Contabo vs Hetzner vs OVH: Europe VPS for self-hosted VPN 2026

You want to stand up a self-hosted VPN in Europe. You've read the WireGuard guides, your wg0.conf is ready, all you need is the VPS. Three names keep showing up: Contabo, Hetzner, OVH. All European, all GDPR, all under €10/month. But which one actually holds up over 14 months of production?

We paid for all three out of pocket, measured with iperf3, compared panels, opened support tickets, and we're giving you the honest verdict. No spec sheet copy-pasted from official sites — just what we observed for real on VPSes running daily WireGuard tunnels.

Comparison criteria (12 axes)

For a comparison to be useful, it needs a framework. Here are the 12 criteria we evaluate for a self-hosted VPN use case:

1. Monthly price — actual cost incl. tax, 24-month commitment
2. CPU / RAM — to sustain WireGuard encryption under load
3. Guaranteed bandwidth — not "marketing burst", real sustained iperf3
4. Datacenter / latency — proximity to end user
5. GDPR jurisdiction — hosting country and corporate HQ
6. Traffic quota — monthly cap or unmetered
7. IPv6 included — /64 or /48 block provided
8. Snapshots / backups — cost and frequency
9. Panel quality — usability, API, terraform provider
10. Support — channel (email/chat), languages, measured response time
11. Measured uptime — over 14 months, via our own monitoring (UptimeRobot 1 min)
12. IP reputation — shared ASN, Spamhaus/AbuseIPDB blacklists

Contabo VPS S — unbeatable price/performance

Price: €4.99/month on 24-month commitment (VPS S "legacy"). €6.99/month for the S Cloud NVMe.

Specs: 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 200 Mbps guaranteed, 32 TB traffic/month included. Main datacenter: Nuremberg (DE), German jurisdiction, strict GDPR.

What we like

• Unmatched price/bandwidth ratio. €4.99/month for 200 Mbps sustained — we couldn't find anyone doing better in Europe. Measured with iperf3 against a Hetzner Helsinki endpoint: 195 Mbps average over 24h.
• 32 TB/month quota. For personal VPN use (5-10 devices) you rarely cap above 2-3 TB. Comfortable margin.
• Snapshots at €1/month. Enabled in the panel. Restore measured at 90 seconds.
• Clean ASN 51167. Low Spamhaus blacklisting, fine with Cloudflare (no systematic challenge).

What we like less

• Dated panel. Interface reeks of the early 2010s. No mature public API. No official Terraform provider.
• Email-only support. Measured delay: 18-36h. No live chat. Replies in EN/DE, FR rare.
• Activation not instant. Count 5-30 min after payment (sometimes more on weekends).
• Shared hardware on legacy VPS. On the €4.99 VPS S, CPU is shared. Not critical for WireGuard but noticeable if you also run CI builds.

See the Contabo VPS S 24-month offer — our default pick.

Hetzner Cloud CX22 — premium German quality

Price: ~€5.18/month (CX22), billed hourly, no commitment.

Specs: 2 vCPU AMD, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe, 20 TB traffic/month included. Datacenters in Nuremberg, Falkenstein, Helsinki, plus Ashburn (US) and Hillsboro (US).

What we like

• Cleanest panel on the market. Modern interface, mature REST API, official Terraform provider. You provision in 12 seconds via hcloud server create.
• Hourly billing. Test, destroy, pay €0.01. Ideal for iterating on your WireGuard config.
• Consistent NVMe performance. No noticeable contention. Disk IO measured at 800 MB/s sequential read.
• 99.98% measured uptime over 14 months (1 scheduled incident 23 min).
• FR/DE/EN ticket support with 4-12h delay, faster than Contabo.

What we like less

• 20 TB/month "soft cap". Beyond that, they don't cut but may reach out. Less generous than Contabo's 32 TB.
• No free snapshots. €0.01/GB/month, i.e. ~€0.40/month for a 40 GB snapshot.
• Strict anti-fraud at signup. First account often demands ID verification. Sign up through Tor and you're refused almost systematically.
• Price looks low but no commitment. Over 24 months, Contabo S works out cheaper (€4.99 vs €5.18).

