Convince yourself!
Source: http://reviews.myhken.com
As you can see the price-performance ratio is right.
On some day during the last week a very good customer who has been renting a Dedicated Server in our datacenter wrote us that he did not necessarily need the server at this time anymore, because the gameserver project he wanted to develop failed. No more need for a dedicated server you might think at this point. But did this great customer cancel the server with Giga-International.com due to vacany? Never ever! Have a look on the email conversation between the customer and our support department by yourself:
Customer:
"How important I am for you guys?
Just asking, because I'm bored. My gameserver hasn't been finished yet since there's no
players and server is useless for me at this time, but I would like to continue with my
server if there's something to do with it. Actually yes. There is, but I've to develop
everything from starting point.
Tell me. Do I continue? :3
"
Giga-International support department:
"
Dear Mr <customer's name>,
Thank you very much for your inquiry.
Please take note that unfortunately we are not really sure what exactly you want us to do.
Therefore we would kindly ask you to paraphrase your message and send it to us once again.
As soon as we receive your e-mail we will immediately respond back to you.
We are looking forward to receiving your soonest reply.
If you have any questions or need help, please do not hesitate to contact us.
--
Best regards,
Kundenservice / Customer support
"
Customer:
"
I'm thinking about continuing & renewing my payment. EVERYTHING JUST, BECAUSE CUSTOMER SUPPORT IS GREAT...
I do not necessarily need server at this time, because I don't have any gameservers that I
can run there, but I'll renew my payment and I can try think some gameservers. I can not
ever hope to be succeed with my gameservers. I'm losing my hope, because no one plays
there ever, but I think I'll buy at least a one month more of the server I already have.
If I don't try... I cannot be succeed.
Any great ideas what to do with dedicated? 
Thanks! I'm always happy about this support. It's reliable, fast and really nice people
there.
"
That's what we call a great loyalty - we really appreciate having so kind and content customers!
I'd like to thank our nice customer that he gave me his permission to mention this incident in our blog.
Effective of today we change the official name for our virtual servers. Our offered hosting solution V-Server is called VPS from now on. VPS is the shortcut for Virtual Private Server.
After long consideration we have decided on a name change, because our experiences have shown that our customers prefer the more common name VPS, also in their correspondence with us.
Customers of Giga-Interational.com, please note:
You, as our customer, are not affected by this modification, nothing besides the name changes for you.
Please note that the invoices you are receiving from us bear the new product name from now on.
Our next offer is aimed at those people who doesn't want to lose any time:
Instant-Setup worth € 29.99. Guaranteed delivery of your hosting product within 12 hours after having received payment.
In many cases it will be possible for us to provide the server to you within a few hours only! By choosing Paypal or Moneybookers as payment option we are going to receive your payment immediately.
So quickly open the 12th calendar door an start using your server, webspace oder VPS immediatley!
Thanks to our Advent calendar we spent the last 23 days with counting and celebrating the days in anticipation of Christmas. Every day we opened a new door and offered you another special promotion regarding our hosting products.
Today on the 24th December we look back on a very successful year and we are getting a bit in a sentimental mood.
While we are proud of our accomplishments this year, we know that our work is never done. We will continue to be focused and passionate about improving our work.
To honor the day duly, we would like to offer you a special surprise. Behind the last door of our Advent calendar hides another setup promotion. But not, as usual, just for one product!
NO SETUP FEES: Setup fees waived entirely for all hosting products.
Giga-Hosting wishes you and your families a Merry Christmas and a happy and healthy New Year. We say thank you to all of our customers and promise to keep on working hard.
Look forward with pleasure to 2013; we achieved a lot in 2012 but we have got a lot of plans for the next year. We are pleased to approach many more milestones together with you.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
The journey has just begun!
This is probably the most appropriate description in one sentence for our ambitious plans for the year 2013.
A few weeks after changing our company name, we are innovating the market for dedicated and virtual servers.
Contabo reduces the prices of all dedicated and virtual servers (VPS) and doubles the VPS performance at the same time!
The self-conception of Contabo does not only imply top-level support that is second to none. Between 08:00 am and 11:00 pm, our support teams answers 99 % of all incoming emails within less than one hour or even within a few minutes in most cases.
Besides that, one of our main business objectives is to offer cost-effective products undercutting the prices of all our competitors.
Our principle - optimal performance at a minimum price - is implemented once more today. We proudly present:
The new Contabo dedicated and virtual servers at an unbeatable price.
1. Contabo dedicated servers - now even more attractive!
Dedicated Server Duo
Intel Core 2 Duo (2 x 2.13 GHz)
3 GB DDR-RAM
400 GB HDD
100 Mbps switch port
Unlimited Traffic
Only 59.99 EUR / month!
Setup-fee starting at 0 EUR depending on the contract period!
