The King of Value for VPS? (Contabo Review & Benchmarks)

today we have a Contabo review video so Contabo  provide vps's at a very good budget price point   i'm going to be looking at the cheapest one today  that's only five euros that's about six dollars   u.s i'm gonna do a complete review and a lot of  benchmarks all right so i've got a link in the   description to these vps plans these are extremely  generous in terms of how much resources you get   for this price so i'm just curious what's the  catch these look kind of too good to be true at   first glance so i'm going to be running a lot of  benchmarks and figuring out what is the catch if   any so i'm going to be running google pagespeed  insights i'm going to be running sysbench   i'm going to do some network file transfer speed  tests i'm going to do loader i o load testing   i'm going to talk about having all this extra ram  compared to other places and what you can do with   that extra ram and then we're going to go through  some conclusions so i've done heaps of research   and heaps of testing a lot more work has gone into  this than my usual video so if you could at least   drop a comment or hit the like button that would  be super helpful even more helpful if you decide   to go with any of these vps ideas from watching my  videos if you use the links in my description that   really really helps me out as well so anyway  i'm alex from idea spot let's get started   all right so we're over on contabo if you use the  link in the description it'll take you over here   the vps plans so i'm quite interested in these  cheaper options especially this five euro   vps s plan so even though it says s it's still  quite generous in terms of the resources you get   eight gigabytes of ram and four cpu cores you're  also getting 32 terabytes of traffic so that is   quite huge compared to other vps's at that price  range now we are using euros for the currency if   you change it to us dollars it's slightly more  expensive Contabo is a german-based company so   it does end up being a little bit cheaper if you  pay euros rather than us dollars so that's 6.99 us   versus 5 euros so i think that works at about  six dollars so you save about a dollar if you   pay in euros so if we were to compare this plan  to the ones that we look at on the channel quite   regularly we look at that vulture six dollar  plan only gives you one terabyte not 32 terabytes   only one gigabyte of memory  not eight gigabytes of memory   and 32 gigabytes of storage this will give you 50  um 50 gigabytes of storage on nvme 200 on ssd so   i'd go for the faster nvme to be honest  unless you really needed the extra storage   if we look at digital ocean it's the same sort of  comparison only one terabyte of transfer one cpu   and only one gigabyte of memory and the storage  is half so only 25 gigabytes of nvme storage   so i know what you're thinking how can this be so  much better in terms of its resources at the same   price point that's what i want to test today i  want to run through some benchmarks and see if   you're making any performance sacrifices to  get all these resources at this price point   so let's go ahead and select this one and  see what the signup process is like here   first thing i noticed was there is a setup  fee five euro setup fee plus your five   euro monthly fee so your first month costs  nearly 10 euros now compared to digital   ocean and vulture they have a free trial for  your first month or even first two months so   paying a setup fee doesn't really feel that great  in this industry at the moment i think if you pay   for 12 months you can avoid the setup fee but  i think again most people when they move to a   new server they want to try it out and see  what it's like for the first few weeks so   having no free trial and having to pay a setup  fee that doesn't make it as attractive but   still not a lot of money for most  people i think and the other thing was   if you want this five euro price you're limited  to european servers here so the german data center   costs five euro but if you want like the united  states you'll go up to six euros so straight away   it costs a little bit more if you want united  states and then singapore in asia is an extra   two and a half euros so if you just go for  european union i actually want to go for the u.s   east coast for this demonstration because i always  have my vulture and my digital ocean servers   on the east coast so i want to compare them but  i think if i just want to save money and go for   the european data center but i think most  of my audience will be around here anyway so   i'm going to go for this one and then i'm going to  stick to nvme as my storage the storage is smaller   but it's going to be faster with nvme compared to  200 gigabyte ssd so i think for serving websites   always go for nvme if you've got the choice you  can actually double that for an extra one euro   as well for 100 gigabytes but let's just go for  the 50 and then i'm going to be using ubuntu 2004   because i'm going to be using cyberpanel  um and that installs well on ubuntu 2004.   