Contabo vs DigitalOcean - budget VPS for always-on workloads

Contabo is a budget VPS provider whose Core VPS plans start at EUR 4.40/month, billed monthly, with no advertised signup credit. DigitalOcean is a developer-focused cloud whose Basic Droplets start at $4/month, billed per second with a monthly cap. All figures below come from each vendor’s official pricing, docs, and terms, checked on 2026-08-20.

Pricing at entry level

Contabo’s cheapest Core VPS is the Cloud VPS 4 at EUR 4.40/month for 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 100 GB SSD, a 200 Mbit/s port, and Unlimited Traffic*. That EUR 4.40 is a 24-month promotional rate; the listed previous price is EUR 5.50, and the footer notes the displayed price is the effective monthly rate for a 24-month subscription including applicable taxes. DigitalOcean’s cheapest Basic Droplet is $4.00/month (or $0.00595/hour) for 1 vCPU, 512 MiB RAM, 10 GiB SSD, and 500 GiB transfer. So at the entry tier Contabo lists far more vCPU and RAM for a comparable headline price, but Contabo’s figure is a multi-year promotional rate while DigitalOcean’s is the standard per-second-with-monthly-cap price.

Screenshot: Contabo VPS pricing page

Last checked: 2026-08-20

Screenshot: DigitalOcean Droplet pricing page

Last checked: 2026-08-20

Billing granularity

This is the fundamental difference between the two. Contabo bills monthly only: its terms allow initial contract terms of one, three, six, or twelve months, with no hourly or per-second billing. DigitalOcean bills Droplets per second, with a 60-second minimum or $0.01 minimum charge, whichever is higher, plus a monthly cap so you never pay more than the monthly price. If you spin a server up for ten minutes and tear it down, DigitalOcean bills you for the seconds it ran (subject to the 60-second minimum); Contabo bills you for the month.

Signup incentives

Contabo has no advertised signup credit or free trial. Help-center searches for “free trial,” “trial,” “signup credit,” and “free credit” returned nothing, and Contabo’s referral program is commission-based rather than account credit. DigitalOcean automatically applies a $5 signup credit when you create your first team, no promo code required, and it expires 90 days after signup. That credit applies to all products except SaaS Add-Ons.

Bandwidth

Contabo markets “Unlimited Traffic*” on Core VPS under a fair-usage policy: incoming traffic is unlimited and unmetered, and outgoing is subject to fair use, with port speeds ranging from 200 Mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s by plan. The terms do not guarantee the advertised port as sustained throughput. DigitalOcean includes outbound transfer starting at 500 GiB/month on the cheapest Basic Droplet, with additional outbound billed at $0.01 per GiB; inbound is always free. Transfer is pooled across all Droplets at the team level and does not roll over between months.

SLA and regions

Contabo’s contractual SLA is 99.9% physical connectivity, per its terms (Clause 11). No compensation schedule for a missed SLA is published. Contabo lists 9 regions across 12 locations (EU, UK, US East/Central/West, Singapore, Japan, India, Australia), and non-EU locations incur a monthly location surcharge whose exact amount is not verifiable. DigitalOcean’s SLA is 99.99% monthly uptime per instance for CPU Droplets, with a service credit of 100% of that Droplet’s charges for the month if uptime falls below 99.99%; GPU Droplets carry a separate 99% SLA. DigitalOcean operates 16 datacenters across 13 regions per its docs.

Payment and cancellation

Contabo accepts credit card, PayPal, Skrill, bank transfer, and SEPA direct debit for EUR/GBP accounts (SEPA is not available for a new customer’s first payment), and credit card and PayPal for USD; cryptocurrency is not accepted. Consumers have a 14-day withdrawal right, with business accounts excluded. DigitalOcean requires a valid payment method before you can create Droplets or other resources; accepted methods include credit cards, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and others.

How to choose

Choose Contabo if you want the most vCPU and RAM per euro at the entry tier, you run an always-on workload that justifies a monthly commitment, and you are comfortable with monthly-only billing and a fair-use bandwidth policy. Watch the 24-month promotional pricing, the non-EU location surcharge, and the 99.9% contractual SLA.

Choose DigitalOcean if you need per-second billing with a monthly cap, a 99.99% CPU Droplet SLA, a $5 signup credit for 90 days, or finer regional control across 13 regions. Remember a payment method is required before you can create any resource.

For the full breakdown of DigitalOcean’s signup credit, see the DigitalOcean free credits entry, and for the broader decision, read how to choose between a VPS, GPU cloud, serverless, or a sandbox. Every grant I track is on the credits index.