Contabo vs Hetzner 2026: The EUR-by-EUR Reality Check After Hetzner's Price Hikes

Post-hike pricing comparison

Hetzner replaced its cloud lineup on June 15, 2026: the CX22 became the CX23 and the CX32 became the CX33, at sharply higher prices, following a smaller across-the-board increase on April 1. Contabo meanwhile retired its old plan numbering for the Cloud VPS 4-18 lineup, though entry pricing has barely moved. Here is the current state:

At monthly pricing the gap is now EUR 2.99: Contabo at EUR 5.50 versus the CX33's EUR 8.49, a 54% premium for Hetzner. Contabo also discounts longer billing terms at checkout, which stretches the gap further. Where the April increase had merely trimmed Contabo's price advantage, the June round blew it back open. Hetzner is no longer competing on headline price at this tier, and its own product strategy suggests it knows that.

The full lineup comparison

The lineup gap tells a story: Contabo and Hetzner overlap only at the 4-vCPU tier. Above that, Contabo offers double the RAM at each CPU count. If you need 24 GB of RAM, Contabo sells it for EUR 14. Hetzner's closest is CX43 at EUR 15.99 with 16 GB, or CX53 at EUR 29.49 with 32 GB. RAM density is Contabo's structural advantage, and it grows at higher tiers.

Performance per EUR

This is where the comparison gets uncomfortable for Contabo at the entry tier.

Contabo wins exactly two rows in that table: RAM and storage, now by 54% and 94% after the June hike stretched both. Hetzner wins everything else by multiples, not percentages. The IOPS gap alone would be a dealbreaker for most web applications. A WordPress page load hitting MySQL generates dozens of random reads per request. At 2,000 IOPS you are queuing. At 20,000 you are not. That is not a benchmark abstraction. It is the difference between a 400ms page load and a 3-second one under moderate traffic.

The IOPS range on Contabo (2,000-5,800) makes the comparison harder than it should be. VPSBenchmarks measured Contabo's 4-vCPU entry plan at 2,056 IOPS in one test and 5,828 in another. Some newer Cloud VPS nodes (mid-2025 stock) hit 20,700, nearly matching Hetzner. But provisioning a Cloud VPS 4 today is a coin flip between old-stock and new-stock nodes. You will not know which you got until you run YABS.

Source: VPSBenchmarks.com YABS tests across both providers, multiple test dates.

Infrastructure differences that pricing does not show

The pricing table misses most of what separates these two providers. Hetzner built a cloud platform: hourly billing, a mature API, private networks, load balancers, block storage, hypervisor firewalls, Terraform with an official provider at v1.60+. Contabo built a monthly VPS service and gradually added API endpoints. The result is two products that occupy different infrastructure categories despite similar RAM-and-CPU specs on paper.

The hourly billing gap is the one that catches people off guard. A Hetzner CX33 costs about EUR 0.012/hour. Need to test whether your Django app runs on 4 GB RAM before committing to a year of Contabo? On Hetzner, spin up a CX33 at 11pm, run your load test, destroy the server at 2am. Cost: about four cents. On Contabo, that test costs EUR 5.50 plus a setup fee, minimum one month. I have watched LowEndTalk users complain about this exact scenario — they bought a month of Contabo to benchmark, discovered 200 Mbit/s was a bottleneck, and ate the cost because there is no hourly escape hatch.

If you manage more than 2-3 servers, the automation gap matters more than any benchmark. Hetzner's Terraform provider handles servers, networks, firewalls, load balancers, volumes, floating IPs, and snapshots. Contabo's Terraform provider (v0.1.42) covers fewer resources and has fewer contributors. Private networking, load balancers, and block storage are not available on Contabo at all. These are not edge-case features. They are the building blocks of any multi-server setup.

Contabo's one infrastructure advantage is Object Storage: EUR 2.49/month for 250 GB with S3 compatibility and no egress fees. Hetzner does not offer Object Storage in its Cloud product line. For backups, static assets, or media archives, that pricing is roughly half of DigitalOcean Spaces. The backup story elsewhere is reversed — Hetzner charges +20% of server cost for automatic daily backups with 7 retained, while Contabo's backup add-on starts at EUR 1.15/month and snapshots are local only.

Compliance is worth mentioning for anyone running client workloads in the EU. Hetzner holds ISO 27001 and BSI C5 certifications. Contabo has no published certifications. Both offer 99.9% SLAs, but Hetzner's is monthly with credit compensation while Contabo's is an annual average, a weaker guarantee that smooths out multi-day outages across the year.

Which provider for which job

Anything that touches disk goes to Hetzner. Databases, production web servers, API backends. The 5-16x IOPS gap makes these non-competitive on Contabo's entry plans. A MySQL query that takes 50ms on Hetzner takes 200-800ms on Contabo's entry plans. Under concurrent load, that gap compounds into timeouts.

Anything that needs infrastructure orchestration also goes to Hetzner. Kubernetes clusters need private networking, load balancers, Terraform, and placement groups. CI/CD runners need hourly billing. Microservice architectures need all of the above. Contabo does not offer private networking or managed load balancers at all.

Contabo earns its keep in three places. First, in-memory workloads like Redis and Memcached, any application where the working set lives in RAM and disk is irrelevant. At 1.45 GB per EUR versus Hetzner's 0.94 GB, the RAM density advantage compounds at higher tiers. Second, cold storage via Object Storage at EUR 2.49/250 GB with no egress fees. Third, batch processing on the Cloud VPS 8 and above, where 24 GB of RAM at EUR 14/month pairs with CPU scores that actually match Hetzner's.

Dev and staging environments are the one genuine toss-up. Contabo gives you more RAM for local development. Hetzner gives you hourly billing for ephemeral test environments. The right answer depends on whether your staging servers run 24/7 or spin up for a deploy pipeline and die.

The common migration direction on LowEndTalk tells the story: Contabo to Hetzner, rarely the reverse. Most production web workloads are I/O-bound, and I/O is exactly where Contabo's pricing model makes its cuts. A hybrid setup (Hetzner for compute, Contabo Object Storage for backups and media) lets each provider do what it actually does well.

The tier split that changes this comparison

Everything above applies to Contabo's entry tiers, the plans VPSBenchmarks tested as VPS 10 and VPS 20 (sold today as the Cloud VPS 4 and 6), which is what most people buy and what most complaints are about. The Cloud VPS 8 (EUR 14/month, tested as VPS 30) is a different product wearing the same brand name. VPSBenchmarks grades the entry plan at F across web performance, CPU, and stability. The VPS 30-class plan scores A for CPU and B for web performance, beating Hetzner's CX33, which grades D and E on those same metrics.

The Cloud VPS 8 costs 2.5x the entry plan. At EUR 14/month it is no longer undercutting Hetzner by much, and Hetzner's CX43 at EUR 15.99 gets you 16 GB with full infrastructure features. But if you need 24 GB of RAM and can tolerate Contabo's billing model, the Cloud VPS 8 holds up. The full tier-by-tier breakdown covers the performance cliff in detail.

This split is why blanket statements about Contabo ("it is slow" or "it is the best deal") are both wrong. The Cloud VPS 4 and 6 are RAM plays with F-grade performance. The Cloud VPS 8 and above are a real server at a real price. Buying the cheapest tier and judging the entire lineup is the most common mistake on LowEndTalk, and it cuts both ways. People who avoid Contabo entirely are missing the upper tiers. People who praise Contabo's pricing are usually quoting the tier that earns F grades.

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