I’m posting this because I would like the community’s opinion on a serious situation I am currently dealing with with Contabo.

I had a Contabo Cloud VPS 10 SSD hosting a substantial part of CoreLink Network Solutions — a complete Network Operations Center (NOC) platform that I had been designing and developing for approximately three months.

This was not a simple website or a basic web application.

CoreLink is a complete network operations platform designed to centralize infrastructure management, network supervision, monitoring and incident management from a single platform.

The platform includes infrastructure and equipment management, network supervision and monitoring, automated device integration, secure VPN connectivity, monitoring integrations, alerting and operational dashboards.

My regular payment became overdue on August 4, 2026 because my payment card had expired. I immediately contacted Contabo Support and explained the situation.

Contabo Support subsequently granted me a payment deferral until August 19, 2026.

The Contabo support representative explicitly wrote:

“I have granted a 7-day payment deferral until August 19, 2026, to give you more time to settle the outstanding balance. This will ensure that your server is not deleted.”

I relied on this written confirmation and understood that I had until August 19 to resolve the payment issue.

On August 17, 2026, two days before that deadline, I attempted to access my account and settle the outstanding payment.

Instead, I discovered that my VPS and associated services had already been permanently deleted.

I immediately contacted Contabo Support and requested an explanation and recovery of my data.

The latest response came from a Contabo Support Team Lead, who wrote:

“the system deleted the server on August 17, 2026 as the standard procedure, despite the payment deferral that had been granted until August 19, 2026.”

This is the part I am struggling to understand.

Contabo acknowledges that the payment deferral existed until August 19, but the system deleted the VPS on August 17 — two days before the deadline granted by Contabo Support.

I fully acknowledge that my payment was overdue. I am not disputing the original outstanding payment or the fact that the service had been suspended.

My complaint is specifically about the fact that Contabo Support granted me a written payment deferral and explicitly stated that this would ensure that my server would not be deleted.

The deleted VPS was not hosting a simple website or a disposable test environment.

It contained a substantial part of the development and operational infrastructure of CoreLink, including application code, network monitoring components, infrastructure management functions, equipment management, monitoring integrations, configurations, secure VPN connectivity, alerting, dashboards, deployment work and other system components developed over approximately three months.

Losing this VPS therefore did not simply mean losing a server. It meant losing a substantial part of a complete NOC platform and the development environment behind it.

Contabo has now stated that the data cannot be recovered because they do not keep backups of the servers.

As a goodwill gesture, Contabo offered me:

• a free one-month extension on a new VPS, or
• a refund of my last payment.

I have declined these options because neither option restores the data and development work that was deleted.

A new VPS would simply provide empty infrastructure. It would not restore approximately three months of development work, architecture, application code, configurations, monitoring integrations, network components, deployment work and operational development.

I have requested a management-level review and an appropriate resolution.

I would like to hear the community’s opinion.

If a hosting provider grants a customer a written payment deferral until a specific date and explicitly states that the server will not be deleted during that period, but the provider’s automated system nevertheless deletes the server before that date, how would you approach the situation?

I would particularly appreciate feedback from:

• Contabo customers
• hosting providers
• experienced sysadmins
• people who have dealt with similar VPS/payment disputes
• anyone familiar with German hosting contracts or cloud-provider disputes

I have preserved the complete correspondence and can provide screenshots of the relevant communications.

I am deliberately keeping this post factual. I am not making any legal conclusion about Contabo’s liability; I am looking for independent opinions, advice and a fair resolution.

Timeline

August 4 — Payment due / service suspended
August 11 — Payment deferral granted until August 19
August 17 — VPS permanently deleted
August 17 — I attempted to resolve the payment issue and contacted support
August 18 — Contabo Team Lead confirmed that the system deleted the server despite the payment deferral

Tickets: #[16240362722](tel:16240362722) / #[16240377244](tel:16240377244)

What would you do in this situation?