Dedicated Server Quad
Intel Core 2 Quad 4 x 2.4 GHz
8 GB DDR2-RAM
2 x 400 GB HDD
100 Mbps switch port
Unlimited Traffic
Only 69.99 EUR / month!
Setup-fee starting at 0 EUR depending on the contract period!
Dedicated Server Core i7
Intel Core i7 920 4 x 2.66 GHz
12 GB DDR3-RAM
2 x 1000 GB HDD
100 Mbps switch port
Unlimited Traffic
Only 79.99 EUR / month!
Setup-fee starting at 0 EUR depending on the contract period!
Dedicated Server 6-Core
Intel Core i7 980 6 x 3.20 GHz
24 GB DDR3-RAM
80 GB Intel Postville SSD
2000 GB S-ATA HDD
100 Mbps switch port
Unlimited Traffic
Only 89.99 EUR / month!
Setup-fee starting at 0 EUR depending on the contract period!
Dedicated Server X
Intel Core i7 3930K 6 x 3.20 GHz (Sandy Bridge-E)
64 GB DDR3-RAM
256 GB SSD (Samsung 830)
3000 GB S-ATA HDD
100 Mbps switch port
Unlimited Traffic
Only 109.99 EUR / month!
Setup-fee starting at 0 EUR depending on the contract period!
2. Contabo virtual private servers (VPS) - doubled performance at a lower price!
VPS M
1 CPU Core
4 GB RAM (guaranteed)
200 GB HDD
100 Mbps switch port
Unlimited Traffic
Only 9.99 EUR / month!
Special introductory offer: 0 EUR setup-fee!
VPS L
2 CPU Cores
8 GB RAM (guaranteed)
400 GB HDD
100 Mbps switch port
Unlimited Traffic
only 16.99 EUR / month!
Special introductory offer: 0 EUR setup-fee!
VPS XL
4 CPU Cores
16 GB RAM (guaranteed)
800 GB HDD
100 Mbps switch port
Unlimited Traffic
Only 29.99 EUR / month!
Special introductory offer: 0 EUR setup-fee!
A few days ago, we drastically reduced the prices of our dedicated servers and virtual servers to provide even more powerful hosting solutions at an unbeatable price.
The server upgrades are next in line. During the order process of a new server, our customers can upgrade the basic configuration of the server according to their wishes and requirements using our order configurator: An additional hard disk is required for the server? No problem! This hard disk should complement the one that is equipped by default and should run in a RAID-array including a hardware RAID-controller? One more click and this configuration is saved as well.
These and many other options are now available at an even lower price than before. Besides the possibility to choose the server upgrades during the order process of a new server, all of these improvements are of course also available for existing customers and already installed servers: A short email to support@contabo.com is sufficient and our support team will guide you through all further steps!
Listed below, you can find the upgrades we reduced the prices for:
Beside that, we offer ready-to-use hard disk packages from now on which are most interesting especially for hosting resellers.
Each package consists of four hard disks of the same size and a hardware RAID-controller which can be configured in a RAID 5 or RAID 10 array according to your requirements.
Especially applications causing concurrent I/O-operations can take advantage of these packages: The hard disks are providing outstanding I/O-performance due to their RAID-configuration and are therefore providing a remarkably good read- and writespeed.
The usage of such compilations results in an enormous performance increase that should not be missed especially on servers that are used for virtualization projects.
And for those who consider this solution as not sufficient yet, we are now offering BBUs (battery units) which can be installed into the RAID-controller. Choosing this upgrade, you can enable the write-cache function on the RAID-controller to achieve an even better I/O-performance.
Listed below, you can find an overview of our speed-optimized hard disk packages:
Our support-team will gladly assist you if you have any requests regarding server upgrades or any other product!
Short after our company name change we reduced the prices of our dedicated and virtual servers and some of our upgrades.
Since last week our high-end server “Dedicated Server X”, which includes a powerful Intel Core i7 3930K processor, 64 GB DDR3-RAM and 256 GB SSD with 6 Gbit/s + 3 TB HDD, can already be ordered at the ridiculously low cost of 109.99 EUR/ month.
Have a look on our server overview at http://contabo.com/?show=servers – our prices of all other servers are quite reasonable as well.
Furthermore, we doubled the performance of our Virtual Private Servers (VPS). From now on, our customers get 16 GB RAM for only 29.99 EUR/ month. These 16 GB RAM are guaranteed to be available, contrary to other offers. You get 100% performance in full!
In addition to that the virtual machine offers 800 GB HDD and 4 cores with 3,2 Ghz each. All together for just 29.99 EUR/ month is a more than excellent cost-benefit ratio, in our opinion.
