Head-to-head
RackNerd vs Contabo
Two hosts, side by side. Pricing, features, and the trade-offs that actually matter.
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
Contabo from $5/mo
Stupid amounts of RAM and disk for the price, with the ergonomics to match.
HQ DE · founded 2003
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: RackNerd is HQ'd in US; Contabo in DE.
Cheapest plans, side by side
| RackNerd | Contabo | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry plan | 1 GB KVM (annual) | VPS S |
| Price | $1.5/mo | $5/mo |
| CPU | 1 vCPU | 4 vCPU |
| RAM | 1 GB | 8 GB |
| Disk | 20 GB | 50 GB |
| Bandwidth | 1.5 TB | 32 TB |
Feature parity
| RackNerd | Contabo | |
|---|---|---|
| Managed Postgres | × | × |
| Managed Redis | × | × |
| Object storage | × | ✓ |
| One-click apps | × | ✓ |
| Private network | × | × |
| IPv6 | ✓ | ✓ |
| DDoS protection | × | ✓ |
| Snapshots | × | ✓ |
| Public API | × | ✓ |
| Terraform | × | × |
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
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)