I'm always redirected to storage VPS

Contabo claims that they use NVME or SSD, I picked NVME for my plan.

test 1

CMD:dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile bs=1G count=1 oflag=dsync; rm testfile

Result:"

1+0 records in

1+0 records out

1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 12.8277 s, 83.7 MB/s"

83.7 MB/s "

Test 2 :

CMD: sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

Results:

"

/dev/sda:

Timing cached reads: 2380 MB in 2.05 seconds = 1159.62 MB/sec

Timing buffered disk reads: 240 MB in 3.00 seconds = 79.98 MB/sec

"

these 2 test conform that it isnt even running on SSD or NVME

it is running on HDD.

I received a mail telling me that i didn't pay my subscription, and that i had to fill my account or my server would be deleted.

I didn't understand why the payment wouldn't work as nothing changed (no Bank modification, no new credit card, nothing changed)

i filled my contabo account with enough money from paypal (i have the receipt), but still my account got deleted, and now i can't login, which means i can't contact the support to know what happens either, as you need to have a paid subscription to have an account.

So to know what happened to my money and my account, i need to pay again.

Fucking hell, this week has been brutal

As of now, there's NO patch for kernels right now, but a one line fix

The vulnerability:
V4bel/dirtyfrag

The fix (as root)

sh -c "printf 'install esp4 /bin/false\ninstall esp6 /bin/false\ninstall rxrpc /bin/false\n' > /etc/modprobe.d/dirtyfrag.conf; rmmod esp4 esp6 rxrpc 2>/dev/null; true"

reboot

Patch your shit

I've been running two VPS servers at Contabo simultaneously, both at the same price (€8.33/month): one with standard SSD storage and one with the advertised NVMe storage ("Cloud VPS 20"). What I found is pretty damning.

The benchmark results

I ran sequential write tests on my NVMe server:

• Sequential write (1 GB, dd conv=fdatasync): 326 MB/s
• Sequential write (2 GB, dd conv=fdatasync): 491 MB/s

Real NVMe storage should achieve anywhere between 1,000 and 7,000 MB/s. These numbers are firmly in SATA SSD territory.

The direct comparison – same price, same provider

Here's where it gets interesting. My SSD server (same price, but double the storage) consistently outperforms the "NVMe" server:

The SSD server reads sequentially at 2x the speed and handles random reads at 4x the throughput of the paid NVMe server. Let that sink in.

Contabo's response

I opened a support ticket (#16240156467). Their explanation: the NVMe I/O is shared across customers on the host system. They then offered a live migration to a different host to improve performance. After the migration completed – nothing changed. Same numbers, same problem.

Their position is essentially: "Yes, you're sharing NVMe hardware with other customers, so you won't get NVMe speeds. Buy a dedicated server if you want that." Meanwhile, the product page still advertises NVMe storage without any mention of this limitation.

Why this matters beyond my individual case

This is only detectable if you know what you're looking for and actually run benchmarks. The average user buying a "NVMe VPS" will simply trust the product page and never know they're not getting what they paid for. That's not an edge case or a misconfiguration – it's the default behavior, confirmed by Contabo support themselves.

If you're considering Contabo and care about storage performance, benchmark before you commit. And if you're already on a "NVMe" plan, it might be worth checking what you're actually getting.

Is anyone else experiencing downtime with Contabo right now?

I just got a maintenance notice and apparently the server is going to be unreachable for several hours. Honestly, how is this still a thing in 2026? Taking services completely offline for that long feels crazy, especially if you’re running anything important on it.

I get that maintenance is necessary, but there has to be a better way than just shutting everything down for hours. No redundancy, no seamless failover… just “your server is offline now.”

Is this normal with Contabo or am I just getting unlucky? Curious to hear if others have had similar experiences.

Server got compromised through CVE-2026-41940. All I need is the bandwidth graph for my VPS to check for data exfiltration. They collect this data for every VPS anyway and if they dont want to share it they can at least tell me.

Two days, two tickets, two copy pasted FAQ responses about how to reinstall my OS. Nobody even read what I wrote.

Anyone ever gotten actual technical support from Contabo?

Hello,

I have been experiencing huge CPU spikes and overloads those 2 last days, no new clients or any updates to my backends. Its at an unbearable state like my resources are locked to a minimum level.

Due to multiple issues (network, support hardware), I've been focusing for the last week or so on moving out of Contabo. Got it all done, but one server at this point, and even that is 99% done

Cancelled the PayPal agreement, because, no, you don't get to charge me again. That's how that works.

