port speed at 200 Mbit/s, and discounting the monthly price in exchange for a 24-month commitment plus a setup fee. Those tradeoffs are the cost of the price tag.
What are the best Hetzner alternatives in the USA?
If you need US data centers and want to stay in the same budget class, Contabo is the most direct alternative — it lists more US regions at a lower entry price. For managed options or different feature sets, our best VPS for email and best cheap VPS roundups cover the alternatives in detail.
Is Contabo a German company?
Yes. Contabo GmbH is headquartered in Munich, Germany, and operates data centers across Germany, the UK, the US, and Asia. Hetzner Online GmbH is also German, based in Gunzenhausen, with data centers in Germany, Finland, the US and Singapore.
Does Contabo or Hetzner have better support?
Hetzner. It offers 24/7 support by email, a 99.9% uptime SLA with defined service credits, and ISO 27001 certification. Contabo is strictly unmanaged — the server and network are supported, but the operating system is your responsibility, and ticket response is slower. If you’re not comfortable running your own Linux box, that difference matters more than the price gap.
Verdict
If you want the cheapest possible server with the most RAM and storage, go with Contabo — nothing else in this price class matches Cloud VPS 4’s specs per euro, as long as you accept the SSD storage, the 200 Mbit/s entry port, and the 24-month term.
If you’d rather pay a bit more for NVMe on every plan, hourly billing, no setup fee, and a US data center without committing to two years, Hetzner is the better machine. For developers and anyone running short-lived or latency-sensitive workloads, that premium buys you something real.
Prices checked: October 27, 2026.
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