The consequences of the price reduction are not really very surprising for us but very pleasing. Every day our support team, that is responsible for new customers and for the setup of all ordered hosting products, is doing a great job by providing almost instant setup, usually within a few hours after receipt of payment.
When we checked our new orders today at 10.30 in the morning we already recorded new orders of
- 30 VPS and
- 4 Dedicated Servers.
We are already excited what count we are going to reach at the end of the day 
.
Parallel to all the new orders the volume of support requests increases. Reasons for that are not because of errors or malfunctions of our server hardware – most of the support enquiries contain individual requests, technical issues and the startup procedure of the servers by the customers.
Even in times when more assistance is required by our customers we are taking care of every phone and email enquiry instantly, often only within a few minutes.
In short: Contabo is able to provide competent instant service and also care for individual requirements someone may have. The office is occupied from 8 am to 11 pm on 365 days a year including holidays and weekends.
We would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to all our new and existing customers. Thank you for having placed your trust in us! We promise to keep on working hard to provide optimum service in combination with an excellent price performance ratio.
For further questions or a detailed product advice feel free to contact our support team (support@contabo.com). We are looking forward to your request.
Shortly after our most recent price reduction and directly following the doubling of our VPS performance features we are even outdoing ourselves once more:
From now on, we do offer our top ranking virtual private server, the VPS XL, with six CPU cores instead of four, each at a frequency of 3.2 Ghz.
If it is dozens of MySQL queries per second, tens of thousands of homepage visitors per day or the calculation of complex 3D structures - you rarely will find a way to bring this high-end VPS down to its knees.
These are the VPS features at a glance:
VPS XL
6 CPU Cores
16 GB RAM (guaranteed)
800 GB HDD
100 Mbps switch port
Unlimited Traffic
Only 29.99 EUR / month!
Special introductory offer: 0 EUR setup-fee!
Order our best virtual machine, which features enormous 16 GB of RAM, 800 GB of storage and, of course, unlimited traffic!
For hosting in a datacenter - or expressed in a more fashionable way - storing data in 'the cloud', there is one crucial factor:
A top quality, fast and secure Internet connection of the servers within the datacenter. Only this makes it possible to retrieve and make use of the data, stored and processed in the servers, in a way that makes sense, no matter where on earth the users are located.
Our customers around the globe appreciate the high quality level of the Internet connection in Contabo's datacenter, which is and has been guaranteed for a long time already, by the two worldwide leading "Tier 1" carriers Telia Sonera and Level 3, as well as by the glass fiber pioneering provider M-Net, who is presently supplying the city of Munich and its suburbs with glass fiber connections straight to the user.
We are now taking a further step ahead and are proving to our customers that even although quality has got its price, this price is incredibly low at Contabo. We do once again turn our business objective into reality: Providing the highest quality at the lowest prices, second to none.
All that is made possible by the large volume of the contingent that we purchase for several thousands of dedicated and virtual servers:
As of today, you can obtain Internet bandwidth/traffic at Contabo, for nearly nothing.
1. New server upgrade: 1 Gbit/s bandwidth - without shaping, 24/7 guaranteed. Only 399.99 EUR / month!
By choosing this upgrade your server is being connected to a 1 Gbit/s (=1000 Mbit/s) dedicated switchport (non-shared) which reserves the whole bandwidth volume of 1 Gbit/s only for you. You are able to use the full 1 Gbit/s with both your upstream and your downstream - 24/7 without limitations, no port capping, etc. We do guarantee this bandwidth allocation to you exclusively, thus, you don't share this bandwidth with any other server. Even if you should use the whole bandwidth all the time, we will not throttle your serverport!
2. Price reduction for the server upgrade: 100 Mbit/s bandwidth without shaping, 24/7 guaranteed. Only 39.99 EUR / month!
By choosing this upgrade your server is being connected to a 100 Mbit/s dedicated switchport (non-shared) which reserves the whole bandwidth volume of 100 Mbit/s only for you. You are able to use the full 100 Mbit/s with both your upstream and your downstream - 24/7 without limitations, no port capping, etc. We do guarantee this bandwidth allocation to you exclusively, thus, you don't share this bandwidth with any other server. Even if you should use the whole bandwidth all the time, we will not throttle your serverport!
3. Price reduction for colocation bandwidth: Dedicated, non-shared bandwidth - without shaping, 24/7 guaranteed: 50% cheaper, no matter how much bandwidth you order!
With this bandwidth module, we offer you dedicated bandwidth, which is reserved for you entirely and can be used in full, all the time ('non-shared'). Both upstream and downstream are useable simultaneously exactly up to the number of mbit/s you chose to order. No restrictions. No traffic limit.
Moreover, you can define yourself whether you want to use the ordered bandwidth as a flat rate with a fixed price or whether you prefer the 95th percentile billing method, which allows to exceed the ordered number of Mbit/s if necessary.