the other thing you could do is wordops which  again uses 2004 but whichever way you go   ubuntu 2004 we're just going to install our panel  on there and then install wordpress with our panel   they do have some choices of apps and panels  that you can install during setup but i didn't   really like any of these options cpanel and  plesk they charge extra for all of those and   i'm not a fan of lamp for running wordpress i'd  rather use nginx or open light speed again webmin   same deal not really a fan of any of these  choices so wood new 2004 that lets us install   nginx through word ops or open lightspeed through  cyberpanel which i'm going to do today i'll show   you that a bit later and then it's worth noting  here you've got 32 terabytes of transfer per month   that is limited to 200 megabits per second  so that is throttled a little bit we'll talk   about how that affects performance a bit later but  that's probably one of the key differences because   vulture and digitalocean don't give any connection  limiting so this does have some effect but we'll   talk about that later and then all of this will  leave as default basically all right so after you   sign up a few hours later you'll get your email  with your login data so it's not instant it does   take a little while so be patient while they set  up your account and you'll be able to go over   to my.contabo.com and log in with your username  and password you'll also be able to remote into   your vps and log in with your root username here  and your password to set up your server so we're   going to do that in just a second but to start  with we'll head over to mycontabo.com and log in   with our username and password there and just have  a look at what their control panel actually looks   like all right so we're in our customer account  panel here there's not a whole lot we can do most   of what we can do is under vps control so you can  restart your server if you need to restart you can   reinstall it back to scratch you can do a rescue  you can take snapshots so if you want to save the   server in a certain instance and and be able to  roll it back to that position if you're trying out   different configurations and things that can be  handy but again not a whole lot we can do here we   can click manage and we can actually do password  resets which is useful if you forget your password   or if you mess anything up and serve ip address  so i'm just going to take that server ip and go   ahead and log in all right so i'm using windows  here so i'm going to use putty to connect to my   server if you're using a mac use terminal either  way we're going to put in our ip address here   and we're going to save it as contabu s and  i'm just going to save that in there like that   and then we can click open and so here we just  log in as root and i right click the password to   paste that in so and then we hit enter to log in  that is just the password that we got from from   our login email here so this is where i'm going to  install cyberpanel so that's just one command to   install that so just run that script i have done  this in a previous tutorial so over on my blog   and in the description as well i'll put a link to  that tutorial but basically just that one command   and then you follow the prompts and set up your  sub panel so i've got that video that i've made   earlier very simple to do don't be scared of  trying out running something from the command   line this is quite simple you'll have your server  up and running within 10 or 20 minutes without too   much hassle so i'm just going to skip ahead as  you can see i've got my cyber panel set up on   my server now and i'm using this demo domain  ideaspot.site for this demonstration so i've   installed wordpress on here i love cyberpanel for  wordpress because open lightspeed and it's a free   panel as well so very fast performance and free so  what's not to like there i've set up my favorite   theme on here cadence theme with the cadence  starter template i like testing this because   it's nice and clean and nice and fast i can do  some performance benchmarking on this website   again if you want the full details of  this setup process check out that previous   video that i made on setting up solar panel and  open light speed it's very very straightforward   honestly but what i really want to concentrate  on this video is the performance of contabo and   comparing that performance to my favorite  vulture and digital ocean server so let's   go ahead just run a google page speed insights  on here so straight away we're seeing very solid   performance here from contabo 99 overall score all  greens on our core web vitals the most difficult   one largest content for paint that's still green  at 1.8 seconds so that's under our 2.5 limit this   is about 20 slower than vulture and digital  ocean because i've been able to get 1.5 seconds   on vulture and digital ocean for our lcp times  so about 20 slower this is a very lightweight   so if it was a heavy website that performance  difference might come into play a bit more but   with a very lightweight website here that's  totally fine 1.8 is totally decent just be aware   that that is about 20 or so slower than vulture so  just to summarize here contabo's about 20 slower   than our vulture and digital ocean droplets that  we've tested before 1.5 second load time for those   guys 1.8 on contabate but still totally decent  we're still getting great scores just a fraction   slower on contabo next up we're going to run some  sysbench benchmarks i like using sysbench because   we can do database benchmarking which is really  the bottleneck when you're looking at wordpress   dynamic content so i'm