Contabo

Contabo sells more RAM, cores and storage per euro than almost anyone. That is the entire proposition, and it is honest about it.

What it does well

Raw specifications. A Contabo VPS gives you several times the resources of an equivalently priced instance at a mainstream cloud provider, which for self-hosting, game servers, media libraries and dev environments is exactly the trade you want. Data centres span Europe, the US and Asia.

Storage pricing in particular is hard to beat if you need terabytes rather than gigabytes.

What it costs

VPS plans start around €5 a month for specifications that cost several times that elsewhere. There is often a one-time setup fee, which is easy to miss. Dedicated servers and object storage follow the same pattern of undercutting the market substantially.

Where it falls short

Support is slow and email-only in practice, with no expectation of hand-holding. Network performance and disk I/O are inconsistent under load, because the price assumes shared contention. Provisioning is not instant, which surprises people used to cloud providers.

This is unmanaged infrastructure. If you cannot administer a server, you cannot use it.

Who it's for

Self-hosters, developers running side projects, and anyone who needs a lot of machine for very little money and can look after it themselves. Not for production workloads with uptime commitments.