In addition to that, you can connect any number of servers (housing modules) to this bandwidth module.
If you do not want to use your own router or BGP, we will manage switching and routing for you - without any extra costs.
Even when starting with only 10 Mbit/s, this module has an impressive price/performance-ratio. But as always: The higher your number of Mbit/s, the cheaper your price per Mbit/s will get.
4. Discount for colocation bandwidth: 100 Mbit/s shared port, now only 9.99 EUR / month!
100 Mbit/s port and unlimited traffic for your colo-server(s) at a reasonable price? No problem.
With this bandwidth module, your colocated server can be connected to our shared bandwidth pool using a 100 Mbit/s port. The traffic is unlimited, thus you can use as much bandwidth as you want.
If you have ordered a '1 server (rack/tower)' housing module together with this bandwidth module, for example, your entire colocation package is complete at only 39.98 EUR per month.
5. Improvement for all dedicated servers which have not been ordered along with the 'dedicated bandwidth - 24/7 guaranteed no shaping' (see above) upgrade:
You can now use (uninterruptedly and continuously) up to 60 Mbit/s on average. Your port will not be throttled.
6. Improvement for all VPS (virtual private servers):
You can now use (uninterruptedly and continuously) up to 40 Mbit/s on average. Your port will not be throttled.
The Internet connection of your server has never been so cheap before and never ever have you been able before, to run bandwidth-intensive applications and homepages so easily!
Pick the Contabo server of your choice right now and get started:
http://contabo.com/?show=server
Contabo celebrates its 10th birthday. We would like to take this opportunity to give you a short look back on the history of our hosting company.
Over the last years a lot has changed at Contabo, formerly Giga-International. However, our main concern always has remained the same:
Our corporate goals:
Right from the beginning we were focused on customer satisfaction. Right from the beginning we realized that only satisfied customers are happy customers.
We have remained committed to our goals since our company has been founded. The customer had been king, in the past as well as in the present.
Our products:
Our product range has grown a lot within the last years. 10 years ago, in 2003, we started with just 3 webspace and 2 dedicated server offers. Now, 10 years later, we offer more than 18 different products, and don’t forget all the further configurations that are possible with that.
Webspace:
Our webspace plans have gone through a tremendous change over the last years, but, fortunately, to the benefit of our customers.
The power has doubled and more than doubled over the years, but the price has significantly dropped regarding the price-performance ratio.
In the following, you will find a comparison about our webspace plans and how they have changed over the last years.
(The following graphics are only available in German language because from 2003 to 2006 our products had been offered only to customers based in Germany.)
Webspace in 2003:
Webspace in 2007:
Webspace in 2013:
Server:
Our former server portfolio is no longer recognizable.
In the following you find a brief comparison of the "Intel Pentium III" offered in 2003 with our current smallest root server in offering, our "Dedicated Server Duo."
Please note the huge difference in price despite extreme power difference:
The calculation is quite simple:
Today (2013), we offer
- 6x more memory (RAM),
- 10x more disk space and bandwidth,
- for a 9x cheaper price.
VPS:
A relevant event in the history of Contabo was the introduction of our three VPS plans in May 2010. Right from the beginning they enjoyed immense popularity and they had been and still being sold like hotcakes. Reason for that might be the special price-performance ratio that we offer .
At the product launch our customers benefit from 2 GB RAM and 100 GB HDD for just 9.99 Euros. Now, several years later, they get 4 GB (guaranteed) RAM and 200 GB HDD for the same price.
But one fact always remained the same: all VPS are connected with 100 Mbit/s to the Internet and come with unlimited traffic. In addition to that, each VPS is delivered with root rights and it can be chosen out of a wide range of operating systems
As you can see, we strive to continually develop and optimize our products and services and always try to meet the wishes of our customers.
Website Relaunch:
In April 2010, our official website was completely redone and freshly designed. Our customers should benefit and take advantage of an easier handling within the ordering process, appearance and information flow.
The most important milestones of Contabo:
A few days ago Katharina gave you a detailed overview about the history of Contabo in her blog post “Contabo through the ages! The story so far…”.
Based on the mentioned most important milestones of the past 10 years we are going to publish now and within the next few days some pictures, photos and texts which we have been collecting during the last years.
Let’s have a look again on the chronicle posted by Katharina…
…and let’s go back to the very beginning when we put our first own rack server into operation at our first data center location in “Mainhattan”, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
In 2004 the first machines went online in the commonly known “Redbus Interhouse” at Lyoner Straße 28. At the beginning we just started with a space for 10 (or 15?) servers, but soon, our company had been growing fast, and thus, also the number of servers in our data center.
Not only we have been delighted about our rapid growth, but also our IT service provider who has been responsible for the handling of our hardware on site and who we worked with for more than 4 years, until we left Frankfurt am Main a little bit later.
