How to Migrate from Contabo to a Cloud Server with Dedicated Resources

Contabo has built a reputation as one of the cheapest VPS providers on the market. Their pricing pages advertise impressive numbers: 8 vCPU cores, 30 GB RAM, and 800 GB of storage for under $15/month. On paper, that looks like an extraordinary deal. But if you have ever actually run a production workload on Contabo, you already know the punchline: those specs do not perform the way you would expect. The "8 vCPU" on your Contabo VPS is not the same as 8 vCPU on a provider that allocates dedicated resources.

If you are reading this, you have probably hit the wall. Maybe your application response times are unpredictable. Maybe your database queries take three times longer during peak hours. Maybe you filed a support ticket and waited days for a response. Whatever the trigger, you are looking for a Contabo alternative that actually delivers consistent performance without requiring you to mortgage your infrastructure budget.

This guide walks through why Contabo is so cheap, what you are actually getting for your money, how dedicated resources change the equation, and the exact steps to migrate from Contabo to a cloud server that performs reliably. We will be honest about where Contabo still makes sense, and where it absolutely does not.

Why Contabo Is So Cheap — And What You Are Actually Getting

Contabo's pricing model works because of one fundamental strategy: massive oversubscription. This is not a secret, and it is not inherently dishonest. Every shared hosting provider oversubscribes to some degree. The difference is how aggressively they do it.

The Oversubscription Problem

When Contabo sells you "8 vCPU," they are not reserving eight physical CPU cores for your virtual machine. Instead, your VM shares a pool of physical cores with dozens of other VMs on the same host. The hypervisor schedules CPU time across all of these tenants, and if the host is not heavily loaded, you might briefly see performance that looks like 8 cores. But during peak hours, when every tenant on the host is competing for the same physical resources, your "8 vCPU" might deliver the equivalent throughput of 2 or 3 cores.

This is not speculation. Anyone who has benchmarked Contabo VPS instances over time will see wildly inconsistent results. Run sysbench cpu at 3 AM and again at 2 PM, and you will get dramatically different numbers. The same applies to disk I/O: Contabo uses local storage on spinning disks or entry-level SSDs, and that storage is shared across all VMs on the host without meaningful I/O guarantees.

What Else You Give Up

• No high availability: Your VM runs on a single physical server. If that server fails, your VM goes down and stays down until Contabo's team manually intervenes. There is no automatic failover, no live migration, and no redundancy.
• Local storage without replication: Your data lives on a single disk (or RAID array) inside a single server. If that disk or server fails catastrophically, your data may be lost. There is no distributed storage, no 3x replication, and no Ceph cluster protecting your files.
• CPU throttling: Contabo applies fair-use CPU limits. If your workload sustains high CPU usage, your VM can be throttled, sometimes without any notification. You will just notice things getting slower.
• Slow support: Support tickets often take 24–72 hours for a first response. For critical production issues, that kind of response time is unacceptable.
• Limited DDoS protection: Contabo offers basic volumetric DDoS filtering, but it is far from the enterprise-grade scrubbing that protects against sophisticated attacks. If you are targeted, your IP may simply be null-routed.
• Minimal API and automation: Contabo's API is limited compared to modern cloud providers. Automated provisioning, scaling, and infrastructure-as-code workflows are difficult or impossible.

Where Contabo Still Makes Sense

To be fair, Contabo is not trying to be a premium provider. For truly non-critical workloads — a personal development sandbox, a test environment you do not care about, a hobby project where downtime is irrelevant — Contabo's price-to-spec ratio is genuinely hard to beat. If you need a box to experiment on and you do not care about performance consistency, uptime guarantees, or data redundancy, Contabo will save you money. The problem is that many users start on Contabo for testing and then end up running production on it because "it works fine... most of the time." That "most of the time" is where things break.

The Performance Gap: What "Dedicated" Actually Means

The word "dedicated" gets thrown around loosely in cloud hosting. To understand why it matters, you need to understand how CPU allocation works at the hypervisor level.

Shared vs. Dedicated CPU Allocation

In a shared (or "burstable") environment like Contabo, the hypervisor assigns vCPUs to your VM, but those vCPUs are virtual constructs that share physical CPU time with other VMs. Think of it like an apartment building where everyone shares a single washing machine. You have "access" to it, but you have to wait your turn, and the more tenants there are, the longer you wait.

