Disclosure: we may earn a commission or referral reward from CloudCone, Contabo, DigitalOcean (account credit, not cash), Hostwinds, InterServer, RackNerd, VPSDime and Vultr if you sign up through our links. It does not change the price you pay. Every other provider pays us nothing.
Contabo vs netcup
Contabo starts $2.33 per month cheaper at the entry tier, counting the IPv4 address billed on top. Contabo lists more regions, which matters if latency to a specific city is your constraint. netcup is the better pick for European projects that want a lot of disk and traffic per euro and can live with a shared vCore.
Contabo
$6.60/mo entry
Home labs, dev boxes and low-traffic apps where memory and disk matter more than sub-millisecond IOPS.
netcup
$8.93/mo entry€7.48 plus €0.50 for an IPv4 address, €7.98 in all
European projects that want a lot of disk and traffic per euro and can live with a shared vCore.
Specification differences
Entry plans compared line by line. Rows marked with a dash are preferences rather than measurable wins, so we do not pick a side on them.
| Attribute | Contabo | netcup | Better |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry plan price / month, with IPv4 where billed extra | $6.60 | $8.93 | Contabo |
| Entry plan vCPU | 4 | 2 | Contabo |
| Entry plan RAM | 8 GB | 4 GB | Contabo |
| Entry plan storage | 100 GB | 64 GB | Contabo |
| Listed regions | 9 | 5 | Contabo |
| Management model | Unmanaged (you run the OS) | Unmanaged (you run the OS) | |
| Support | Ticket support included; response times are slower than DigitalOcean or Vultr under peak load. | See netcup for its support terms. | |
| Billing | Monthly subscription (1, 3, 6, 12 or 24 months); price displayed excludes VAT. | Monthly on the 1-month term; 12- and 24-month terms are cheaper and billed for the whole term. | |
| Free tier | No free tier. | No free tier. |
Same size, side by side
The cheapest plan from each provider that meets each size, so the comparison is between equal servers rather than two entry plans. Prices include a separately-billed IPv4 address where the provider charges for one.
| Size | Contabo | netcup | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 vCPU / 1 GB | $6.60Cloud VPS 4 · 4 vCPU · 8 GB · 100 GBFour cores and 8 GB RAM on a rolling monthly contract. Unlimited traffic under a fair-use policy, 200 Mbps port. | $8.93VPS 500 G12.5 · 2 vCPU · 4 GB · 64 GBMonth-to-month price with netcup choosing the data centre in Europe; 12- and 24-month terms cost less. Traffic flat rate, throttled to 200 Mbps while the 24-hour average is above 2 TB. | Contabo cheaper by $2.33 |
| 2 vCPU / 4 GB | $6.60Cloud VPS 4 · 4 vCPU · 8 GB · 100 GBFour cores and 8 GB RAM on a rolling monthly contract. Unlimited traffic under a fair-use policy, 200 Mbps port. | $8.93VPS 500 G12.5 · 2 vCPU · 4 GB · 64 GBMonth-to-month price with netcup choosing the data centre in Europe; 12- and 24-month terms cost less. Traffic flat rate, throttled to 200 Mbps while the 24-hour average is above 2 TB. | Contabo cheaper by $2.33 |
| 4 vCPU / 8 GB | $6.60Cloud VPS 4 · 4 vCPU · 8 GB · 100 GBFour cores and 8 GB RAM on a rolling monthly contract. Unlimited traffic under a fair-use policy, 200 Mbps port. | $15.67VPS 1000 G12.5 · 4 vCPU · 8 GB · 128 GBMonth-to-month price with netcup choosing the data centre in Europe; 12- and 24-month terms cost less. Traffic flat rate, throttled to 200 Mbps while the 24-hour average is above 2 TB. | Contabo cheaper by $9.07 |
| 8 vCPU / 16 GB | $16.80Cloud VPS 8 · 8 vCPU · 24 GB · 300 GBEight cores, 24 GB RAM and 300 GB SSD. Unlimited traffic under a fair-use policy at 600 Mbps. | $29.10VPS 2000 G12.5 · 8 vCPU · 16 GB · 256 GBMonth-to-month price with netcup choosing the data centre in Europe; 12- and 24-month terms cost less. Traffic flat rate, throttled to 200 Mbps while the 24-hour average is above 2 TB. | Contabo cheaper by $12.30 |
Every provider at these sizes, ranked: 1 GB RAM · 4 GB RAM · 8 GB RAM · 16 GB RAM
Where each one wins and loses
Contabo
Contabo prices its Cloud VPS range on a plan-per-month basis rather than by-the-hour, and the resulting month-to-month prices are the lowest we track at most memory sizes from 8 GB up. The trade-off is upfront: the storage is SSD rather than NVMe, minimum contract is one month, and the effective monthly price falls further only if you pre-pay 24 months.
