r/Contabo

Fucking hell, this week has been brutal

As of now, there's NO patch for kernels right now, but a one line fix

The vulnerability:
V4bel/dirtyfrag

The fix (as root)

sh -c "printf 'install esp4 /bin/false\ninstall esp6 /bin/false\ninstall rxrpc /bin/false\n' > /etc/modprobe.d/dirtyfrag.conf; rmmod esp4 esp6 rxrpc 2>/dev/null; true"

reboot

Patch your shit

I've been running two VPS servers at Contabo simultaneously, both at the same price (€8.33/month): one with standard SSD storage and one with the advertised NVMe storage ("Cloud VPS 20"). What I found is pretty damning.

The benchmark results

I ran sequential write tests on my NVMe server:

• Sequential write (1 GB, dd conv=fdatasync): 326 MB/s
• Sequential write (2 GB, dd conv=fdatasync): 491 MB/s

Real NVMe storage should achieve anywhere between 1,000 and 7,000 MB/s. These numbers are firmly in SATA SSD territory.

The direct comparison – same price, same provider

Here's where it gets interesting. My SSD server (same price, but double the storage) consistently outperforms the "NVMe" server:

	SSD Server	NVMe Server
Sequential Read	931 MB/s	470 MB/s
Sequential Write	517 MB/s	441 MB/s
Random Read QD1	1,972 IOPS	4,062 IOPS
Random Read QD32	18,015 IOPS	4,328 IOPS

The SSD server reads sequentially at 2x the speed and handles random reads at 4x the throughput of the paid NVMe server. Let that sink in.

Contabo's response

I opened a support ticket (#16240156467). Their explanation: the NVMe I/O is shared across customers on the host system. They then offered a live migration to a different host to improve performance. After the migration completed – nothing changed. Same numbers, same problem.

Their position is essentially: "Yes, you're sharing NVMe hardware with other customers, so you won't get NVMe speeds. Buy a dedicated server if you want that." Meanwhile, the product page still advertises NVMe storage without any mention of this limitation.

Why this matters beyond my individual case

This is only detectable if you know what you're looking for and actually run benchmarks. The average user buying a "NVMe VPS" will simply trust the product page and never know they're not getting what they paid for. That's not an edge case or a misconfiguration – it's the default behavior, confirmed by Contabo support themselves.

If you're considering Contabo and care about storage performance, benchmark before you commit. And if you're already on a "NVMe" plan, it might be worth checking what you're actually getting.

Server got compromised through CVE-2026-41940. All I need is the bandwidth graph for my VPS to check for data exfiltration. They collect this data for every VPS anyway and if they dont want to share it they can at least tell me.

Two days, two tickets, two copy pasted FAQ responses about how to reinstall my OS. Nobody even read what I wrote.

Anyone ever gotten actual technical support from Contabo?

I’ve been running a Contabo VPS for 2+ years and haven’t had issues like this before, so I wanted to check if others are seeing something similar recently.

Over the last couple days I’ve experienced:

• Minecraft server dropping from stable 20 TPS down to ~6–14 TPS under no load
• SSH becoming noticeably delayed
• Slow service startup times
• General system-wide sluggishness

I checked disk performance with iostat and saw write latency (w_await) consistently in the 100–500ms range, which is far beyond normal SSD behavior.

I opened a support ticket and my VPS was migrated to a different host.

After migration:

• Performance immediately returned to normal but honestly not quite as good as it was about a week ago- (~20 TPS, no lag)

However, shortly after (about a day later i checked back again):

• The same degradation returned (~15 TPS under no load)
• Similar symptoms reappeared

So the pattern is:

• Severe degradation
• Migration fixes it
• Issue returns again

Given this, it doesn’t seem consistent with typical “noisy neighbor” behavior, especially with the disk latency observed and the temporary recovery after migration.

I also noticed there are ongoing security-related updates and backup system issues on the status page, so I’m wondering if there could be broader infrastructure impact.

Has anyone else experienced similar VPS performance issues in the last few days?

Trying to determine whether this is isolated or part of a wider issue.

Hello,

I have been experiencing huge CPU spikes and overloads those 2 last days, no new clients or any updates to my backends. Its at an unbearable state like my resources are locked to a minimum level.

Is anyone else experiencing downtime with Contabo right now?

I just got a maintenance notice and apparently the server is going to be unreachable for several hours. Honestly, how is this still a thing in 2026? Taking services completely offline for that long feels crazy, especially if you’re running anything important on it.

I get that maintenance is necessary, but there has to be a better way than just shutting everything down for hours. No redundancy, no seamless failover… just “your server is offline now.”

Is this normal with Contabo or am I just getting unlucky? Curious to hear if others have had similar experiences.