In a dedicated environment, specific physical CPU cores are pinned to your VM. No other tenant can use those cores. It is like having your own washing machine in your unit. You do not wait, you do not share, and your throughput is predictable regardless of what your neighbors are doing.

On a MassiveGRID Cloud VDS (Dedicated VPS), when you provision 4 dedicated vCPU cores, those are four physical CPU threads reserved exclusively for your VM. The hypervisor will not schedule any other tenant's workload on those cores. The result is consistent performance that does not degrade during peak hours.

Why Consistency Matters More Than Peak Performance

A Contabo VPS with "8 vCPU" might occasionally outperform a 4-core dedicated VDS in a quick synthetic benchmark. But that peak performance is meaningless for production workloads. What matters is your P95 and P99 latency — the performance your application delivers under real-world conditions, consistently, across hours, days, and weeks.

Consider a database server. If your query execution time is 5ms at 3 AM but 45ms at 2 PM because the host is overloaded, your users will experience that inconsistency as random slowness. Your monitoring dashboards will show erratic latency spikes that do not correlate with your own traffic patterns (because they correlate with your noisy neighbors' traffic patterns). This is the fundamental problem with oversubscribed hosting: you are at the mercy of workloads you cannot see, control, or predict.

With dedicated resources, your performance baseline is your performance ceiling. A 4-core dedicated VDS will not spike to 8-core performance, but it will deliver rock-solid 4-core performance at 3 AM, 2 PM, and every minute in between. For production applications, databases, and user-facing services, that predictability is worth far more than a bigger number on a spec sheet.

Storage: Local Disks vs. Distributed NVMe

Contabo's storage is local to the physical server. This means your IOPS and throughput depend on what other VMs on that same host are doing with the disk. There is no storage-level redundancy beyond the server's internal RAID configuration.

MassiveGRID uses a distributed Ceph storage cluster with NVMe drives. Your data is replicated three times across multiple storage nodes. If a drive fails, or even if an entire storage node fails, your data is safe and your VM keeps running. Beyond redundancy, the distributed architecture means your I/O is not bottlenecked by a single server's disk subsystem. You get consistent NVMe-speed IOPS regardless of what other tenants are doing, because the storage pool is designed for concurrent access at scale.

Migration Steps: Contabo to MassiveGRID

Migrating between providers does not have to be stressful if you plan it properly. Below is a step-by-step guide for moving your workloads from Contabo to a MassiveGRID cloud server.

Step 1: Back Up Everything (Do Not Rely on Contabo Snapshots)

Contabo's snapshot feature is unreliable for migration purposes. Snapshots are stored on the same local storage as your VM, and they cannot be exported or downloaded in a standard format. Instead, create your own backups.

For a full filesystem backup of your Linux server:

# Create a compressed archive of the entire filesystem
# (excluding pseudo-filesystems and the archive itself)
tar czf /tmp/full-backup.tar.gz \
  --exclude=/proc \
  --exclude=/sys \
  --exclude=/dev \
  --exclude=/tmp/full-backup.tar.gz \
  --exclude=/run \
  --exclude=/mnt \
  /

For databases, always use native dump tools rather than file-level copies:

# MySQL / MariaDB
mysqldump --all-databases --single-transaction \
  --routines --triggers > /tmp/all-databases.sql

# PostgreSQL
pg_dumpall > /tmp/all-databases.sql

Download these backups to your local machine or a separate storage location before proceeding. Do not rely on having continued access to your Contabo server during migration.

Step 2: Provision Your MassiveGRID Server

Choose the appropriate MassiveGRID tier for your workload (see the recommendation section below). Provision your server through the MassiveGRID portal, selecting your preferred data center location (New York, London, Frankfurt, or Singapore). Your server will be ready within minutes.