Strengths
- Cheapest RAM-per-dollar in this list at every tier from 8 GB up
- Unlimited traffic on every plan, subject to a fair-use policy that allows throttling
- One-month minimum contract; longer terms cut the effective monthly cost further
- Adequate US, EU and APAC datacentre coverage for a budget provider
Weaknesses
- SSD storage on Core VPS, not NVMe — cheaper providers now match the spec, this one does not
- Reputation for setup queues on new accounts, especially outside the EU
- Public bandwidth is capped at 200–800 Mbps depending on the plan
- Historically underinvested control panel; API surface is thinner than DigitalOcean’s
Support: Ticket support included; response times are slower than DigitalOcean or Vultr under peak load.
Billing: Monthly subscription (1, 3, 6, 12 or 24 months); price displayed excludes VAT.
Free tier: No free tier.
netcup
netcup is a German host selling KVM virtual servers from Nuremberg, Vienna, Amsterdam, Manassas (US) and Singapore. Its VPS G12.5 line pairs shared vCores with large SSDs and a traffic flat rate. Prices are set in euros: we list the month-to-month price without VAT and convert it to US dollars at the European Central Bank rate.
Strengths
- Large disks for the price (128 GB SSD with 8 GB RAM)
- Traffic flat rate on a 2.5 Gbit/s port
- Month-to-month contracts, with lower prices on 12- and 24-month terms
Weaknesses
- Traffic is throttled to 200 Mbps while the 24-hour average is above 2 TB
- Choosing a specific data centre costs about 15% more than letting netcup pick one in Europe; Singapore costs about twice as much
- Billed in euros, so the dollar price moves with the exchange rate
- A public IPv4 address is EUR 0.50 a month on top of the plan price
Support: See netcup for its support terms.
Billing: Monthly on the 1-month term; 12- and 24-month terms are cheaper and billed for the whole term.
Free tier: No free tier.
The full cost stack
What a server costs beyond its sticker price, shown for 2 vCPU / 4 GB. Only figures read from each provider's own documentation appear; a gap says “not captured yet”.
| Item | Contabo | netcup |
|---|---|---|
| Plan (2 vCPU / 4 GB) | $6.60 | $8.93 |
| Automatic backups | not captured yet | not captured yet |
| Outbound traffic beyond the allowance | not captured yet | not captured yet |
| Smallest managed load balancer | not captured yet | not captured yet |
Sources: none captured yet for this pair.
Price changes we have logged
No tracked price change for either provider yet.
Full record at the change log.
Every plan
The complete plan ladders, with the date and source of every price, are on each provider's page: Contabo and netcup.
All figures are the providers' own published list prices in USD, on-demand monthly. The index was last refreshed 2026-10-14, and every row shows the date its own price was read. Nothing here is live or negotiated pricing. Where a provider bills a public IPv4 address on top, it is added to the monthly price, the ranking and every cost per vCPU or per GB, and the row shows the parts: the server, any disk priced apart, and the IPv4 charge. Some prices exclude VAT or need a commitment; the plan notes say which. Check the provider's pricing page before you commit.
Related comparisons
Where both sell
Contabo and netcup both have data centres in these places. Each page ranks every provider there at the price charged in that location.
Contabo vs netcup — frequently asked
Every answer is computed from this pair's own prices and costs.
- Which is cheaper for 1 vCPU / 1 GB, Contabo or netcup?
- Contabo Cloud VPS 4 at $6.60/mo, which is $2.33 (26%) less than netcup VPS 500 G12.5 at $8.93/mo.
- How many datacentre locations do Contabo and netcup have?
- Contabo lists 9 and netcup lists 5.