Contabo Reviews and Expert Opinion

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Browse Contabo’s in-depth support materials to quickly resolve issues on your own.
• Utilize unlimited free SSL certificates to boost your website’s trustworthiness.
• Ease your way into web hosting with a free website builder and hundreds of 1-click app installations.
• Keep your site running smoothly even during traffic surges with unlimited bandwidth and generous disk space.
• Improve your Google ranking and customer satisfaction with fast load times.
• Optimize your back-end for the software and applications you’re running thanks to a rich developer portfolio.
• Make server safety a priority with DDoS protection.
• Take advantage of Contabo discounts to cut back costs even further.

Cons:

• Although we saw few service disruptions during our testing period, Contabo doesn’t provide an uptime guarantee.
• Customer support is only available 8am-11pm (UTC+2), though emergency support is available via email 24/7 as an upgrade.
• The company doesn’t currently seem to offer a money-back guarantee.

Pricing and Payment Methods

Contabo’s reputation as an inexpensive web host is well-earned, and its shared, VPS and dedicated server solutions are all well within the affordable range. The company’s most basic shared hosting plan, Webspace M, starts at €2.99 (about $3.40) a month and gives you 1 domain, 50 GB disk space and unlimited bandwidth, as well Contabo’s own free website builder.

Contabo’s cheapest 100% SSD-storage VPS plan starts at €4.99 (about $5.60) and provides 200 GB disk space and unmetered traffic. You also have root access and a free operating system reinstall console, giving you a lot of control over your virtual server.

If you need more resources than shared or VPS can provide, Contabo has you covered with its dedicated servers. Its basic package starts at €49.99 (about $56.20) monthly, and offers 12 GB RAM, 2000 GB disk space, and unmetered bandwidth. Here too, features like root access, free DNS entries and free server reboots really let you make your server your own.

Ease of Use

On the whole, Contabo manages to hit all the right notes when it comes to customer experience. Beginners have access to tools such as the website builder and 1-click integrations that make it simple to get started with web hosting. Contabo also makes it simple to customize plans with features that can easily be added to create unique plans.

The company’s thorough tutorials, coupled with the huge amount of features available with even the most basic plans, empower Contabo’s advanced users to set up rich, complex back-ends. Unlike other hosting providers, Contabo offers a wide range of database management tools, letting you find a system that works well for you and your team.

Load Times and Reliability

Both personal and commercial websites need speedy page loads and reliable uptimes to attract users and increase conversions. One thing that stood out for us as we researched Contabo was that the company doesn’t cite a specific uptime guarantee. Nevertheless, over the three months that we tested Contabo the company’s uptimes were on average 99.9%, what we’ve come to expect of a leading web hosting provider.

These days, you simply can’t afford to neglect your load times. Google’s SEO ranking now prioritizes load speeds, and users are liable to swipe onwards if your site is even a few milliseconds slower than what they’re used to. Contabo has a number of measures in place to keep your site loading quickly, such as SSD storage. Our upload speeds showed an average of between 2.2-2.5s, fast enough to satisfy Google and users.

As the company itself notes, because its data centers are located in Germany and because its clients are primarily European, users from the US may enjoy even faster load times, since their audience’s peak times will differ from European audiences’.

Features

Contabo is proof that cheaper plans can still compete in the feature arena. For beginners, Contabo ticks off the two big boxes: it provides a free website builder with all plans, and a 1-click installer for over 300 apps, including the leading CMS and e-commerce platforms. Commercial websites can also take advantage of generous email account allowances and MySQL databases to give team members the tools they need to communicate effectively.

With Contabo, you also have the ability to customize your cPanel with a language of your choice, making back-end navigation that much easier. We also appreciated the fact that Contabo provides automatic setup and renewal of SSL certificates – one less thing for beginners to have to worry about.

As developers and web host enthusiasts, we’re always looking for substantial developer toolkits. Here too, Contabo delivered more than we expected from a host on the lower end of the price range. The company offers FTP accounts and provides access to php.ini so you can adjust your PHP configurations to run specific applications. In general, we were pleasantly surprised by the amount of PHP extensions Contabo enables you to play around with.

In terms of security, Contabo uses DDoS protection and RAID to keep their servers safe, and the extra datacenter the company launched in Munich in 2009 gives it leverage in cases of cyber-attack or hardware failure. Backups are on you; however, you can routinely save backups of your website’s content with just a few clicks.

Customer Support

We were particularly impressed with Contabo’s customer support ecosystem. The customer support team is comprised of friendly individuals who know the ins and outs of your server and your account. Even so, we would have liked to see 24/7 availability – as it stands today, you can reach Contabo’s expert team via telephone and email, 8am-11pm (UTC+2).

The support side acts similarly equip you with valuable information. The company’s FAQ page covers a wide range of billing and technical questions, while the blog and tutorials offer advanced users the chance to troubleshoot and make changes before escalating to a live agent.

User Reviews

We use standardized metrics to evaluate every web host solution and see where it’s holding. We invite you to examine our user reviews to see how Contabo’s everyday customers score the company products and service.

Conclusion

For the most part, our Contabo site review found that the company’s hosting solutions can be a great fit for both beginners and webmasters. If you’re new to the web hosting game, Contabo’s branded website builder and its 1-click app installation tool can have your site up and running in no time.

Advanced users can easily customize their back-end, thanks to a slew of included developer features. Choose from 9 database management tools to take control of your data in a software environment that you enjoy, or use PHP extensions to create elaborate, multi-lingual programs. The fact that Contabo supports a variety of open-source software really broadens the horizons of developers that want to innovate behind the scenes.

Whatever your familiarity with web hosting, Contabo’s winning combination of above average uptimes and load speeds, free SSL certificates, a well-oiled customer support machine and other terrific features make Contabo a real catch.