Contabo vs Hetzner: which VPS host is better in 2026?
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In this Contabo vs Hetzner comparison, Contabo comes out on top. It’s more affordable (starting at $5.28/month, compared with Hetzner’s $7.09/month for fewer resources), provides 24/7 support, and has a wider selection of data center locations (11 compared with Hetzner’s 3). These features make it a better fit for various VPS hosting needs.
Below, you’ll find our detailed Contabo vs Hetzner comparison, based on hands-on experience and tests conducted by the Cybernews research team.
| Contabo | Hetzner | |
| ⭐ Rating: | ||
| 💵 Price: | From $5.28/month | From €1.60/month |
| 📑 Uptime guarantee: | 99.99% | 99.9% |
| 🔥 Coupons: | Cybernews Web Hosting Coupons | - |
| Storage space (from): | 75GB NVMe | 40GB |
| ✂️ Free domain (first year): | No | No |
| 🔒 Free SSL certificate: | No | No |
| ➡️ Site migration: | - | - |
| 💾 Automated backups: | For an extra fee | For an extra fee |
| 📧 Email accounts: | No | No |
| 👨💻 24/7 live support: | Yes | No |
| 💰 Money-back guarantee: | 14-day | 14-day |
Pricing: Contabo is more affordable
Contabo offers cheaper VPS hosting than Hetzner, and you also get more resources for your money. Here’s what you get with the entry-level plan from each provider:
- Contabo ($5.28/month): 8GB RAM, 4 vCPUs, 100GB SSD, unlimited traffic
- Hetzner ($7.09/month): 4GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 40GB NVMe, 20TB traffic
So, with Contabo, you get more than twice the resources for a lower price. Of course, Hetzner uses NVMe storage, which is a little faster than regular SSD storage. But when you’re getting less than half the storage, limited traffic, and paying more, I don’t see that as a big enough advantage to offset the difference.
Both providers offer plenty of plans for different needs, from more powerful VPS’ to dedicated servers with fully dedicated resources. A lot of providers lure you in with a low entry price, but once you start looking at plans that actually fit your needs, the price difference can disappear pretty quickly. So, let’s see if that’s the case with Contabo.
Here’s how some of the more powerful VPS plans compare:
- Contabo (Cloud VPS 18, $47.04/month): 18 vCPU cores, 96GB RAM, 600GB SSD
- Hetzner (CAX41, $49.09/month): 6 vCPUs, 32GB RAM, 320GB NVMe
Again, that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Contabo offers more resources at a lower price across these plans, so if price and specs are your main priorities, it looks like a pretty good option. Its affordability is one of the main advantages we noted in our Contabo review.
Control panel: Hetzner’s is more modern
When it comes to the control panel, I prefer Hetzner. Hetzner’s control panel looks much more modern. I especially liked the server window, where I could click on my servers to get a quick overview of their performance, activity, and whether anything needed my attention.
It also made it easy to access the main server settings and manage things like networking and server status. If you’re experienced with VPS hosting, I feel like the dashboard will be fairly easy to use.
Contabo currently has two control panel interfaces. When you log in, you’re initially taken to the older control panel, which looks a little outdated to me. That said, I didn’t have any major issues with its functionality. The menu is on the right, everything is nicely categorized, and I could find pretty much everything I needed. From there, I could manage my VPS, restart it, check its resources, and access the settings I needed for the initial setup. The only issue I noticed is that server resource monitoring isn’t available by default and can only be purchased as an add-on.
Contabo has also recently launched a new control panel interface, which I liked much more. When you log in to the old panel, you’ll see an alert inviting you to try the new interface, and I’d definitely recommend switching to it. It has a much more modern look and feels more in line with the dashboards offered by other VPS hosting providers.
Comparing my experience setting up a VPS, both felt fairly intuitive, but Hetzner guided me through the setup better. With Contabo, I definitely felt like I needed to watch a tutorial, especially during the initial setup. However, the new control panel seems to make the setup easier.
Security comparison: Contabo vs Hetzner
When it comes to security, I’d call it a tie between Contabo and Hetzner. Unlike managed hosting, which is often handled for you, unmanaged VPS hosting requires you to be more hands-on and handle various aspects of server management yourself. Security is one of them.
