Nothing in Contabo's bare-metal range costs less than €149 a month before VAT, and what that buys is a 12-core Ryzen with 64 GB whether or not you needed either. Pick their US East region and their own configurator warns that provisioning "can take up to 10 days". Server Room opens at $5/mo, hands the machine over in about five minutes, and wins at the top of the range too: $347.78 for a 32-core EPYC against €399.00, and $472.98 for a 64-core carrying a third more memory against €699.00.
Contabo earned its name on cheap AMD cores. Three places that stops being the whole story.
Contabo's whole catalog is AMD, so each pairing below sets one of our EPYC builds against theirs at a matching core count. No Xeon-versus-Ryzen sleight of hand.
No comparable server offered
Their smallest dedicated machine is the AMD Ryzen 12 Cores at €149.00/mo before VAT, arriving with 64 GB and 1 TB of NVMe whether that suits you or not - plus €8.10 to €11.25 a month to sit in a US data center. Cheaper than that, they only sell shared-host VPS.
Identical core count, identical memory, and we land more than €50 under them before their US location fee is added. Their silicon is the newer Turin on NVMe; ours answers with registered ECC, hardware RAID 1, and a port no fair-usage policy governs.
Sixty-four cores on both sides - except ours carries 256 GB where theirs carries 192 GB, and still arrives more than €200 cheaper. Upgrade to a 10 or 20 Gbps unmetered port and the gap survives.
Contabo figures come from contabo.com and its configurator, August 2026, and are net of VAT - checkout adds it at your local rate, so €149.00 becomes €177.31 in Germany, and the €134.10 twelve-month prepaid rate becomes €162.26 in Romania (€141.55 at three months). No setup fee, but location fees run €8.10-€36.00 outside the EU. Credit where it's due: their 24-core Genoa at €199.00 beats our $337.78 equivalent on cores per euro. Our EPYC line runs in New York and Bucharest, and every price above is a configurator total.
Specs settle half the decision. Location, delivery, billing terms and who picks up the phone settle the rest.
| Server Room | Contabo | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry dedicated server | From $5.00 / mo on real single-tenant hardware | From €149.00 / mo excl. VAT - nothing smaller in the dedicated range |
| 32-core AMD, 128 GB | EPYC 7513 at $347.78 / mo | EPYC 9355P at €399.00 / mo excl. VAT, plus location fee |
| Location pricing | Identical in New York, Miami, San Francisco, Amsterdam and Bucharest | EU is free; UK and US Central €8.10/mo, US West €9.60, US East €11.25, Australia €20.55, Asia €34.00-€36.00 |
| Deployment time | ~5 minutes in every location; custom builds within 24h | ~90 minutes quoted for a standard EU build; their US East option warns provisioning "can take up to 10 days". Fast-track Setup is a paid add-on |
| Setup fees | None on instant configurations | None on dedicated servers |
| Pricing terms | Month to month at the listed price | Month to month at €149.00 net; €141.55 at three months, €134.10 prepaid twelve - VAT added at your local rate on top |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered options up to 20 Gbps on EPYC, 100 Gbps on Xeon, never oversold | "Unlimited" under a Fair Usage Policy on 1 Gbit/s; 10 Gbit/s only on the larger Turin models |
| Memory & RAID | Registered ECC and hardware RAID across the EPYC line | ECC on the EPYC models; the entry Ryzen is non-ECC with software RAID |
| cPanel | Included on every plan above the $5 entry server | Paid add-on |
| Support | 24/7 phone & live chat with dedicated-server engineers; managed tiers from $39/mo | 24/7 support by chat, phone and ticket - but the server itself is unmanaged |
| Migration help | Free - we move you from Contabo with little to no downtime | Self-service |
There is one point where Contabo genuinely wins, and we'll name it: their 24-core Genoa is the cheapest way to rent that many cores in a German rack. Choose Server Room for everything around it - an entry server at $5 rather than €149, a US machine that arrives in five minutes instead of "up to 10 days" and without a location fee, 32 and 64 core EPYC that costs less rather than more, and ECC, hardware RAID and engineers on the phone included rather than optional. Month to month, nothing prepaid, and we'll move you off Contabo for free with little to no downtime.