Once provisioned, perform initial setup:

# SSH into your new MassiveGRID server
ssh root@your-new-server-ip

# Update the system
apt update && apt upgrade -y    # Debian/Ubuntu
# or
dnf update -y                    # RHEL/AlmaLinux

# Install any required packages your applications depend on
# (web server, runtime, database server, etc.)

Step 3: Transfer Data via rsync

Use rsync to transfer your application files and data from Contabo to MassiveGRID. Run this from your Contabo server, pushing data to the new server:

# Sync web application files
rsync -avzP --delete \
  /var/www/ root@new-server-ip:/var/www/

# Sync configuration files
rsync -avzP \
  /etc/nginx/ root@new-server-ip:/etc/nginx/
rsync -avzP \
  /etc/letsencrypt/ root@new-server-ip:/etc/letsencrypt/

# Sync any other application-specific directories
rsync -avzP \
  /opt/myapp/ root@new-server-ip:/opt/myapp/

The -P flag shows progress and allows resuming interrupted transfers. For large datasets, you may want to run the initial sync while both servers are still live, then do a final incremental sync just before the DNS cutover.

Step 4: Migrate Databases

Restore your database dumps on the new server:

# MySQL / MariaDB
mysql < /tmp/all-databases.sql

# PostgreSQL
psql -f /tmp/all-databases.sql postgres

For minimal downtime, consider using replication. Set up the MassiveGRID server as a read replica of your Contabo database, let it sync, then promote it to primary during the cutover window. This approach reduces the data gap to seconds rather than the time it takes to transfer a dump file.

Step 5: Test Your Applications

Before switching DNS, verify everything works on the new server. Update your local /etc/hosts file to point your domain to the new server's IP address, then test thoroughly:

# Add temporary hosts entry (on your local machine)
echo "NEW.SERVER.IP.ADDR  yourdomain.com" >> /etc/hosts

# Test your site / application
curl -I https://yourdomain.com
# Verify response headers, SSL certificate, status codes

Check application logs for errors, verify database connectivity, test all critical user flows, and confirm that background jobs and cron tasks are running correctly.

Step 6: Update DNS and Cut Over

Once testing is complete, update your DNS records to point to your new MassiveGRID server IP. Lower your DNS TTL to 300 seconds (5 minutes) at least 24 hours before the migration so the change propagates quickly.

# Verify DNS propagation
dig yourdomain.com +short
# Should return your new MassiveGRID IP

Keep your Contabo server running for at least 48 hours after the DNS change. Some DNS resolvers cache aggressively, and you want to ensure no traffic is still hitting the old server before you decommission it.

Step 7: Decommission Contabo

After confirming all traffic is flowing to MassiveGRID and everything is stable, cancel your Contabo service. Make one final backup from the old server before cancellation, just in case you missed any files or data.

Which MassiveGRID Tier Is Right for You

MassiveGRID offers several product tiers, and the right choice depends on your workload, your budget, and how much of the Contabo experience you are trying to escape. Here is an honest breakdown.

Budget Developer Who Needs Reliability: H/A Cloud VPS — Starting at $3.99/mo

Let us be upfront: $3.99/month is more than Contabo's cheapest plan. You will get fewer raw specs for the same money. But here is what you gain: high-availability failover, meaning if the physical host your VM runs on fails, your VM is automatically restarted on a healthy host within minutes. Your data is stored on NVMe-backed Ceph storage with 3x replication, so a disk failure does not mean data loss. You get DDoS protection included, not as an upsell. And you get support that actually responds.

The H/A Cloud VPS still uses shared CPU, so you are sharing cores with other tenants. But MassiveGRID's oversubscription ratios are dramatically lower than Contabo's, and the NVMe storage cluster eliminates the I/O lottery. For personal projects, staging environments, and low-traffic applications where you need things to actually stay online, this is the right starting point.

Developer Burned by Inconsistent Performance: H/A Cloud VDS — Starting at $19.80/mo

This is the primary recommendation for anyone migrating from Contabo due to performance issues. The H/A Cloud VDS (Dedicated VPS) gives you dedicated CPU cores — physically pinned to your VM, not shared with anyone. Combined with NVMe Ceph storage and HA failover, this is a fundamentally different class of hosting than what Contabo offers at any price point.

Yes, $19.80/month is significantly more than Contabo's $6.99 plan. But compare what you are actually getting: dedicated CPU cores that deliver the same performance at 2 PM as they do at 3 AM, NVMe storage that does not slow to a crawl when your neighbor runs a backup, automatic failover that keeps you online during hardware failures, and 3x replicated storage that protects your data. If your Contabo frustration is rooted in unpredictable CPU or I/O performance, the Cloud VDS solves that problem completely.

