Contabo is a Munich-based German cloud-and-hosting provider operated by Contabo GmbH (Welfenstrasse 22, 81541 Munich; HRB 180722 at Amtsgericht München; VAT DE267602842; managing directors Stephan Wolfram and Mario Wilhelm). Founded in 2003 and positioned in the budget VPS / dedicated-server tier, Contabo reports more than 225,000 customers across 190 countries running on 450,000+ servers in nine global regions and eleven data-centre locations: European Union, United Kingdom, three United States locations, Singapore, Japan, India, and Australia. Pricing is the headline feature: Cloud VPS 10 starts at less than €5/month on annual billing (4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM), and the product surface covers Cloud VPS, Virtual Dedicated Servers, bare-metal dedicated servers, object storage, domain registration, and managed application hosting for n8n, Nextcloud, GitLab, and similar.
For an EU-sovereignty audit the listing is mixed. The German GmbH legal structure, Munich HQ, Frankfurt-area data centres, and EU footprint look natively European, but in June 2022 a consortium led by KKR, the US private-equity giant (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, New York), together with Oakley Capital (UK) acquired the majority of Contabo alongside the management team. KKR's US-incorporation gives Contabo material CLOUD Act exposure at the parent-jurisdiction layer regardless of where the EU customer's specific VM runs. Additionally, three of Contabo's eleven data centres are in the United States, which means buyers who don't pin their workloads explicitly to EU regions may end up on US infrastructure. The DPA and security URLs returned 404 at audit; certifications are not advertised on accessible public pages.
Best fit: indie developers, small SaaS builders, gamers, and prosumers who prioritise low VPS price over enterprise compliance. Contabo is one of the cheapest credible European VPS providers globally. Procurement-grade EU buyers needing a strict EU-controlled cloud should prefer Hetzner (DE, family-owned), Scaleway (FR, Iliad), OVHcloud (FR, public Euronext), or STACKIT (DE, Schwarz Group / Lidl), listed above in this category. Contabo serves a complementary, price-led use case rather than a compliance-led one.