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 OVHcloud
OVHcloud starts $1.25 per month cheaper at the entry tier. OVHcloud lists more regions, which matters if latency to a specific city is your constraint. Contabo is the better pick for home labs, dev boxes and low-traffic apps where memory and disk matter more than sub-millisecond IOPS.
Contabo
$6.60/mo entry
Home labs, dev boxes and low-traffic apps where memory and disk matter more than sub-millisecond IOPS.
OVHcloud
$5.35/mo entry
Bandwidth-heavy workloads that would blow through a metered-transfer plan at another provider.
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 | OVHcloud | Better |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry plan price / month | $6.60 | $5.35 | OVHcloud |
| Entry plan vCPU | 4 | 2 | Contabo |
| Entry plan RAM | 8 GB | 4 GB | Contabo |
| Entry plan storage | 100 GB | 40 GB | Contabo |
| Listed regions | 9 | 15 | OVHcloud |
| 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. | Ticket support included; paid Business and Enterprise support tiers via the OVHcloud Control Panel. | |
| Billing | Monthly subscription (1, 3, 6, 12 or 24 months); price displayed excludes VAT. | Month-to-month on the US VPS range, with lower per-month rates for 6- and 12-month commitments. Public Cloud instances are a separate, hourly-billed product. | |
| Free tier | No free tier. | No free tier on the VPS range. |
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 | OVHcloud | 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. | $5.35VPS-1 · 2 vCPU · 4 GB · 40 GBTwo vCPUs and 4GB for about five dollars. Unlimited traffic at 500 Mbps public bandwidth. Month-to-month price; a 12-month commitment lowers it to $4.54. | OVHcloud cheaper by $1.25 |
| 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. | $5.35VPS-1 · 2 vCPU · 4 GB · 40 GBTwo vCPUs and 4GB for about five dollars. Unlimited traffic at 500 Mbps public bandwidth. Month-to-month price; a 12-month commitment lowers it to $4.54. | OVHcloud cheaper by $1.25 |
| 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. | $10.00VPS-2 · 4 vCPU · 8 GB · 75 GBFour cores and 8GB for ten dollars, at 1 Gbps with unlimited traffic. Month-to-month price; a 12-month commitment lowers it to $8.50. The tier that most directly undercuts DigitalOcean. | Contabo cheaper by $3.40 |
| 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. | $27.50VPS-4 · 8 vCPU · 24 GB · 200 GBEight cores and 24GB of RAM, unlimited traffic at 3 Gbps. Month-to-month price; a 12-month commitment lowers it to $23.37. | Contabo cheaper by $10.70 |
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.
OVHcloud
OVHcloud runs its own datacentres and its own network, which is why the VPS list price is denominated in USD and includes unmetered traffic rather than a monthly transfer allowance. The 2027 range replaces the older Value/Essential/Comfort/Elite naming with plain VPS-1 through VPS-4 tiers, all on NVMe storage. It is a serious alternative to Hetzner if you want unmetered egress and a wider region map, and it runs its own data centres in North America as well as Europe.
Strengths
- Unlimited traffic at 500 Mbps–3 Gbps depending on tier
- Prices set in USD on the North American site, no FX drift for the invoice
- NVMe storage across the whole VPS range
- Datacentres OVHcloud actually owns, including US and EU footprints
Weaknesses
- Two vCPUs on the cheapest tier is generous, but shared and inconsistent under load
- Support quality has an uneven reputation; documentation is thinner than DigitalOcean’s
- Add-ons like backups are billed separately (from about a dollar per month)
- Historic outage record (Strasbourg fire, 2021) is worth knowing about before you rely on a single region
Support: Ticket support included; paid Business and Enterprise support tiers via the OVHcloud Control Panel.
Billing: Month-to-month on the US VPS range, with lower per-month rates for 6- and 12-month commitments. Public Cloud instances are a separate, hourly-billed product.
Free tier: No free tier on the VPS range.
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 | OVHcloud |
|---|---|---|
| Plan (2 vCPU / 4 GB) | $6.60 | $5.35 |
| 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 OVHcloud.
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 OVHcloud both have data centres in these places. Each page ranks every provider there at the price charged in that location.
Contabo vs OVHcloud — frequently asked
Every answer is computed from this pair's own prices and costs.
- Which is cheaper for 1 vCPU / 1 GB, Contabo or OVHcloud?
- OVHcloud VPS-1 at $5.35/mo, which is $1.25 (19%) less than Contabo Cloud VPS 4 at $6.60/mo.
- How many datacentre locations do Contabo and OVHcloud have?
- Contabo lists 9 and OVHcloud lists 15.