Business Running Production on Contabo: H/A Managed Cloud Servers — Starting at $27.79/mo

If you are running a production application on Contabo and you do not have a dedicated sysadmin on your team, the H/A Managed Cloud Server tier is where you should look. This includes everything in the Cloud VPS tier, plus 24/7 server management: MassiveGRID's team handles OS updates, security patches, monitoring, and incident response.

Compare this to Contabo's support experience: waiting 24–72 hours for a ticket response when your server is having issues. With managed cloud servers, you have a team actively monitoring your infrastructure and responding to problems before you even notice them. For businesses where downtime directly translates to lost revenue, the management fee pays for itself the first time it prevents an outage you would have spent hours debugging on your own.

Contabo Dedicated Server Users: H/A Managed Cloud Dedicated Servers — Starting at $76.19/mo

If you are currently on one of Contabo's dedicated servers and you need guaranteed single-tenant hardware performance with the addition of high availability and professional management, the H/A Managed Cloud Dedicated Server tier delivers exactly that. You get an entire physical server's resources dedicated to your workloads, combined with HA failover, NVMe Ceph storage, DDoS protection, and full 24/7 management.

This is the premium tier, and it is priced accordingly. But for workloads that demand maximum performance isolation — large databases, high-traffic web applications, compliance-sensitive environments — the combination of dedicated hardware, high availability, and professional management eliminates the compromises that come with budget hosting.

Contabo vs. MassiveGRID: What Changes

Here is an honest side-by-side comparison. We are not going to pretend that MassiveGRID is cheaper — it is not. What we will show is where the money goes and what you get for it.

The summary: Contabo wins the spec sheet war. If all you compare is "vCPU count per dollar," Contabo will always look better. But specs that do not translate to consistent performance are not really specs — they are marketing numbers. MassiveGRID wins on everything that affects your actual experience: CPU consistency, I/O reliability, data safety, uptime, and support.

Free Migration Assistance

Migrating providers can feel daunting, especially if you are managing production workloads. MassiveGRID offers free migration assistance for customers moving from Contabo or any other provider. Our team will help you plan the migration, transfer your data, test your applications on the new infrastructure, and minimize downtime during the cutover.

This is not a generic offer buried in fine print. When you sign up for any MassiveGRID plan and submit a migration request through the support portal, a real engineer will work with you to get your workloads moved safely. If you are running complex multi-server environments, databases with replication requirements, or applications with specific configuration needs, our team has handled these migrations hundreds of times.

Ready to migrate? Provision your H/A Cloud VDS or Managed Cloud Server and open a support ticket requesting migration assistance. Include details about your current Contabo setup — number of servers, approximate data size, and any specific requirements — and we will handle the rest.

Our Recommendation

If we had to recommend a single product for someone migrating from Contabo, it would be the H/A Cloud VDS starting at $19.80/month. Here is why:

• It solves the core problem that drives most Contabo migrations: inconsistent performance. Dedicated CPU cores eliminate the noisy neighbor issue completely.
• The NVMe Ceph storage with 3x replication solves the second most common complaint: unreliable I/O and data safety concerns.
• HA failover means hardware failures do not translate to extended downtime, which is something Contabo simply cannot offer.
• The price increase over Contabo is significant but justified. You are paying for resources that actually deliver what they promise.

For those who need managed support on top of dedicated resources, the H/A Managed Cloud Server at $27.79/month adds 24/7 sysadmin support that replaces Contabo's slow ticket-based support with proactive monitoring and rapid incident response.

Conclusion

Contabo serves a purpose. For disposable test environments and non-critical hobby projects, their pricing is genuinely impressive. But the moment your workload matters — the moment downtime costs you money, slow performance frustrates your users, or data loss would be a real problem — the Contabo pricing model stops being a bargain and starts being a liability.

The gap between "8 vCPU shared" and "4 vCPU dedicated" is not just a number. It is the difference between unpredictable performance that varies by the hour and a stable, reliable platform you can build a business on. When you factor in HA failover, replicated NVMe storage, DDoS protection, and responsive support, the cost difference between Contabo and MassiveGRID is not an expense — it is an investment in infrastructure that actually works.

Whether you choose the Cloud VPS for budget-conscious reliability, the Cloud VDS for dedicated performance, the Managed Cloud Server for hands-off operations, or the Managed Cloud Dedicated Server for maximum isolation, MassiveGRID gives you infrastructure where the specs on the page match the performance in production. That is what a real Contabo VPS alternative looks like.