Contabo Brand Guidelines: Munich Servers From Giga-International to KKR

One server in Munich, 2003.

Contabo began in Munich in the spring of 2003. The company’s own history says it was set up as Giga-International and grew “from just a single server in a data center” to more than 450,000 servers today. The Czech technology site Lupa.cz, reporting on the company in October 2020, also described Contabo as the firm formerly known as Giga-International, based in Munich. Contabo’s history page does not name its founders, and it says the business started with two people.

Its early growth, as the company tells it, came through its own buildings. In 2009 it opened a data centre in Munich with space for more than 4,000 physical servers, with its offices on the same site so that support staff could react quickly on every day of the year. At the start of 2013 it changed its name from Giga-International to Contabo, and with the new name began to sell beyond the German market.

A second data centre followed in Nuremberg in 2014; the company says it holds up to 10,000 physical servers on a floor of 1,700 square metres, and Lupa.cz gave the same capacities for both German sites in 2020. In 2020 Contabo opened its first data centre outside Europe, in the United States, with locations later described as Central, East and West US; Lupa.cz reported that year that the first American site, in St. Louis, had capacity for 1,500 servers with room to grow.

The company’s explanation of its low prices is about hardware and scale. It says it weighs purchase price against performance and against power use when choosing hardware, and keeps one unified hardware platform across all of its data centres to get purchase discounts and simpler maintenance. Lupa.cz reported in 2020 that Contabo also assembles its own Contabo-branded servers, working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Oakley Capital, VSHosting and KKR.

Contabo’s ownership has changed twice in a short time. According to Lupa.cz, writing in October 2020, the investment firm Oakley Capital bought a majority stake in Contabo from its founders in 2019; the German Wikipedia entry on Oakley Capital still lists Contabo among its technology holdings.

With that backing, Contabo made its own acquisition. In October 2020 Lupa.cz reported that the Munich hosting and cloud group had taken 100 per cent of VSHosting, a Prague host that runs its own ServerPark data centre, buying out the earlier German investors and the remaining founders’ shares; the Czech Wikipedia entry on VSHosting dates the final buyout to July 2020. VSHosting’s founders stayed in its management, the site reported, and Contabo planned to use the Czech business in its expansion abroad. Contabo now lists an office in Prague among its own.

The second change came in June 2022. On 8 June 2022 Telecompaper reported that KKR had reached an agreement to acquire a majority stake in Contabo from Oakley Capital, whose fourth fund had held the business. Oakley was to keep a minority stake alongside the management and the hosting entrepreneurs Thomas Strohe, Jochen Berger and Thomas Vollrath. English Wikipedia, in its article on the founder of VSHosting, describes VSHosting as part of the Contabo Group and the group as part of KKR’s portfolio.

The company’s management page today presents a team with backgrounds in telecoms, software and other private-equity-backed hosting firms, and says the business has grown from two people to a team of roughly 300.

Design and documentation.

Web hosting and cloud companies sell something their customers rarely see: machines in buildings far away. Their identities therefore lean on what can be shown — the customer interface, the data-centre building, the names on the order page and the corporate page that says who owns the business.

The control panel is often the part of the brand customers use most. Providers give these interfaces names of their own and place them in the main menu beside the product lines: Hetzner’s website links to customer interfaces called Robot, Console and konsoleH, and OVHcloud’s to a customer account and webmail. Documentation, status pages and programming interfaces sit in the same menus, so the brand reaches into technical writing as much as into advertising.

Data-centre photography carries the physical side of the business: rows of racks, cabling and building exteriors. Hetzner’s company pages include a 360° tour of a data centre, and its press kit sets out logos and colours for journalists. Plan names do similar work in text. Some providers use letter codes for server lines, as Hetzner does with its AX and EX lines; others use words, as OVHcloud does with ranges named Kimsufi, Advance, Game and Scale. A mascot is a further option for a host’s brand.

Corporate pages answer the questions that buyers of infrastructure ask: who owns the company, and where its machines stand. Hetzner lists data-centre parks in Germany and Finland and further sites in the United States and Singapore; OVHcloud’s corporate site gives counts of data centres, customers and countries. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — founding, ownership and locations — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

“German quality with global availability.”

Contabo sums up its pitch as “German quality with global availability.” Its locations page says it now serves customers from 11 locations in 9 regions on four continents: Europe, Africa and the Middle East from five data centres in Germany, the UK and Ireland from Portsmouth, South and South-East Asia from Singapore, and East Asia from Tokyo, alongside its American sites. Those are the company’s figures.

Standardisation is the company’s own design story. It says it uses the same server blueprint and rack layout in every region, the same cooling-aisle arrangement, the same top-of-rack switches and routers, and even the same server shelves, and that it builds its data centres itself rather than through outside contractors. In October 2024 its blog announced that the first building of a new site called Hub Europe was running, as part of a park the company says can grow to six buildings and up to 50,000 physical servers.

The products are named plainly: Cloud VPS, Cloud VDS — virtual dedicated servers — Storage VPS and dedicated bare-metal servers, numbered or lettered by size, with object storage and newer self-hosted collaboration and AI-agent offers sold from the same site. Its teams, the company says, work remotely and from offices in Munich, Cologne, Nuremberg and Prague, with coworking space in Berlin and Hamburg.

The brand’s language is direct: a short coined name, product names that are mostly sizes and numbers, and copy that keeps returning to German roots, low prices and identical hardware. Its about page explains the prices in the company’s own terms — economies of scale, proprietary scripts to balance load across servers, and offices kept modest so that money goes into data centres.

For a design guide, Contabo shows how one repeated technical standard can become the core of a brand story. Compare Hetzner, another German server host that runs its own data centres, and netcup, a German host that kept its name inside a larger group. For this guide we use a server blue, a deep ink blue and an amber with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Contabo’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.