going to go ahead and show  those results so with our my sequel performance   in the database benchmark contabo is pretty solid  a little bit actually quicker than digitalocean   for its database performance but vulture wins  this benchmark by a fair margin actually so   we can see if you were looking at dynamic  content vulture is going to be the quickest one   and similar effort from contabo and digitalocean  next up we tested the file io so contabo's   file input and output is actually quicker than the  other options so that was very promising now it   is worth noting that contabo does have a network  port limit so even though the file input output is   quicker on quantabo we might actually see later on  that contabo's network limit does bottleneck this   performance a bit in terms of running websites  under loads so i'm going to show you how that   has an effect a bit later on but next we did the  memory the memory was all pretty even vulture was   a little bit ahead but um in terms of memory  this is useful for serving cached content from   your memory um when you're doing websites so very  even there's no trouble with any of these options   all right so next up i tested some file transfer  speed just moving a 1 000 megabytes worth of data   um contabo was way slower than digital ocean  and vulture in this test so we can see contabo   is limited to that 200 megabit connection speed  in this case the um 43 second transfer works out   to 186 megabits so that seems about right that's  close to 200 as we saw earlier vulture and digital   ocean much faster so digitalocean i was able  to transfer it over a gigabit um vulture three   gigabits here so only two and a half seconds  and seven and a half seconds for these guys   43 seconds for contabo to transfer that so i think  that's actually it's not too bad if there's light   traffic on the server contabus not gonna suffer  any slowdown as we saw with the google page speed   it was still 1.8 seconds it was still fast enough  it's just as you get multiple concurrent users   you get heavy traffic these guys are going to  start to shine with those unthrottled ports   three gigabits one gigabit i think that's much  much quicker in terms of being able to serve a   heavy load of traffic to multiple visitors at  the same time compared to contabo so i think   this is probably the key difference basically  cantabu is giving you a cheap vps with very good   resources in terms of its ram and cpu but you're  limited in terms of your network performance so   i think this is a very interesting comparison i  think to highlight this difference if you head   over to loader.io you can run load testing which  is what i did in this case so i really loaded up   these servers with 200 clients per second and  500 clients per second and then just check the   response time in each case so digitalocean and  vulture were able to handle both of these loads   fairly comfortably vulture didn't even make a  difference if i was using 200 or 500 clients   and contabo when i boosted the load test up to  500 clients that's when it did hit some lag so   um 2536 milliseconds of response time compared  to only 10 or 20 or 30 from digital ocean uh so   that's two and a half seconds of extra lag that  you're getting added so under heavy load that's   where contabo starts to struggle a little bit but  of course 500 clients per second that's a lot of   load i don't think most websites are going to get  that but that's just illustrating if you're under   a heavy amount of load these guys going to perform  better as you grow websites and they become   popular these are going to still perform very  strongly contability will start to struggle as   the load gets high but again 500 is a lot 200 it  still manages the test just fine compared to the   other ones as well so 200 clients per second was  just fine on contact but i think for most people   the performance is going to be fine for as  long as the traffic doesn't get too heavy   one thing people are worried about when they see  this sort of price with four cpu cores and eight   gigabytes of ram they think oh okay maybe they  are overloading these servers and the cpu is   gonna suffer we're gonna maybe lose some of the  cpu performance because it's being overloaded   over on vps benchmarks they  kind of address this by running   sustained cpu endurance on these servers and they  have a metric called cpu steel so that is how much   cpu performance is actually lost due to being  shared with other vps's on the server so it's not   too bad on contabo it's um it's not zero but 4.2  percent is the average loss of cpu and the maximum   was 10.98 we can actually see how that compares  to other vps's on here as well so basically as a   result of being in a vps environment you've got  a virtual cpu and the virtual cpu is four point   two percent slower than an equivalent physical  cpu um in the case of contabo so average 4.2   maximum was 10.98 these aren't too bad you  don't need to worry about them particularly   it's just worth comparing that vultures virtual  cpus and say compared to google's e2 higher cpus   are pretty much exactly the same as a physical cpu  in terms of their performance only a very fraction   of a percentage slower than a physical cpu digital  ocean was between two and five percent slower than   the physical cpu equivalent but for those of you  who are worried about contabo being