Contabo and Hetzner are the two names that come up in almost every European “cheap VPS” thread, and they are frequently compared as if they were the same kind of product. They are not. The specification sheets look similar; the business models behind them are quite different, and that difference is what you actually feel six months in.
The short answer
- Hetzner — the better engineering. Fast NVMe, a clean cloud API, honest network capacity, hourly billing. Expect strict abuse handling and, for some accounts, an identity check.
- Contabo — more raw resources per euro, especially RAM and disk. Shared CPU is oversubscribed and performance varies with your neighbours. Setup fees apply to several plans.
- If your workload is CPU-sensitive or latency-sensitive, the cheaper sticker price rarely wins. If you need a large, mostly idle box for storage or a lab, it often does.
Shared vCPU is where they diverge
Both sell “vCPU”, but a vCPU is not a unit of performance — it is a scheduling slot. What matters is how many slots the provider sells per physical core, which nobody publishes.
In practice, Contabo prices for density: you get generous RAM and disk numbers, and the CPU is shared more aggressively. That is a perfectly reasonable trade for a Nextcloud instance, a game server with a handful of players, a backup target or a test environment. It is a poor trade for a build server, a busy database or anything where a stalled thread turns into a user-visible delay.
Hetzner's shared plans are less densely packed, and they also sell dedicated-vCPU instances where the core is genuinely yours. If you need predictable single-thread performance, that distinction matters far more than the core count.
Billing model
Hetzner
Hourly billing with a monthly cap. You can create a server, test for two hours and delete it for a few cents. Their dedicated line runs through a server auction where the same hardware costs wildly different amounts depending on the day.
Contabo
Monthly billing, with one-off setup fees on a number of plans — that is where the headline price and the first invoice tend to diverge. Longer terms bring the monthly price down. Fine if you plan to keep the box; annoying if you spin things up and tear them down.
Identity checks
This is the point people search for most often, and it is not really about either company being difficult. Both are German, both are bound by the same EU rules, and neither is legally required to see your passport for a VPS.
What drives verification is card fraud. Hosts that take cards get hit with stolen ones, and asking for a document is cheaper for them than absorbing the chargebacks. So it tends to be triggered by risk signals — a new account, a mismatched country, a first order that is unusually large — rather than applied to everyone.
Providers that take crypto have less exposure to that problem and therefore less reason to ask. That is the actual mechanism behind privacy-focused hosting, and it is worth understanding rather than treating as a marketing badge.
Network and abuse policy
Both run their own networks with plenty of capacity — this is not where they differ. The difference is in how they react when something goes wrong.
- Hetzner is known for acting quickly and firmly on abuse reports. Good if you value a clean IP neighbourhood, uncomfortable if your workload generates false positives — security scanning, for example.
- Contabo is generally slower to react, which some read as lenient and others as a reason their IP ranges carry a worse reputation on blocklists.
If you send email, check the reputation of the specific IP you are assigned before committing. That single factor causes more grief than any CPU benchmark.
How to actually choose
- Web app, API, database, CI — pay for predictable CPU. Dedicated vCPU at Hetzner, or any provider that does not oversubscribe.
- Storage, backups, media library, lab — Contabo's resource density is hard to beat per euro.
- Short-lived environments — hourly billing wins outright.
- Privacy matters to you — check the payment methods and whether the billing address is mandatory before you order, not after.
Where we fit
We are smaller than both, and we do not pretend to compete on the price of a 4 GB box. What we do differently is not overselling CPU on the Hi-CPU line, accepting crypto including Monero, and never asking for an ID document. Servers sit in Germany and the Netherlands, so the same EU rules apply as with either of the above.
If none of that matters for what you are building, one of the two larger providers is very likely the sensible choice — and saying so costs us nothing.
Frequently asked
Is Contabo or Hetzner cheaper?
Contabo usually shows more RAM and disk per euro, but several plans carry a one-off setup fee. Hetzner bills hourly with a monthly cap and no setup fee, so short-lived servers are cheaper there.
Why is Contabo's CPU slower than the specs suggest?
Its shared plans oversubscribe physical cores more aggressively, so single-thread performance varies with your neighbours. Measure steal time with 'vmstat 1' to see it.
Do Contabo or Hetzner require ID verification?
Neither is legally required to for a VPS. Both may ask when card-fraud risk signals appear on an order — a new account or a large first purchase, for instance.