Here’s what Contabo and Hetzner cover when it comes to the security essentials:
| Contabo | Hetzner | |
| DDoS protection | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Firewall | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Auto backups | ✅ Yes (add-on) | ✅ Yes (add-on) |
| Snapshots | ✅ Yes (included in plans) | ✅ Yes (add-on) |
| Malware scanning | ❌ No | ❌ No |
| 2FA | ✅ Yes (authenticator app) | ✅ Yes (authenticator app, YubiKey) |
Overall, both providers offer pretty similar security features. Contabo includes snapshots with its plans, while Hetzner offers them as an add-on. On the other hand, Hetzner supports 2FA with a YubiKey, which Contabo doesn’t.
Neither provider offers malware scanning, so that’s something you’ll have to handle yourself either way.
Performance comparison: Hetzner showed stronger output
When testing and comparing Contabo vs Hetzner performance, I focused on several key metrics, including CPU performance, disk speed, network speed, and performance under high traffic.
With the help of the Cybernews research team, we ran a series of tests to evaluate the performance of both providers across these key areas. For the comparison, I used the following VPS configurations from each provider:
- Contabo Cloud VPS 4: 4 vCPUs (AMD EPYC), 8GB RAM, 100GB SSD
- Hetzner CX33: 4 vCPUs (Intel), 8GB RAM, 80GB NVMe SSD
Data center locations
Contabo offers more locations to choose from. Data center location matters because the closer the server is to your visitors, the better the load times they’ll get. So, having a broad selection of locations worldwide makes it easier to choose a data center close to your audience.
Contabo offers data centers in:
- North America: the US (Seattle, St. Louis, and Carlstadt)
- Europe: the UK and Germany
- Asia: Singapore, India, and Japan
- Oceania: Australia
Hetzner offers data centers in:
- North America: the US (Ashburn and Hillsboro)
- Europe: Germany (Falkenstein and Nuremberg) and Finland
- Asia: Singapore
There’s one more difference worth mentioning: while Contabo offers the same locations across all plans, with Hetzner, the Cost-Optimized plans only offer European servers. The other locations are only available on the Regular Performance plans.
CPU performance
CPU performance shows how quickly a VPS can process tasks. A faster CPU makes websites, databases, applications, and background processes more responsive, especially when multiple things are happening simultaneously. So, if you’re running OpenClaw on your VPS, better CPU performance means faster responses and smoother performance.
For this comparison, we used Geekbench to benchmark CPU performance and measure how well each VPS handles processor-intensive workloads. Here’s a summary of the results, comparing both providers.
| Contabo | Hetzner | |
| Single-core | 747 | 775 |
| Multi-core | 2035 | 2105 |
Looking at the results, both providers performed well for a 4 vCPU VPS. Hetzner’s single-core score was around 4% higher, while its multi-core performance was approximately 3% higher than Contabo’s. Overall, the difference between the two providers was relatively small.
Disk speed
Disk speed shows how quickly a VPS can read and write data. Faster storage can make databases, websites, applications, and file operations feel more responsive, especially when the server is handling many small operations at once.
The 4K, 64K, 512K, and 1M tests represent different data sizes being read or written. Smaller blocks, such as 4K, are more relevant to everyday server operations like database queries and website files, while larger blocks are more relevant to moving large files or backups.
Here’s a summary of the results, measured with the fio tool, comparing the two providers.
| Contabo | Hetzner | |
| 4K | 126.34MB/s | 217.54MB/s |
| 64K | 1.32GB/s | 1.92GB/s |
| 512K | 1.26GB/s | 1.84GB/s |
| 1M | 1.21GB/s | 2.29GB/s |
Hetzner delivered higher disk speeds across all tested block sizes, with the largest difference appearing in the 1M test. Contabo remained competitive, particularly at 512K and 1M, but consistently trailed Hetzner. This means Hetzner can move larger amounts of data faster, while Contabo still delivers strong disk performance, particularly at smaller block sizes.
Network speed
Network speed shows how quickly a VPS can send and receive data over the internet. Higher transfer speeds are useful for workloads involving large amounts of data or heavy traffic. Latency (ping) shows how quickly the VPS can communicate with another server or a user’s device – lower latency generally means a more responsive connection.
Location is an important factor in this test, as network performance can vary significantly with the distance between servers. To ensure a fair comparison, both VPS instances were located in Germany, providing the same starting point. Network throughput was measured using the Iperf3 tool.