OVH VPS Value — the French-latency choice

Price: ~€3.50/month excl. VAT (VPS Value), about €4.20/month incl. tax. Monthly or annual commitment.

Specs: 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD, 100 Mbps guaranteed, unmetered traffic. Datacenters Roubaix (RBX), Strasbourg (SBG), Gravelines (GRA), plus Beauharnois (BHS) in Canada.

What we like

• Unbeatable French latency. From Paris: 8 ms to RBX, 12 ms to SBG. Hetzner Nuremberg: 28 ms. Contabo Nuremberg: 31 ms.
• Unmetered traffic. No monthly cap. If you push 10 TB/month, fine. (Bandwidth is still capped at 100 Mbps though.)
• Native FR support by phone and chat. It's OVH, support speaks French during business hours.
• Pure French jurisdiction. GDPR + Cloud Act exempt, interesting if you want maximum digital sovereignty.

What we like less

• Anemic specs. 1 vCPU and 2 GB RAM is just enough for solo WireGuard. Add Nextcloud + Bitwarden and you'll swap.
• 100 Mbps only. Half of Contabo. Measured at iperf3: 97 Mbps sustained, OK but you hit the ceiling fast with 4-5 simultaneous clients.
• Complex "Manager" panel. Inherited from the dedicated OVH ecosystem, unintuitive for a newcomer. Many clicks for a simple action.
• Historical incidents. The March 2021 SBG2 fire is in everyone's mind. OVH has rebuilt the infra since, but perception lingers.
• ASN 16276 heavily blacklisted. Lots of spammers on OVH historically. Cloudflare and reCAPTCHA will challenge you more often than with Contabo.

Comparison table — 12 criteria

Verdict by profile

You're starting self-hosting → Contabo VPS S

€4.99/month, 200 Mbps, 8 GB RAM to bonus-host Bitwarden or Nextcloud. Ugly panel that works. WireGuard tutorials all over the web tested on Contabo. Safest default. We cover it in detail in the Contabo WireGuard setup guide.

You're an advanced dev, you want infra-as-code → Hetzner CX22

REST API + Terraform provider = commit your config to Git, terraform apply, your VPN is up in 30 seconds. Ideal for rebuilding after an incident. You trade €4 extra per month for a clean panel and a modern stack.

Critical FR latency (gaming, finance) → OVH VPS Value

If you play competitive FPS or trade forex at low latency from Paris, the 20 ms gap between RBX and Nuremberg matters. OVH is the only logical pick. Tolerate the rotten panel and Cloudflare CAPTCHAs.

Multi-tenant, multiple services in parallel → Hetzner CX32 or Contabo VPS M

If you host 3+ services (VPN + Nextcloud + Plex + git) jump to the higher tier. Contabo VPS M (€8.49/month, 6 vCPU, 16 GB) or Hetzner CX32 (~€7/month, 4 vCPU, 8 GB). The price/performance balance tips back to Contabo as soon as you scale RAM.

Methodology & sources

The numbers above come from our own monitoring over 14 months (March 2025 → May 2026), using:

• Uptime: UptimeRobot HTTPS ping 60s + WireGuard handshake check every 5 min
• Bandwidth: daily iperf3 against a reference OVH BHS endpoint
• Latency: mtr --report --report-cycles 100 from Paris, Berlin, Madrid
• ASN reputation: weekly checks on Spamhaus DROP, AbuseIPDB, Talos Intelligence

Official sources:

• Contabo VPS specs
• Hetzner Cloud pricing
• OVH VPS Value
• RFC 9293 — TCP for theoretical throughput calculations
• GDPR — Regulation (EU) 2016/679

Further reading

• Self-host VPN on Contabo: complete WireGuard guide 2026
• GDPR cloud hosting: alternatives to AWS in 2026
• WireGuard vs OpenVPN on VPS: real benchmarks 2026

Disclosure: VPNSmith earns an affiliate commission if you pick Contabo via our links. It did not influence the verdict — Hetzner and OVH don't have an active affiliate program with us, we recommend them just the same when they're the right call. Prices verified on 2026-06-02 on official sites. Article continuously maintained, last updated 2026-06-02.