Within a few months our server farm grew from 10 servers to 100 servers, and until today our business is expanding at an ever-increasing rate.
A few months later our long-term IT service provider decided to open another data center location a few houses away from us in Lyoner Straße 15. It was probably not only our very positive development which was responsible for their new data center, but we certainly have made an important contribution to that. At this time Giga-Hosting/ Contabo occupied the highest numbers of servers in their data center.
Today, 10 years later, the Tier1 carrier and global player “Cogent” has settled down right there, in the same datacenter we had used for many years at that time, with his German headquarter.
In the following you will find some impressions of our time (2004-2008) in Frankfurt am Main:
Our objective has always been to stay responsible for all of our servers. This means, we have chosen all single items and the infrastructure of our servers on our own and ,according to our ideas, we created server systems which were ready-to-use. We worked day and night to deliver our servers to Frankfurt am Main as soon as possible. And believe me, this was really hard work.
The following picture shows our already packaged servers shortly before its transportation to Frankfurt. According to the file attributes the picture was taken in October 2005 at 2:00 AM in the morning.
Giga-Hosting staff often travelled to Frankfurt to support the technicians there. I can warmly recommend “Motel 1” as accommodation because that’s where the team stayed during our visit and it was pretty nice.
It was situated between the airport and the data center and that’s why we haven’t seen a lot of the city during our stay.
This was the view out of our hotel room - we had to be content with a view towards another hotel instead of impressive pictures of the city centre and the famous Frankfurt skyline:
While we have been focused on the hardware and on the infrastructure of our servers, we took care of one of our most important matters: our product range.
When we started planning our company we agreed on three basic principles which focused on our customers and that have been applied consistently and uncompromisingly to this very day:
1) Discount prices
2) Instant service
3) The customer is king
According to these principles we operated day by day.
We were working hard to continually improve our products like webspace, servers, colocation, domains and its sustainable development. From time to time we offered radical price reductions but always together with high quality products and support.
This concept has been proven for years and it is still our company philosophy.
In the following you will find some impressions of some former marketing promotions and offers:
In March 2006 we opened the first office in Munich for our 1st and 2nd level support department. Since that time our team has been growing constantly.
If you are interested in more details about our history, stay tuned here on our blog. The story will be continued…
In our last blog post we have already given you an overview about the history of Contabo since its foundation.
Now we would like to move on into 2006. For a better understanding keep again an eye on the chronicle of Contabo:
In March 2006 we opened our first office in the heart of Munich. During a long night session we set up several tables, chairs and computers in our new office which was located in a mixed building with offices and apartments. That’s why it wasn’t really surprising (but for us it somehow was at this moment) when an angry neighbor complained about our noisy furniture assembly and installation.
So we finished our hammering, drilling and screwing at 3 o’clock in the morning and continued on the next day.
Thanks to our apology and a bottle of red wine the domestic peace could be restored again.
According to our former company size our first office was very small and contemplative. Nevertheless, nothing was missing.
Right from the beginning a “Coke”-refrigerator of the brand “Bosch” in 50s retro style had been ordered and has been providing us with refreshments until today. By the way, the purchase price was 700 Euros plus delivery expenses.
Impressions from 2006 of our first office:
Unfortunately, we didn’t stay in the office for a long time although we had been blessed with a delicious food infrastructure like Mc Donald’s, Pizza Hut and several Döner restaurants because of its location in the middle of the city center.
We took advantage of the possibility to use a small data center in the middle of Munich operated by the carrier Tiscali with exclusive access to our servers. Tiscali itself stopped all its business in Germany at this time because they didn’t perform profitably any more. Further details of the Italian telecommunications company which was our partner at that time can be found on Wikipedia.
In 2007 we split all of our servers in two different locations; one was located in Frankfurt and one in Munich. At the same time we moved our office to the former office rooms of Tiscali to operate near our servers. This gave us the possibility, in the event of any server problems, to react instantly at any time.
This relocation was the kick off of our colocation and housing product offers.
From this time, customers had the possibility to colocate their own server hardware in our data center and to benefit from a very fast internet connection, from excellent international routing, redundant air-conditioning and power supply. The number of servers increased rapidly.
Impressions from 2007 of the data center in Munich:
The racks of Rittal shown on the pictures above have been taken over from Tiscali by us later on and are still in use in our data center.
Impressions of our 2nd office at Tiscali:
We left the building in 2009 when we opened our today’s office and data center in Giesing/ Munich.
If you are interested in more details from our past, stay tuned here on our blog. The story will be continued…
The first and second part of my overview about the history of Contabo was about our beginning on the hosting market and our rapid and continuous growth up to the year 2007.
Now let's move to 2008.