Below, I compare the results for the key locations tested.
| Contabo | Hetzner | |
| Amsterdam | 25.3Mbit/s ↓ / 3.84Mbit/s ↑ / 53.3ms | 5100Mbit/s ↓ / 3849Mbit/s ↑ / 10.9ms |
| London | 6.99Mbit/s ↓ / 94.9Mbit/s ↑ / 53.3ms | 7000Mbit/s ↓ / 5320Mbit/s ↑ / 21.7ms |
| Los Angeles | 82.7Mbit/s ↓ / 95.5Mbit/s ↑ / 157ms | 960Mbit/s ↓ / 690Mbit/s ↑ / 180ms |
| Singapore | 52.1Mbit/s ↓ / 169Mbit/s ↑ / 249ms | 970Mbit/s ↓ / 4010Mbit/s ↑ / 168ms |
Contabo showed significantly lower network speeds than Hetzner in all locations tested. That said, Contabo had lower latency in Los Angeles, while Hetzner demonstrated lower latency in the other three locations. Overall, Hetzner provided faster network speeds and lower latency in our tests.
Stress testing
A stress test is another key metric when evaluating VPS hosting. It’s important that your server can handle sudden traffic surges without slowing down or breaking down.
For this test, we sent 50 virtual users (VUs) to the server and measured its performance using k6, a load-testing tool developed by Grafana Labs.
During the test, k6 generated a total of 14.6K requests for the Contabo server and 14.9K requests for the Hetzner server. The test reached a peak of 50 requests per second. The good news is that both providers completed the test with zero HTTP failures, indicating that both servers handled the simulated load reliably.
There was, however, a notable difference in response times. Contabo recorded a P95 response time of 76ms, compared with just 8.86ms for Hetzner. This means that 95% of requests to Contabo were completed within 76ms, while 95% of requests to Hetzner were completed within 8.86ms. Although both response times are fast in absolute terms, Hetzner was significantly more responsive under load. This is consistent with the results from our other tests, in which Hetzner also performed better overall.
Customer support: Contabo stands out with 24/7 support
Contabo offers better support overall because it has 24/7 live chat, while Hetzner doesn’t offer round-the-clock support.
| Contabo | Hetzner | |
| 24/7 live chat | ✅ Yes | ❌ No |
| Phone support | ❌ No | ✅ Yes |
| Email support | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Guides and tutorials | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| AI assistant | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
Both providers have a solid library of guides covering different setups and common server issues. The guides include screenshots, which I found helpful when following along with a setup. Both also offer email support and an AI chatbot.
One thing I liked about both providers is that they have YouTube channels where they post useful, step-by-step tutorials. There are videos covering topics such as transferring a domain, hosting n8n, configuring a firewall, and other common tasks. So even if you prefer figuring things out yourself, there’s plenty of material to work with.
That said, I think the biggest difference between the two is the availability of actual support when you need it. Hetzner doesn’t offer immediate support outside of business hours. It does have phone support, which is actually my preferred way of getting help, but it’s only available from 8 AM to 6 PM on business days. If something goes wrong on a weekend, you’re basically on your own until Monday. Or, you can check the reasonably active unofficial Reddit community for help from other users.
Contabo doesn’t offer phone support, but it does have 24/7 live chat. I think that’s a pretty big advantage, especially when you’re running something that you need to be available around the clock.
Final recommendations
After thoroughly comparing Contabo and Hetzner, I can confidently say that Contabo is the winner. It offers more affordable plans, a wider selection of data center locations, and customer support that’s available around the clock, including weekends.
That said, Hetzner isn’t a bad option either. It showed better performance in our tests and phone support during weekdays.
| Feature | Contabo | Hetzner | Verdict |
| Pricing | Contabo offers more resources and add-ons for a lower price | ||
| Control panel | Both control panels are functional, but Hetzner feels more modern | ||
| Security | Both provide strong security features, including DDoS protection, firewalls, and 2FA | ||
| Performance | Contabo offers more data center locations, but Hetzner showed better results in all performance tests | ||
| Customer support | Contabo offers 24/7 live chat, while Hetzner does not provide round-the-clock support |
FAQ
Is Contabo better than Hetzner?
Yes, Contabo is better than Hetzner. It offers more server locations, lower prices, 24/7 support, a better control panel, and more server locations.
What are the best Hetzner alternatives in the USA?
Hostinger VPS is the best Hetzner alternative in the USA. It offers VPS servers in the US, which means lower latency for US visitors. Hostinger also delivers excellent performance at a lower price, with an easy-to-use control panel and a straightforward setup process.
Is Contabo trustworthy?
Yes, Contabo is a trustworthy German cloud hosting provider. It offers affordable VPS and dedicated server hosting across 11 data center locations worldwide.
Is there anything cheaper than Hetzner?
Yes, Hostinger VPS and Contabo offer cheaper hosting than Hetzner. Hetzner is now a mid-priced provider after its significant price increases in mid-2026.
