Sandboxer vs Contabo Cloud VPS

Contabo Cloud VPS is a monthly-contract unmanaged VPS on KVM with a low price per vCPU and RAM. It is not billed per second and does not support nested virtualization on VPS plans. Sandboxer is billed by the second, stops for free and supports nested KVM. Pick Contabo for always-on cheap servers; pick Sandboxer for on-demand agent sandboxes.

Checked against Contabo Cloud VPS's public docs on October 24, 2026. Sources are linked in the table and listed below.

At a glance

Sandboxer and Contabo Cloud VPS compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Contabo Cloud VPS
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	KVM virtual machine
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd	Page mentions full root access for server use cases.
Docker inside	Preinstalled
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)		Contabo VPS documentation says nested virtualization is not supported on any VPS plan family.
Pause and resume with memory	Running processes come back
Fork a sandbox	Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh
HTTPS URL per port	Private with a token, or public
Longest session	No limit on paid plans Auto-stop is up to 30 days or off	not applicable: persistent server for the contract term
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	monthly subscription; initial contract minimum 1 month, longer terms advertised at lower effective monthly rates Prices on the page are shown as effective monthly rates for a 24-month subscription.
GPUs
Self-host or open source
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)	9 regions, 11 locations (EU, UK, US, Singapore, Japan, India, Australia)

= not documented publicly.

Where Contabo Cloud VPS is strong

Very low monthly price for 4 vCPU and 8 GB RAM with unlimited incoming traffic.
Nine regions across Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific.
Dedicated IPv4 and IPv6, firewall and DDoS protection included.

Where Sandboxer differs

Contabo is billed by monthly contract, while Sandboxer bills per second and costs nothing when stopped.
Standard Contabo VPS plans do not support nested virtualization; Sandboxer sandboxes expose /dev/kvm.
Contabo gives you a bare server and snapshots (1 on Cloud VPS 4); Sandboxer adds fork, agent APIs and per-port URLs.

Pick Contabo Cloud VPS if

You need an always-on server at the lowest monthly price.
You want a long-term low-cost host with a fixed monthly bill.
You need many locations including Asia-Pacific.

Pick Sandboxer if

You want a sandbox that stops with memory and disk saved and resumes with processes running, with stopped sandboxes costing nothing.
You want Docker, systemd, nested KVM, SSH and coding agents (Claude Code, Codex and others) already installed, with HTTPS URLs for any port, without assembling it yourself.
You want a per-second-billed Ubuntu 24.04 VM driven by a REST API, CLI, MCP server or TypeScript/Python SDK.

Sources

Products change. If something here is out of date, email hello@sandboxer.com and we'll fix it. Contabo Cloud VPS is a trademark of its owner. Sandboxer is an independent product and is not affiliated with Contabo Cloud VPS.

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