Please find again on the chronicle below what has happened in 2008:
In 2008 we relocated more than 700 servers from Frankfurt am Main to another data center location in Dreieich near Frankfurt, which was 15 kilometers away from the old location. After extensive planning (all customers were informed more than on time), the relocation has been executed, of course, at night in order to bring all servers online again within a short time.
Our removal team stayed in a small hotel in Dreieich for 2 nights, built up dozens of racks, connected them with cables and prepared everything for the new servers. Thanks to their continuous hard work for 2 days and nights, our customers haven’t been affected much.
Once the relocation had been completed and after all the efforts had been finished we had dinner at a little Greek restaurant in Dreieich. Although the Bifteki there was great and a cold beer helped to feel better some of us even fell asleep during dinner, right at the table.
Anyway, all the effort was worth it, because every server went online again in Dreieich without any complications and within a short time.
In the following you will find some impressions of our data center (2008) in Dreieich near Frankfurt:
Reasons for the relocation were among other things the good collaboration with Tiscali, an ISP that operated under the name “Nacamar” at that time. Just like our second server location in Munich that we operated at the same time, our new data center location in Dreieich was built and provided by Tiscali - and exclusively used by us.
These two locations gave us and Tiscali the possibility to benefit from each other: Tiscali's previous investments into the data center infrastructure worth millions of Euros hadn’t been for nothing but had been used by us for our increasing number of servers; and thus this has been very lucrative for both us. Our further growth was secured and we were able to offer top quality service to all of our customers.
Nonetheless, in the same year, we already worked on our new goal and initiated the merging of all our servers in just one location.
We planned and designed our own, new, big and modern data center location in Munich. In a modern office building on two floors we found the appropriate location for our plan.
On the first floor, that was bigger than 300 sqm, the data center area should be located; the floor above should include the office area and service area for our customer support department and for our technical staff.
In spring 2009 our plan became reality and several specialist firms started with their work, like mounting the double floor, electricity, air-conditioning and so on. Everything was directed by us.
Finally, in April 2009 our new data center in Munich with room for up to 4000 servers has been put into operation and our former data center locations in Dreieich and Munich were closed.
Since that time 5 years have passed and we still host all of our customer servers at that place. “Our servers” have already reached the number of 2500 machines – “our customers” are about to outnumber 10.000 from all over the world.
Thanks to our professional technicians we guarantee a smooth data center operation, twenty-for-seven. Our support team, which is responsible for competent instant service and individual requirements one may have, is available daily from 8am to 11pm via email (support@contabo.com) or by phone (local number). The office is occupied on 365 days a year including holidays and weekends.
We are dedicated to provide a response time of less than 1 hour, no matter what issue is concerned. This is what we call customer service made by Contabo!
Please be informed about any update and news here on our blog or on our Facebook page. In addition to that we provide further details regarding our data center on our website Contabo.com. Thanks to two webcams you are able to convince yourself live of your running server and that we haven’t been hit by any earthquake .
Our customer reviews on our website prove that we do not just preach excellent service but also live this idea. Doesn’t matter what kind of customer you are, whether you just host a small webspace package or a dedicated server with us – each of our customers gets our full and undivided attention.
Since the time when we have taken our new data center into operation in 2009, we continuously work on further improvements and on further developments regarding our product range. Many customers accompany us since our beginning, for more than 10 years right now, and this makes us really proud.
You will find an overview of the most important events and happenings of the last years in our news section on our website.
Here are just a few milestones:
- January 2010: We became a member of the RIPE
- February 2010: Relaunch and new design of our website
- June 2010: Introduction of our company blog
- July 2010: Additional upstream of 10 Gbit/s: Telia Sonera
- August 2010: Introduction of a new product: Virtual Private Servers (VPS)
- Winter 2010: Increase of 150% air-conditioning performance in our data center
- Spring 2011: Introduction of our Facebook page
- December 2011: Additional upstream of 10Gbit/s: Level3
- July 2012: Introduction of our Customer Control Panel (CCP)
- January 2013: Company name change - Giga-International became Contabo
And…we haven't finished yet!
At the moment we are working on further new projects, small ones and huge ones, for further improvements and products. You can imagine, our list of To Do’s is still very long and day by day, we proceed!
I hope I could provide you some insight into the history of Contabo, based on my three-episode series.
I would like to take this opportunity and say thank you to those without whom each milestone and plan would not have been possible. In short, Contabo wouldn’t exist without them!
Thank you to all of our customers,
for your confidence and loyality!
I’m looking forward to having a great time with you further on and to celebrating our 20th company birthday in less than 10 years!
