Hetzner vs Contabo: Two German value hosts with different philosophies

Two German value hosts that mean different things by value

If you asked a room of European developers to name the cheapest sensible place to put a server, most of them would say Hetzner or Contabo. Both are German, both have been trading since the early 2000s or before, and both have a reputation for delivering more hardware per unit of spend than the fashionable clouds. That is where the similarity ends. They arrive at low prices by completely different routes, and those routes produce platforms that suit different work.

Hetzner got there by industrialising. It builds and runs its own data centre parks, standardises on a short list of server configurations, meters everything by the hour and exposes the whole platform through an API that feels like a modern cloud. Contabo got there by bundling. It sells a monthly plan with a deliberately generous allocation of memory and disk, keeps the catalogue simple, and spreads its locations across more countries than you might expect for a company of its size.

What follows is a practical comparison of the two, aimed at someone deciding where a real workload should live rather than at someone collecting specifications. AllCloudShop lists accounts for both, on the Hetzner account page and the Contabo account page.

The four differences that matter

A cloud versus a hosting plan. Hetzner Cloud behaves like a cloud: resources are objects with identifiers, they are created and destroyed by API, and they are billed for the hours they exist. Contabo behaves like a hosting product: you buy a server for a month, it exists for that month, and the relationship is closer to a lease than to a meter.

Allocation shape. Contabo's plans are dimensioned to be striking on paper, weighted heavily toward memory and disk. Hetzner's plans are balanced and comparatively lean, with the expectation that you will attach a Cloud Volume if you need more space rather than buying a bigger machine for the disk alone.

Composability. Hetzner gives you load balancers, private networks with user-defined routes, firewalls as separate objects, placement groups, floating and primary IP addresses, snapshots and volumes. Contabo gives you servers and object storage. On Hetzner you build a system; on Contabo you build inside a machine.

Where the capacity is. This one surprises people. Contabo's location list is the wider of the two, spanning Europe, North America, several Asian countries and Australia, while Hetzner's cloud is concentrated in Germany and Finland with a smaller number of overseas sites. If your users are far from central Europe, the cheaper-looking option may also be the closer one.

The two catalogues side by side

How each feels to automate

On Hetzner, the console is almost an afterthought once you have an API token. Projects isolate environments, hcloud drives every resource type from a terminal, and the Terraform provider covers servers, volumes, networks, firewalls, load balancers, placement groups and SSH keys. A developer can express a complete environment as code, apply it, destroy it after testing and pay only for the hours it existed. That workflow is the reason Hetzner appears so often in continuous integration setups.

On Contabo, the Customer Control Panel is the centre of gravity. There is a REST API that can provision and manage instances, and cloud-init is supported on the Cloud VPS range, so unattended setup is entirely possible. What is missing is the surrounding ecosystem: no first-party command line tool and no official Terraform provider, which means provider-level automation is something you assemble rather than something you adopt.

The consequence is a difference in where your automation lives. Hetzner users tend to describe infrastructure declaratively at the provider layer. Contabo users tend to push their configuration inside the machine, using Ansible, container images or shell provisioning, because the machine is the durable unit. The guide to Ansible for cloud server configuration describes that second style well.

For reference material, the Hetzner Cloud documentation and the Contabo help centre are the authoritative sources, and both are kept current with their respective product lines.

Hardware, disks and networks

Hetzner's cloud servers carry local NVMe storage sized to the plan, with Cloud Volumes providing network-attached capacity that can be detached from one server and attached to another. Because the company owns its facilities, the internal network between instances in a location is fast and predictable, and teams routinely build clustered storage or database replication across it. The Arm64 family gives an efficiency option for software that runs well on that architecture, which nothing in Contabo's line matches.

Contabo's lines are defined by capacity rather than by architecture. The Cloud VPS range offers a choice of SSD or NVMe tiers, Storage VPS trades processing power for very large disks, and the VDS line reserves physical cores for buyers who cannot tolerate shared-core variability. Object Storage handles bucket-style data. Dedicated Servers sit at the top for anyone who wants an entire machine. Details of the current tiers sit on the Contabo VPS product pages.

