500,000 servers – and that is just our VPS. Let that sink in for a second, because honestly? We still kind of are. Half a million VPS instances now run on Contabo, doing real work for real people every hour of every day. When we started, hitting a number like this wasn’t a guarantee. It was a hope. So today we wanted to put the work down for a moment and say something about it, to the people who made it happen.
We hit 500,000 Virtual Private Servers
When we started, the plan was simple. Make serious hosting affordable enough that anyone could use it. The catch is that it only counts if people actually trust you with the things they care about. Half a million VPS later, you did. You do.
So this number isn’t really ours. It’s yours. It’s the side project that quietly turned into a business. It’s the team that needed real performance without a painful invoice. It’s the developer who deployed at 2am and just needed the thing to work, and it did.
Thank you. Plainly, sincerely. You built this with us, and this milestone is a celebration of you.
What got better along the way
We didn’t want to mark the moment with a number alone, so here’s some of what landed this year while you were busy building.
In April we launched Contabo Firewall, a network-level firewall that comes with every VPS and VDS, new and existing. Switch it on and all inbound traffic is blocked by default until you set your own rules, and you manage the whole thing from the Customer Control Panel with no iptables and nothing to install. One firewall can guard multiple instances from a single place. It was also the first feature to come out of Contabo Labs, our in-house development team.
We’ve also been busy expanding our 1-click apps, because the faster you get from a bare server to something useful, the more your server is worth to you. On top of Nextcloud, WireGuard, n8n, OpenClaw and Coolify, five brand-new apps are now available in the server configurator or through reinstallation in the Customer Control Panel:
- Hermes, if you want an AI sales rep working your pipeline around the clock.
- Paperclip, if you want a self-hosted home for your documents and notes.
- Dokploy, if you want a simple way to deploy and manage your own apps.
- Ollama, if you want to run open large language models locally on your own hardware.
- Zeroclaw, if you want a private, self-hosted AI assistant you fully control.
Pick one during the order process or a reinstall (Application Installation) and we handle the package install, the initial configuration, and the secure defaults, so you spend your time using the tool instead of setting it up.
More with your server
There’s one thread running through all of this, and it’s the same one that got us here. We want your server to do more for you over time, not stay the same as the day you ordered it. The firewall is built in. The new apps install in a couple of clicks. Each addition is meant to stretch what a single Contabo server can do, without sending you off to stitch the pieces together yourself.
That’s the bar we’re holding ourselves to from here. When we build something, the first question we ask is what it adds to the server you already have.
We think
A milestone like this is a good moment to be honest about what it means. We think 500,000 VPS is proof that affordable and reliable were never a tradeoff, and we believe the best part is still ahead. So we’ll keep our heads down and keep delivering the value you signed up for, then push for more. This isn’t where we stop. It’s where we dig in. More to come.
