Contabo vs UpCloud

Contabo is strongest for budget-conscious developers. UpCloud is strongest for performance-sensitive VPS workloads. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Contabo	UpCloud
Starting price	$3.23/mo	$3.5/mo
Best for	Budget-conscious developers Personal projects Storage-heavy workloads Self-hosters	Performance-sensitive VPS workloads European data residency Simple predictable billing
Stated uptime SLA	99.90%	99.999%
Storage	NVME	NVME
Regions	4	13
Managed Kubernetes	No	Yes
Support channels	Ticket, Docs, Community forum	Ticket, Docs, Community
Compliance	GDPR	GDPR, ISO 27001
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	Simple Backups add-on billed as a percentage surcharge on server price (Day +10%, Week +20%, Month +40%, Year +60%) Data transfer beyond the Fair Transfer Policy allowance can incur overage charges despite marketing free egress Premium plans require MaxIOPS block storage which is priced/allocated differently than Starter plan Standard SSD
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18