Many have already heard about it or even used it once in a while, but most have probably not been introduced to it yet: Our rescue system! While hopefully not being needed often, it provides many possibilities to fix certain problems and to bring the machine back online as soon as possible. When the server is down, every second counts. It is important to know what to do beforehand. Thus, I will provide you with some basic information first:
Our rescue system is based on the SystemRescueCD. This is a specialised Linux distribution for recovery purposes. I can highly recommend it for private usage as well. I always carry a bootable thumb drive with me . The rescue system starts on our servers via PXE network boot. This has several advantages:
The rescue system can be chosen for Dedicated Servers or VPS's in your Customer Control Panel. After clicking on the rescue icon, a new page opens with a short info text and the version control. The version should match the operating system. This is 64 bit in most cases. Once you click on "Start rescue system", your server will reboot right away.
The system will available after a few minutes via SSH under the server IP and the default port 22. The root password is the default that we have sent you when you ordered the server. We can send you that e-mail again if necessary. We recommend PuTTy (command line) and WinSCP (file transfer) as Windows clients.
You will probably need access to your data. Check first which partitions are available:
fdisk -l
The root file system is usually located on /dev/sda1 or /dev/vda1. Use the following command to mount the according partition:
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/custom
Your server files are now available in /mnt/custom.
If you use Windows as operating system on your server, our rescue system can be helpful despite the different architecture. The C: drive is usually located on /dev/sda2 or /dev/vda2. The command to mount it with write access is a bit different:
ntfs-3g /dev/sda2 /mnt/windows
You are now set to modify configuration files or to retrieve personal data. WinSCP is perfect for those jobs.
When you have finished your work and want to boot your server normally again, enter the following commands:
exitrescue
reboot
Your server should then boot from the hard disk again and be available as usual.
This was supposed to be a short introduction. Becoming familiar with the Linux shell and its possibilities is very advantageous. I can definitely recommend the tutorials on nixCraft for further reading.
More tutorials for certain procedures will follow, so stay tuned!
We have great news for you! As of now, the restriction on additional IPv4 IP addresses at Contabo has been lifted.
From now on, all VPS interested ones can order up to 10 additional IP addresses for their VPS. The price per additional IP is 2 € / month.
With just one click the desired number of additional IPs can be order on our order page ("Services and upgrades").
Further details on our VPS products can be found here: http://contabo.com/?show=vps
For more than 10 years already, we offer hosting solutions for all needs – whether one is a professional Web designer getting his business online, or simply has a small hobby site. Contabo has the right hosting plan for everyone.
Hosting with us has a lot of advantages one can benefit from:
An established company:
Contabo is a fix part on the international hosting market and 10.000 customers from all over the world trust in our services.
Outstanding service:
It is our highest premise to offer outstanding services. This includes excellent support, high-quality products and a top price-performance ratio.
Unique support:
Our best advertisement is the quality of our products and full satisfaction of our customers. We can guarantee this because of our qualified support team. They are specially trained and educated and get coached regularly.
Thanks to our large support team, we can guarantee a smooth data center and server operation, 24/7. Our support team, which is responsible for competent instant service and individual requirements one may have, is available daily from 8am to 11pm via email or by phone The office is occupied on 365 days a year including holidays and weekends. We are dedicated to provide a response time of less than 1 hour, no matter what issue is concerned. This is our point of view regarding optimal service.
Latest server technology:
All our products contain the latest available hardware and equipment. We just use branded and certified hardware, e.g. Intel, Kingston, Western Digital, Samsung and many more.
Modern data center:
We maintain our own private data center that we have planned and designed on our own. It allows us to be extremely flexible and gives us the possibility to meet all the special needs and requirements of our customers.
What distinguishes us from our competitors in detail?
Contabo offers a lot of services free of charge which would cause substantial costs at other providers:
- Customer Control Panel (CCP), that allows our customers to make automated reinstalls free of charge
- RDNS (PTR-Center): we offer the possibility to set reverse DNS entries
- Rescue-System: our rescue system is an independent Linux operating system that runs independently of the server operating system
- We offer an extensive selection of different operating systems. Changing the operating systems (Linux) is completely free of charge
...and many more
Our focus:
We are focused on our customers and customer service. That’s the reason why we reduced the prices of all dedicated and virtual servers (VPS) and doubled the VPS performance at the same time.
You will not find any other hosting provider that can compete with our discount prices in conjunction with the product features and performance.
Our VPS got benchmarked – convince yourself of the good results:
- http://virtdeal.com/contabo-review-germany-kvm-vps-hosting/
- http://vpseer.com/ssd-plans
With the recent deployment of IPv6 in our data centre network, newly installed servers should be configured with an IPv6 address out of the box. For existing installations that you do not want to reinstall or colocation devices not installed with our operating system deployment solution, the necessary information needs to be added to your system manually. This guide should give you enough information to get IPv6 up and running on your server.
