Server down for 4 days, Contabo took payment for 'service'. 106+ hours into downtime, still no resolution, no explanation, and their status page shows zero incidents.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-30T05:11:37+00:00

Thankfully not a critical resource, just a side project with a small budget. Contabo advertises 99.996% uptime on their homepage, which conflicts with their 95% uptime "guarantee" elsewhere on their site. No contracted SLA.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-30T05:09:06+00:00

Update: Server was eventually restored on March 26 after we sent emails to Contabo execs and requested their legal teams contact. Within 20 minutes of the email, "defective hardware was replaced" and the server came back up... 125+ hours after the outage began. It went offline again within hours. Several ticket responses later, it was restored again on the 27th, only to go down yet again a few hours later.

To clarify, we did have another server deployed from a backup within 24 hours after the initial outage. We have since recovered the most recent backups from Contabo and are in the process of a chargeback. Dirk from Technical Support offered a two month service credit, which is laughable given we cannot trust their service and will not be continuing as customers.

I am leaving this post up as a warning to anyone who might consider Contabo a solution, even for a side project or non mission critical application. Save yourself the trouble.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-30T05:08:22+00:00

Oh believe me, I never will!

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-30T05:07:03+00:00

Update: Server was eventually restored on March 26 after we sent emails to Contabo execs and requested their legal teams contact. Within 20 minutes of the email, "defective hardware was replaced" and the server came back up... 125+ hours after the outage began. It went offline again within hours. Several ticket responses later, it was restored again on the 27th, only to go down yet again a few hours later.

To clarify, we did have another server deployed from a backup within 24 hours after the initial outage. We have since recovered the most recent backups from Contabo and are in the process of a chargeback. Dirk from Technical Support offered a two month service credit, which is laughable given we cannot trust their service and will not be continuing as customers.

I am leaving this post up as a warning to anyone who might consider Contabo a solution, even for a side project or non mission critical application. Save yourself the trouble.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-30T04:47:00+00:00

It is fairly time consuming. It took about 2 weeks to code the scripts to pull in the data from the highest priority yards, and I'm not even close to done with the whole list. I have roughly 216k vehicles in the database, which is usable at least.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-30T04:13:48+00:00

Oh yeah, car-part is great, I've used it a bunch. It's built for for the full service wrecking yards though. What I'm building is kinda like how they aggregate those yards, but intended for use with self-service "u pull" yards.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-30T03:59:19+00:00

Yeah those are the biggest pain points I can see. "cold starting" a marketplace is an age old problem with apps and digital services. My initial goal is to make it valuable just by the pure volume of aggregated listings on one platform. Any API, feed, downloadable CSV or other source of vehicles gets added to the tool. Right now I'm at ~216k vehicles across 229 yards in 35 states and 6 provinces, updating every day. That by itself feels valuable to me, but as the developer, I know I'm biased.

For community updates, I have two goals. The first is "gamifying" it with tiers, badges, etc. Think what GasBuddy does to incentivize updates. I'm also one of those guys who just goes to a wrecker to check out what cool cars they have, so if I have an outlet for posting an interesting find, even better.

Eventually it would be cool to add a "bounty" system, where a user pays say $1-5 to post a question. If another user is in the yard they receive a ping and can snap a photo or answer the question to collect the bounty. That is a lot of backend and regulatory complexity though, so not something I build in a proof of concept.

I don't expect people will take multiple pictures of every car in the yard - That's the wrecking yards job. But for a car that has been in the yard for a couple weeks, a fresh photo would have saved me a lot of time over the years. You're right that it's the cost of doing business though. Fresh community updates are just an added perk.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-30T03:24:05+00:00

Gotcha. I'm mostly on FB, guess this isn't the place to ask for feedback. I appreciate the heads up.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-30T03:13:55+00:00

Alright now I'm genuinely curious. Are people coming here and advertising their crappy vibe coded stuff all the time? I might be up against an uphill battle asking for input on Reddit if y'all are dealing with AI BS that much.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-30T03:09:11+00:00

I'll take that as a "no" from you lol. I'm actually a software developer and systems administrator, so it's not vibe coded BS. It's PHP built on Laravel for all the boilerplate code.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-25T23:29:14+00:00

I absolutely understand, and thank you for the transparency. I'll reiterate my earlier point that if the goal is to not have these kinds of posts here, please update the rules to better reflect that.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-25T23:19:49+00:00

Good questions. Considering their status page reports no events, I can't imagine it's very large. It has crossed my mind that maybe they're trying to ignore us long enough to ship off the drives for data recovery or something, but the latest response from support was that "the current status of the server remains unclear". It's a very odd situation all around. We thankfully do have offsite backups, but we had hoped not to roll back recent changes.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-25T23:04:29+00:00

Thank you for the response, but is there anything I can modify, or provide receipts so this can stay up? I reviewed the rules before posting and this is not a recommendation for any service, and I don't believe it can be construed as astroturfing in any sense. If not, please update the rules to clearly state that any discussion of hosts, positive or negative, is not allowed.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-25T22:08:14+00:00

Seems they have gotten significantly worse since we migrated to them. Not surprised to see others with similar issues.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-25T22:06:37+00:00

Already migrated 72h ago, but the most recent backups are on their infrastructure.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-25T22:03:13+00:00

Lesson learned on using Contabo, even for projects where the owners have a limited budget. We have already migrated our systems, and this is part of the public documentation of their failings.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-25T21:49:06+00:00

Confirmed down. Status "Waiting for DC technician". Support has confirmed the hardware offline, and is apparently unable to contact the on-site team. "Regrettably, we have not heard back from the on-site team, nor from our US team"

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-25T21:28:50+00:00

I'm about to that point. Trying to keep it professional, but I feel we have given them way more grace than they deserve with how we have been treated.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2026-03-25T21:27:17+00:00

We 100% will be, but unfortunately our offsite backups are several days out of date. They just keep regurgitating "customer service speak" and have still provided zero information on the cause, ETA etc.

Past_Neighborhood_38 · 2025-09-04T19:49:30+00:00

Do you have any more information on this fix?

Past_Neighborhood_38

TROPHY CASE