overloaded it   doesn't really seem like that's the case you do  lose a little bit of cpu performance to being in   that shared environment with the vps but they have  engineered it so that you still get most of the   performance out of the cpu and it's not completely  overloaded here i did find a little bit more   discussion about cpu steal time over on scout apm  i'll link that in the description but basically   if it's an average under 10 i think you're going  to be fine you're not really going to notice any   slowdown from having a virtual cpu in those cases  now i just wanted to mention ram because this is   one of contabo's biggest advantages you get eight  gigabytes of ram on kontaba only one gigabyte of   ram on the other guys when it comes to running  wordpress sites the number of wordpress sites is   typically bottlenecked by the amount of ram that  you have on the server so generally as a rule of   thumb you could run 10 websites pretty safely  on one gigabyte so if you've got 8 gigabytes   you could 8x that you could have 80 websites  running on that cheap contabus server so if you're   in that situation where you need to run  a lot of websites say you're a small   freelancer or small agency and you want to run  a lot of hosted wordpress websites this is where   contabo's really going to shine for you because  those extra resources translate to just hosting a   lot more websites than what is capable on vulture  and digitalocean for the money so while these ones   are slightly faster and handle heavy traffic  better you can just have much more greater   quantity on contabo so that is the big advantage  so these are quite different products when you   look at it in these terms one last thing i wanted  to touch on was uptime with contabo i haven't had   the server for very long so i can't really say  how the uptime is long term so far it's been 100   totally fine let me know in the comments if you're  using contabo and let me know what your uptime has   been like i'd be interested in knowing that part  in comparison with vulture vulture has been rock   solid for me i am in the new jersey data center  i've never had a problem i did reset my server   back in march for three minutes so that's why  that was cause that was me not anything to do   with vulture so um otherwise a hundred percent  up for over four 000 hours now since march so   uh really good from vulture and i've never had any  problem with digitalocean either so yeah just let   me know how cantabru's uptime has been if you've  got experience just let me know in the comments   all right so in terms of our conclusion cantabo is  excellent value it's a very different product from   vulture and digitalocean which we've covered a lot  on the channel before so catarbo selling point is   that high ram and traffic allowance it's much more  generous also a very high traffic limit in terms   of 32 terabytes of transfer so 8 gigabytes  of ram you can host a way more websites but   yeah it's very different from what we've tested  before it would actually be suitable for other   things besides running websites so if you're doing  file sharing game servers if you're hosting video   32 terabytes of traffic transfer a month that's  going to be great running websites was a little   bit slower on contabo but again the resources  it just gives you a much different scope for   different applications compared to vulture and  digital oceans so um contaba's website performance   was still so solid but it was notably slower than  vulture and digital ocean we saw that with our   largest contentful paint being about 20 slower and  the low testing numbers from vulture and digital   ocean being a lot better than contabo but i think  contabo is still in that situation where you just   need the extra resources and you want to host  a lot of websites i think this is really cool   so the situation where i'd recommend contabu  is if you were very limited in terms of your   budget and you just want to host a large number  of wordpress websites and the small performance   difference doesn't concern you so maybe those  of you in developing countries where you have   very tight budgets and you really want to squeeze  a lot of websites onto your server i think this is   going to be a good choice i think for the rest  of us where we only have two or three projects   that we're working on and we just want the fastest  possible speed i'd still recommend vulture if you   just want the best possible speed on your website  so i'm going to stick for vulture for most of my   projects but i think there's going to be  definitely applications where contabo is going   to be suitable for your use case so if you're  interested in trying contabo and you found this   video helpful it would be really nice if you use  the link in the description when you're signed up   that helps the channel a lot also don't forget to  like and comment all that good stuff really helps   me out i'll put up the video at the end of this  one showing you how i set up the open light speed   and cyber panel like i did in this video so if  you want to use that setup on your quantabo server   you can use that method i'll put that up here  but thanks for watching i'll see you next time

Channel: IdeaSpot

Views: 8,697

Keywords: contabo vps, vps hosting, contabo review

Id: m7vGDGHDSos

Length: 20min 40sec (1240 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021