Networking is the clearest capability gap. Hetzner treats the network as a first-class part of the platform, with private networks that carry their own subnets and routes, firewalls applied by label, and load balancers that distribute traffic across targets. Contabo offers private networking and additional addresses, but no load balancer and no route control, so any traffic distribution happens inside your own software. The load balancer explainer is useful if you need to work out whether that absence matters to your design.

Buying from either as a business

Both are German companies, which makes the data protection conversation straightforward in each case, and both invoice in euros. The difference is in how the spend behaves. Contabo produces a fixed, forecastable invoice that does not move unless you add a plan, which is exactly what a small business or an agency with client billing wants. Hetzner produces a metered invoice that reflects what actually ran, which is better when usage genuinely fluctuates and worse when nobody is watching.

Support is ticket-driven at both, with Contabo additionally reachable by phone during business hours in Germany. Neither company manages your operating system, your updates or your application. That means the whole stack above the hypervisor is yours, and the division set out in the shared responsibility model applies without exception on both platforms.

For an agency, the choice often comes down to how client work is packaged. One large Contabo server with a control panel can host many small sites under a single predictable cost, which is easy to resell. Hetzner suits agencies that give each client an isolated project with its own network and firewall, and that bill through to the client based on real consumption. The agency hosting article covers both models in more depth.

What each is genuinely good at

Hetzner

Hetzner is the stronger platform when you want to build a system rather than occupy a machine. Volumes, networks, firewalls, load balancers and placement groups combine into architectures that would otherwise require a much more expensive provider, and the API makes them repeatable. Dedicated vCPU instances deliver consistent performance for latency-sensitive services, and the ability to graduate to Dedicated Root Servers keeps a growing workload inside one relationship.

Hourly billing is the other underrated strength. Test environments, preview deployments and batch jobs can exist for an afternoon and cost an afternoon, which changes how freely a team experiments.

Contabo

Contabo is the stronger choice when the job is to hold a lot of data and run a lot of software on one box. Generous memory and multi-terabyte disks in a single plan suit self-hosted platforms, media libraries, backup targets, game servers and control-panel hosting, and the fixed invoice makes those workloads easy to budget for over years rather than months.

Its geographic spread deserves more credit than it usually gets. For customers in India, Japan, Singapore, Australia or the United States, Contabo offers local capacity at value pricing from a European contracting party, which is an unusual combination.

What each one cannot do

Hetzner

There is no managed Kubernetes, no managed database, no application platform and no GPU capacity, so everything above the operating system is your responsibility. Plans are leaner on disk than Contabo's, which makes storage-heavy workloads more expensive once volumes are attached. New accounts begin with modest resource ceilings that grow with account history, and the cloud footprint outside Europe remains limited.

Contabo

The platform stops at servers and buckets. No load balancer, no attachable block storage, no managed services of any kind, no first-party command line tool and no Terraform provider mean that scaling out is something you engineer yourself. Shared-core plans behave like shared-core plans under load, which is why the VDS line exists. Hourly experimentation is not part of the model, and provisioning is deliberate rather than instantaneous.

Which one fits your work

Take Hetzner if your architecture has more than one moving part, if you want infrastructure defined in code, if you need consistent CPU for a latency-sensitive service, or if you create and destroy environments regularly. Software teams, continuous integration pipelines and anyone running clusters will get more out of it. The Hetzner listing covers the account options.

Take Contabo if the workload is one large, long-lived machine with plenty of memory and disk, if a fixed monthly invoice is worth more to you than elasticity, or if you need value capacity in a region Hetzner does not serve. Self-hosters, agencies with panel-based hosting and storage-heavy projects are the natural audience; see the Contabo listing.

Other pages extend the comparison. Contabo against DigitalOcean tests the bundle model against a developer platform, Hetzner against OVHcloud sets it beside the other European infrastructure heavyweight, and OVHcloud against Contabo looks at breadth versus budget capacity.

Common questions