Contabo vs Linode (Akamai)

Contabo is strongest for budget-conscious developers. Linode (Akamai) is strongest for developers. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Contabo	Linode (Akamai)
Starting price	$3.23/mo	$1/mo
Best for	Budget-conscious developers Personal projects Storage-heavy workloads Self-hosters	Developers Startups GPU/AI workloads Small-to-mid production apps Kubernetes
Stated uptime SLA	99.90%	99.99%
Storage	NVME	SSD
Regions	4	20
Managed Kubernetes	No	Yes
Support channels	Ticket, Docs, Community forum	Ticket, Community forum, Docs, Phone (higher support tiers)
Compliance	GDPR	SOC 2, PCI DSS (for compatible services), GDPR, HIPAA (with BAA on eligible services)
Hidden costs to watch for	Quoted monthly prices are the effective rate for a 24-month prepaid/contract term; shorter terms (1 or 12 months) cost more per month Additional IPv4 addresses, extra backup slots, and storage extensions are billed as add-ons Outgoing traffic is technically unlimited but subject to a fair usage policy that can throttle abusive/sustained high-bandwidth usage Support is ticket-only on lower tiers; phone support requires add-on	Outbound bandwidth billed at $0.005/GB (compute/storage) or $0.015/GB (NodeBalancer) once pooled network transfer allowance is exceeded Backups service is a separate add-on priced per instance (roughly 20-25% of the instance monthly price) HA control plane for LKE Kubernetes is a flat $60/mo add-on per cluster; LKE Enterprise clusters are $300/mo per cluster Managed Database HA (3-node) clusters cost roughly 2-3x the single-node price
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18