DigitalOcean vs Contabo for n8n: $24/month against €5.50
Contabo wins on price per GB; DigitalOcean wins on the two things Contabo will not publish — transfer terms and support response.
The two rows, side by side
| Contabo Cloud VPS 4 | DigitalOcean droplet | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | €5.50/month (first 24 months) | $24.00/month |
| CPU / RAM | 4 vCPU / 8 GB | 2 vCPU / 4 GiB |
| Disk | 100 GB SSD | 80 GiB SSD |
| Transfer | “Unlimited” under a fair-use clause | 4,000 GiB included, then metered |
| Support | ticket queue | ticket queue, 24/7 |
| Renewal price | not published where we read | published |
Where the $18.50 difference goes
It is not the CPU. Both machines clear n8n’s floor; the DigitalOcean row clears it by zero margin at 4 GiB, and the Contabo row clears it with 4 GB to spare — which matters the moment you enable the Docker task runner or add Redis as a second process.
What you actually buy with the extra $18.50 is published numbers and a support rota. DigitalOcean prints its transfer allowance (4,000 GiB) and its renewal price. Contabo’s “unlimited” is policy-constrained and its renewal figure was not on the page we read. On a workload you cannot afford to have throttled, that difference is worth more than the RAM.
Which one to pick
- Pick Contabo if the box is yours to manage, the traffic is modest, and RAM per euro is the deciding metric.
- Pick DigitalOcean if webhook traffic is public-facing and heavy, if you need the transfer number in writing, or if a two-hour outage costs you more than $18.50.
- Neither, if you would rather not run a server at all: the managed cloud tier starts at €20/month and includes the execution cap instead of a sysadmin role.
Every figure above was read from the provider’s own page on 2026-09-12 and is published with that date. Fields a provider does not publish are marked, not estimated.
Sources
- DigitalOcean pricing page — $24.00/month for 2 vCPU / 4 GiB / 80 GiB SSD (read 2026-09-12)
- Contabo Cloud VPS 4 product page — €5.50/month for 4 vCPU / 8 GB / 100 GB SSD, first 24 months (read 2026-09-12)
- n8n documentation — 4 GB RAM / 2 vCPU minimum once the Docker task runner is enabled (read 2026-09-12)