Contabo: New UK Region
-
@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.
-
@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..
-
@humptydumpty Maybe you're right. I may give them a go for a month and see what happens. Will decide tomorrow
-
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.
-
@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
-
@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.
-
@LeeW Top be fair to any provider offering anything priced in single digits, but they time they've paid staff to answer an email or two the cost of business exceeds the income. I think most provider's smallest instances are really loss-leader marketing.
I kinda respect the honesty, as well as your voting with your time and doing the same.
Best of luck, and let us know if you find anything else comparable.
I'm in Jersey BTW, so 150 miles south of you. Island-wide fibre to home here, so I get used to 1ms pings to London/Paris and Gigabit speeds at home
-
@marcusquinn said in Contabo: New UK Region:
Top be fair to any provider offering anything priced in single digits, but they time they've paid staff to answer an email or two the cost of business exceeds the income. I think most provider's smallest instances are really loss-leader marketing.
Not relevant in relation to the issue though. Whether I pay 8 EUR or 80 EUR, it will not change the problem of an 80ms roundtrip, it will be the same for any service within that DC. It could be teething issues that will get better, either way, not my concern anymore.
-
@LeeW said in Contabo: New UK Region:
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.
That would suggest they're doing some AS network tomfoolery and not actually having servers in the UK, just made to look like they are. Probably in FR.
-
@robi - Definately in Portsmouth, it's a configuration issue that is the cause, I gave them a full trace log back to Portsmouth showing precisely where the issue is, just needed a little tweak and it would have largely been sorted. Hence my support ticket to nudge them, which they didn't appear to appreciate
But regardless, whether you are paying 8 EUR for 6vCPU/8GB Ram or 27 EUR for 10vCPU/60GB Ram (lol) they are without doubt horribly oversold. Your mileage will vary. All about setting expectations and if you don't expect much then you won't be disappointed.
Like I said before, 20ms to 80ms may not seem much in isolation but there are other factors which impact visitors inside/outside of the UK and so on. For most that don't do a lot of optimization, it is unlikely to be a noticeable difference. So if Contabo works for people, then it's good for what it is.
-
@robi they use 3°party datacenter outside Germany.
And there networking infrastrutture was not good already in Germany, now for example don't specify how much bandwidth they have on 3° party location.
So i would not trust them too much -
Random off topic nugget to add - there was a VPS I saw somewhere once upon a time a few months ago that did not have pre-defined bandwidth allocations (unlimited as long as you don't abuse). Anyone know of any?
-
@doodlemania2 I know OVH Cloud has unlimited bandwidth. The connection speed increases with each higher plan.
-
@humptydumpty said in Contabo: New UK Region:
@doodlemania2 I know OVH Cloud has unlimited bandwidth. The connection speed increases with each higher plan.
On the other hand, personally OVH is among the last places I would use to host anything.
-
@doodlemania2 I used to look for such "unlimited" options in the past for some of my high traffic sites, but realized it wasn't necessary.
For example SSDnodes has sufficiently high limits that I never hit them, and they loosely enforce it.
Also, if a particular aspect of your service is the only one causing the limits to be exceeded, for ex: image or video repository, that resource can be CDN'd (often for free) resolving the local network bw issue.
-
