Head-to-head
Contabo vs RackNerd
Two hosts, side by side. Pricing, features, and the trade-offs that actually matter.
Contabo from $5/mo
Stupid amounts of RAM and disk for the price, with the ergonomics to match.
HQ DE · founded 2003
RackNerd from $1.5/mo
Bottom-of-market VPS prices for projects that just need to run — plus an aggressive line of cheap older-generation dedicated servers.
HQ US · founded 2019
Quick verdict
Cheapest: RackNerd wins on entry price ($1.5/mo vs $5/mo).
More features: Contabo ships more first-party platform features out of the box.
Region: Contabo is HQ'd in DE; RackNerd in US.
Cheapest plans, side by side
| Contabo | RackNerd | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry plan | VPS S | 1 GB KVM (annual) |
| Price | $5/mo | $1.5/mo |
| CPU | 4 vCPU | 1 vCPU |
| RAM | 8 GB | 1 GB |
| Disk | 50 GB | 20 GB |
| Bandwidth | 32 TB | 1.5 TB |
Feature parity
| Contabo | RackNerd | |
|---|---|---|
| Managed Postgres | × | × |
| Managed Redis | × | × |
| Object storage | ✓ | × |
| One-click apps | ✓ | × |
| Private network | × | × |
| IPv6 | ✓ | ✓ |
| DDoS protection | ✓ | × |
| Snapshots | ✓ | × |
| Public API | ✓ | × |
| Terraform | × | × |
Contabo pros
- +8 GB RAM + 200 GB SSD for under $10/mo, no commitment
- +Generous resources let you self-host stacks that need RAM (Mastodon, Synapse, Sentry)
- +EU and US regions, transparent monthly billing
Contabo cons
- −Provisioning can take hours instead of seconds
- −Network performance is the most-cited complaint — fine for a personal app, marginal for a SaaS with real users
- −Setup fee on entry-level plans (waived on annual commits)
RackNerd pros
- +Annual VPS plans below $20/year for usable specs
- +Older-generation dedicated servers from $139/mo (16 GB / SSD / 35 TB bandwidth)
- +Multiple US datacenters plus Amsterdam, with Asia-optimized routing on some SKUs
RackNerd cons
- −Resold infrastructure — not all DCs are equal in performance or uptime
- −Support and dashboard polish reflect the price
- −No managed services of any kind