We have already assigned an IPv6 address to every one of your services where applicable. You can find this address in your customer control panel, which should look like this:
Do not use the address space shown in the image, "2a02:c200:0:10:3:0:7:1". Use your own IPv6 address space from your customer control panel instead.
At this time, the following additional information is valid for every IPv6 enabled server:
netmask / prefix length: 112
gateway address: fe80::1
dns servers: 2a02:c200:0:10::1231:1 and 2a02:c200:0:10::5002:1
Before adding this IPv6 address to your configuration files and thus making the changes persist after a server reboot, you might want to configure it manually. I will use the IPv6 address 2001:db8::1 in this example. Please replace it with the appropriate address assigned to the server in question. If your network card is not eth0, you will have to replace "eth0" with the appropriate value, too.
Add the address to the server's network interface in the format /:
ip addr add 2001:db8::1/112 dev eth0
You can validate that the address has been enabled by running
ip -6 addr show
which should show, among others, the following lines:
2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qlen 1000
inet6 2001:db8::1/112 scope global valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
In order to reach the everyone else in the ever growing IPv6 world, add a default route to the server's configuration:
ip route add default via fe80::1 dev eth0
Again, you can verify the setting by running
ip -6 route show
which should show the following output:
default via fe80::1 dev eth0 metric 1024 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295
You can now check your IPv6 connectivity by using the ping6 command:
ping6 2a02:c200:0:10::5001:1
Different operating systems have different ways of setting up the network configuration. If in doubt, please search the documentation for your operating system. Sample configurations for Debian/Ubuntu and CentOS/Fedora/RedHat will be provided here. Please be very careful when applying this changes. Errors may result in your server no longer responding to any network traffic at all!
Edit the file /etc/network/interfaces and add the following lines:
iface eth0 inet6 static
address 2001:db8::1
netmask 112
gateway fe80::1
accept_ra 0
autoconf 0
privext 0
Make sure IPv6 networking is enabled at all by editing /etc/sysconfig/network. Add the following line to this file:
NETWORKING_IPV6=yes
Then add the IP configuration to the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
IPV6INIT=yes
IPV6ADDR=2001:db8::1/112
IPV6_DEFAULTGW=fe80::1
IPV6_DEFAULTDEV=eth0
This should make sure the IPv6 address gets enabled again after your server reboots.
After you have connected to your server using RDP, click on "Start" > "Control Panel" > "Network and Internet" > "Network and Sharing Center". Click on "Change Adapter Settings" on the left side of the window. Right-click the icon for the network connection, select "Properties" from the menu:
Highlight the entry "Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IP)" on the list, make sure that the checkbox is ticked and click on "Properties" again. Enter the information you gathered from step one as shown below:
Click on "OK", to close the dialogs and save the changes.
If you have made the changes as described above and if the ping6 command did return a response but you nevertheless cannot reach your server via IPv6 from your local computer, chances are that IPv6 might not yet be enabled in your local network. Your local ISP can help in this case.
We are happy to announce the introduction of IPv6 in our network. IPv6 is the successor to IPv4. Normally, when talking about an ip address, one means an IPv4 address.
An example for an IPv4 address would be 79.143.183.251. An example for an IPv6 address would be 2a02:c200:0000:0010:0000:0000:1231:0001.
IPv6 is entirely optional, meaning you can use it, but you do not have to. For your server, nothing changes - but if you want to, you can activate IPv6 in addition to your existing IPv4 addresses from now on.
Each VPS, each dedicated server and each colocation server has received 65535 (!) IPv6 addresses from Contabo, an entire /112 network. With IPv4, the address space is very limited, considering today's requirements. IPv6 does not have this problem, an enormous amount of addresses exists. We pass this advantage on to our customers: All IPv6 adresses are completely free of charge!
Further details and instructions on how to enable IPv6 on your server have been published in a blog article: http://blog.contabo.com/tutorials/adding-ipv6-connectivity-to-your-server/
Important: You can only reach your server's IPv6 addresses from your local computer if IPv6 is enabled in your local network and with your Internet connection. Otherwise you will not be able to reach them from your computer, even if you have configured everything correctly on your server.
We wish you much success with IPv6!
Attention Windows Server users: We released a new installation method for Windows Server operating systems today. It is already available for all VPS and Dedicated Server customers with Windows Server. The first thing you will notice is a much shorter installation time. Our Dedicated Server X with 1 Gbit/s port only took five minutes to finish. Further technical improvements facilitate our administrative work.
We still provide all existing advantages of our automated system installation (ASI) as a matter of course. There will not be any user interaction necessary. Your server will be automatically deployed with the assigned IPv4 and IPv6 address. RDP will be accessible right after the installation. Important security updates will be downloaded and installed over night.
We are now perfectly prepared for future Windows versions. Windows Server 2012 R2 should be available very soon on our servers after its official release.