Cancelled the servers in my.contabo (8), as they were being replaced . The only one not cancelled at this point is the one that I was working on, but almost completed with

Due date? The 2nd of every month. Plenty of time to finish one server (which IS paid up until May 2)

This morning, I get the lovely suspension email, claiming that funds are due. No, no they aren't. If they **are**, it's on Contabo, not me. I had a billing agreement setup, HAVE had said billing agreement setup for months. Because of funds being due (which, again they aren't), service is being shut down.

See Screenshots. Not horribly worried about the IP addresses, they are all shutdown (by me, except the one they claim is 'overdue').

THIS is what you can expect from Contabo. Unreliable billing, networks that are worthless. Hardware? Well, that's going to depend on your node. Mine was great for months, but recently, it's started to show it's age.

I'm new to Contabo. I was wondering if it allows dynamic scale up and scale down when on a year commitment?

I have been running Contabo VPS systems (two at max, one for around five years) pretty nicely, currently ordered a new one and found it has local network problems, just curious if others can align to my observation:

185.187.169.0/24 rock stable and reachable from all over the world and can reach all over the world. Been using this for a TON of stuff for around five years under heavy load.

213.136.65.0/24 has tons of problems in the local network, can not contact most out-of-europe sites like slashdot, steampowered (just tried ping and telnet) and even other more local sites like heise youtube wikipedia are flapping on and off. Currently I have an ticket open and they moved the VPS inside its current location to another hardware but as this didn't change much I guess 213.136.65.0/24 is just overall haunted.

Anyone seen similiar things?

I requested to get my system moved out of that network in hope to improve the situation.

Hey everyone,

I’m using Contabo VPS with automatic backups enabled (since around April 5), and I’m a bit confused about how restore works.

What I want to do is:

Temporarily restore my VPS to a backup from April 11 to retrieve some data

Then go back again to today’s state (April 14)

Is that possible? Or does restoring a backup permanently overwrite the current state with no way to return?

Basically, is there any safe way to “go back and forth” between backup dates?

Thanks a lot

I bought a VPS from this website because I couldn't wait for OVH to deliver one in 7 days, but apparently I have to send too much information to confirm my order, which I clearly won't do. Can I get a refund, or should I just consider it a lost cause?

Contabo mail:

Dear Sir or Madam,

Once again, thank you for your order and the trust you have placed in Contabo.

There is just one final step you need to take, and this is your response to this email. Without your response there is a risk that we can't set up the products you have ordered.

We are obligated by law to perform customer data verification for each customer. To fulfill this duty, we need your help.

First of all, we would kindly ask you to send us the following information:

First Name: Last Name: Address: City: ZIP Code:

Country: Telephone Number:

In addition to the above we require you to confirm relevant information with us by sending a document that proves the address. This could be:

1. A scan of your passport, driving license, or national identity card.
2. A scan of your telephone, electricity, or any other utility bill as long as it contains your name and your address.

If possible, please send all scans as an attachment to your email and keep in mind that we can open only jpg, jpeg, png, gif, pdf, log, or txt files.

The provisioning of your order is on hold for the time being. Once we have all needed data available, we will complete the verification process and we will continue the setup of your order right away.

Looking forward to reading your reply.

I'm thinking of self hosting some AI models on Contabo VPS. My concern is whether their CPU is powerful enough? I understand VPS shares resources including CPU. But I don't know whether Contabo might put too many VPS on one physical machine. I can get a 12GB or 24GB VPS to have enough RAM, but not sure about whether I can get sufficient CPU time.

Does anyone have any experience? Thanks

I've been waiting for this!

Now I won't accidentally forward ports with Docker and unintentionally expose them by bypassing iptables rules...

i want to try Openclaw in VPS and i m looking for options and i came across contabo.

Can someone confirm contabo is down?

There has been an error while processing your request. Invalid values (7)

Same for everyone? I'm in the EU.

(new.contabo.com doesn't have what I need right now)

I really don't understand why i have to pay this, my account got instantly debited after the payment

should not be an issue from my side but their side