Contabo: New UK Region

[micmc]

@humptydumpty Contabo offer an excellent service, however their drawback is they're charging a SETUP fee for each VPSs and prices based on monthly instead on hourly, which makes their offer much less interesting for developers.

They sill have very good prices for quality, but how many time we need to test something or whatever and for such we do quickly fire up a VPS, sometimes it's just a few days, weeks or even just a few hours, then throw it away and you're charged just for the use.

Here too it depends on what you do online.

[humptydumpty]

@micmc Good point! I haven't thought about it from a devs perspective.

[marcusquinn]

Wouldn't a dev just use temporary local VMs for that sort of development?

Either way., I get it, but there's always Hetzner for that sort of use-case, but when wanting higher specs for long-term use, Contabo still costs less overall.

[timconsidine]

@micmc : it seems no setup fee in UK according to their website, some launch promo I guess.

I get the issue about needing a VPS for short-term use.
I use a monthly fee VPS which is regularly wiped and re-purposed. So not sure monthly pricing is a huge issue but yes, it does tie hands a little.

[marcusquinn]

@timconsidine If a "Dedicated VPS" is within your budget, then you can install Proxmox VE on that and then create KVM containers or VMs within that for your disposable needs and some additional nice features for cloning etc.

If you look at the Boot loader for any Contabo VPS though, you'll see they are using Proxmox behind the scenes, I expect with their web panel connected to its API, so I'm not sure if it nests virtualisation, but it's an idea that might give you more options if that's a regular need.

[marcusquinn]

I asked them if it's possible to move current VPS VMs to the UK region, the answer seems to be yes:

Dear Marcus,

Thank you very much for your reply.

Moving your VPS to a different region is possible. Please find a full overview on the migration procedure in our documentation https://docs.contabo.com/docs/products/Cloud-VPS-and-VDS/migration/ .

You can start the migration process at any time using your customer control panel at https://my.contabo.com/abos# by clicking on "Manage" right next to your VPS and by choosing the option "Move to other Region" there.

--
Best regards,

Markus Heimerl
Marketing Manager

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[LeeW]

It is always good to have another UK provider at this pricing level, but all of the hosting forums I visit regularly have threads about Contabo and none of them are good.

[humptydumpty]

@LeeW I've had a hickup with downtime when I first signed up for a VPS with them but it's been running perfectly since. Do you remember what issues they ran into?

[LeeW]

@humptydumpty - Various issues, performance, support mainly. I think a lot of the support issues are due to the fact they still manage all support by email, with no ticket system to properly manage them.

One person signed up recently for the UK, and got set to EUR billing, he asked the same day of signup to change his billing to GBP, and they agreed to change it if he paid a $25 admin fee...

Also, have you noticed that all their pricing is in EUR by default, makes sense given they are in Germany. But a €5.99 plan when the currency is changed to GBP becomes £6.99..

[MooCloud_Matt]

We had in the past collocation to their datacenter and we got really big issue with there support and especially there networking, they didn't use at that time (2019ish) any software define networking so it was hard to understand some behavior, and customer support was not wall trained.

[humptydumpty]

@LeeW said in Contabo: New UK Region:

Also, have you noticed that all their pricing is in EUR by default, makes sense given they are in Germany. But a €5.99 plan when the currency is changed to GBP becomes £6.99..

It's the same thing for US customers. It shows $6.99 for the starting VPS. I think that's the conversion rate + a "foreign" transaction fee.

@MooCloud_Matt I agree, my experience with their support has been off-putting but the pricing and overall performance of their VPS' is keeping me as a customer so far.

[LeeW]

@humptydumpty said in Contabo: New UK Region:

my experience with their support has been off-putting but the pricing and overall performance of their VPS' is keeping me as a customer so far.

And that for me at least is where I can't use a provider. Knowing their support isn't good and therefore hoping nothing goes wrong.

If you have the backups and time to move quickly should something go wrong then fair enough, I just don't want to want to be in that position.

[humptydumpty]

@LeeW said in Contabo: New UK Region:

If you have the backups and time to move quickly

The power of Cloudron

[LeeW]

@humptydumpty - Indeed, won't lie, despite my reservations I was considering giving them a go. Hetzner is fantastic, I would like a UK service though, it's where all my visitors are and I would just prefer being hosted in rather than outside of the UK.

[humptydumpty]

@LeeW Hetzner and Netcup were next on my list but at that time they lacked a US server location which is why I went with Contabo. I spun up a Contabo VPS and ran a Cloudron on it as a test for a month. It worked fine so I moved my production server from DigitalOcean. I'm paying almost the same amount but I have MUCH more resources (especially RAM).

I feel I made the right choice by switching because if something does go bad provider wise, most likely it's network stuff that you can do nothing about but wait it out. Also, DigitalOcean' support takes just as long to respond. Having done an actual Cloudron migration, I'm less stressed about switching hosts if things do go south. The process was super easy and the only real "hassle" is the propagation time. Of course, this relies on you having S3 backups with a third party like Backblaze, etc..

[LeeW]

@humptydumpty Maybe you're right. I may give them a go for a month and see what happens. Will decide tomorrow

[marcusquinn]

@LeeW Been with them for a couple of years with no issues. The lowest price VPSs really will not be performant on any host though, so try to organise yourself to avoid the very smallest ones.

[LeeW]

So, I signed up for a VPS and went for the Medium VPS at 8.99 EUR to try it out. The performance was ok but I noted some initial lag on connect. I have a couple of UK VPS and one in Germany with Hetzner.

From my UK location, when I ping my UK VPSs I get an average of 20ms, with Hetzner its 32ms. With Contabo it's 80ms. That might not seem significant but really it is for a UK visitor connecting to a UK server.

I opened a ticket and politely asked about this. I suspected it was routing, Portsmouth is not the hub of the UK from a connectivity viewpoint, I appreciate that but just wanted to get their thoughts on it.

The response I got back was "Suggest you look for another provider".

Ok then, cancelled.

[marcusquinn]

@LeeW You won't get comparable specs per £ with the big-brands, but I always found Upcloud to be very good in the premium market: https://upcloud.com/data-centres/#uk-lon1=

Otherwise there's a good hosting research rabbit-hole here: https://hostadvice.com/?server_location=GB

[LeeW]

@marcusquinn - I am fine with DO, Vultr and Hetzner to be honest. But when I saw a new UK location it was worth checking it out. The performance difference is night and day and clearly so is the support.

I wouldn't even have minded if they just fobbed me off but to tell me just to walk if I wasn't happy, lol.