Contabo vs Hetzner vs Hostinger: Three Different Theories of Cheap

These three dominate every “cheap VPS” list and they are not competing on the same thing. Contabo sells RAM and storage. Hetzner sells compute. Hostinger sells setup time. Normalise them at the same memory tier and the winner changes with every column — so the useful question isn’t which is cheapest, it’s which column you’re actually buying.

Fifteen-second answer

• Most resources per pound, and you’ll tolerate variance → Contabo
• Best cores and consistency at a flat price → Hetzner
• You want a panel, backups and one-click installs, and you’d rather not learn a cloud console → Hostinger
• You want all three properties → you want a bigger budget; none of these is a premium host

The same tier, three ways

Matched as closely as each provider allows at 8 GB:

Read the vCPU row first. Hostinger gives you two cores where the other two give four at the same memory. For a memory-bound workload that’s irrelevant; for anything that parallelises — a dozen containers, a build, background workers — it’s the difference that matters most on this page, and it’s the one the pricing grid doesn’t emphasise.

Then read the renewal row. Contabo and Hetzner charge the same price indefinitely. Hostinger’s advertised rate requires a 24-month term and then rises 71%.

Three years of it

Hostinger assumes 24 months at $8.79 followed by 12 at $14.99; the other two are flat throughout.

The ordering is stable and the gaps are real but not enormous — about $139 over three years between the cheapest and the most expensive. Whether that’s decisive depends entirely on whether the panel, the backups and the one-click installs save you more than $46 a year of your own time. For many people they plainly do.

What each one is actually selling

Contabo sells volume. 200 GB of NVMe and 32 TB of transfer at this tier is more storage and more bandwidth than either competitor, at the lowest price, with no renewal increase. Published third-party benchmarking of its NVMe puts it around 2.1 GB/s sequential read and roughly 45,000 random 4K IOPS — genuinely quick.

The trade is consistency. Contabo’s vCores are heavily oversubscribed, results differ noticeably between customers, support is slower than the others here, and provisioning can take hours rather than seconds. Buy it for a media server, a backup target, a database with a large working set, or batch work. Don’t buy it for anything latency-sensitive.

Hetzner sells compute and predictability. Four cores, 20 TB of transfer, flat pricing, hourly billing with no minimum contract, and free L3/L4 DDoS filtering. The storage allocation is the smallest here at 80 GB, which is the genuine trade-off.

Two caveats specific to Hetzner: the cheap CX line runs on older hardware generations with occasional regional stock limits, and — the trap we cover in the dedicated CPU guide — CPX costs four times CX and is still shared; only CCX is dedicated. Learn the four letters before you buy.

Hostinger sells the hour you’d otherwise spend setting up. A managed panel, weekly backups included, a browser terminal that works without SSH keys, and a one-click catalogue that covers modern software rather than a legacy CMS list. For a first server, or for anyone whose time is better spent on the thing they’re building, that package is the product.

It costs you two cores, a 71% renewal increase, and a 24-month commitment to reach the advertised price.

Where the benchmarks would have gone

The obvious way to settle this is to buy all three at the matched tier and publish Geekbench single and multi-core, disk IOPS and time-to-first-SSH. We haven’t done that, and we’d read anyone’s numbers with some caution — shared-host performance depends on which physical machine you land on and what your neighbours are doing, so a single measurement describes one instance rather than a provider.

What we can point to is published third-party benchmarking where it exists (Contabo’s NVMe figures above), and what the specifications commit to. If you want your own numbers, all three bill monthly or hourly and a single month costs under ten dollars each — measure with sysbench for CPU, fio for disk (the commands are in our NVMe VPS guide), and vmstat 1 10 to check steal time under load.

Who each is wrong for

Contabo is wrong for you if your workload is latency-sensitive, you need responsive support, or you can’t tolerate performance that varies with your neighbours.

Hetzner is wrong for you if you want a control panel, need lots of storage at this tier, need a US-centric footprint, or you’re new enough to servers that a bare console is a barrier. It’s also wrong if you buy CPX thinking it’s dedicated.

Hostinger is wrong for you if your workload is CPU-bound — two cores at 8 GB is thin — or if you object to a 24-month term and a renewal that rises 71%.

All three are wrong for you if you need managed support, an SLA with teeth, or a platform with managed databases and load balancers. That’s a different market, covered in our managed VPS comparison.

For the two-way version focused on the time-versus-money trade, see Hostinger vs Hetzner — the saving works out to one to two hours of your year.

Where to buy

Check Hostinger VPS pricing → · Read our Hostinger review

Contabo isn’t part of an affiliate programme we participate in, and our Hetzner tracking link is currently out of action — so neither carries a tracked link here. Both are on this page because the arithmetic puts them there.

How we picked

Specifications and pricing come from each provider’s pricing pages, verified August 2026, matched as closely as the three catalogues allow at 8 GB. Hetzner figures are in euros converted at approximately $1.08 and reflect its 15 June 2026 price adjustment. Contabo’s benchmark figures are published third-party results, not ours.

The 36-month model assumes Hostinger’s 24-month introductory term followed by twelve months at the renewal rate, with Contabo and Hetzner flat throughout. Introductory terms and promotions move; the renewal rates are the stable part.

This page carries one affiliate link, to the most expensive of the three over three years. The cheapest option — Contabo, by roughly $139 across that period — earns us nothing, and it’s first in the table.

FAQ

Which is cheapest: Contabo, Hetzner or Hostinger?

Contabo, at roughly $252 over three years against Hetzner’s $330 and Hostinger’s $391 at the 8 GB tier. Contabo also gives the most storage (200 GB) and transfer (32 TB) at that price. The catch is performance variance and slower support.

Why does Hostinger cost more if it’s the budget option?

Because its advertised price is introductory. KVM 2 is $8.79 on a 24-month term and $14.99 at renewal — a 71% rise — while Contabo and Hetzner charge the same rate indefinitely. What the premium buys is a control panel, weekly backups and one-click installs.

Which has the best CPU?

Hetzner and Contabo both give four vCPUs at 8 GB where Hostinger gives two, so for parallel workloads either beats Hostinger on paper. Between those two, Hetzner is the more consistent — Contabo’s cores are more heavily oversubscribed, so its results vary more between customers.

Is Contabo reliable?

Reliable enough for workloads that tolerate variance, which is most batch and storage-heavy work. Its published NVMe benchmarks are strong (around 2.1 GB/s read, ~45,000 IOPS), but shared vCores mean performance depends partly on your neighbours, and support is slower than the alternatives here.

Which should I pick for a first VPS?

Hostinger, unless you’re confident on a command line. The panel, the included backups and the browser terminal remove the parts of a first server that go wrong, and the extra cost over three years is around $139 against Contabo — roughly $46 a year for a significantly gentler experience.

Do any of these include a control panel?

Only Hostinger, via hPanel. Contabo and Hetzner give you a bare server, so you’d install your own — and as our cPanel cost breakdown shows, a cPanel licence at $29.99 a month would cost several times the server itself at this tier.