[Offer] natbox.io: 50% off NAT VPS in Germany, from $0.50/mo, IPv6 /80 included, free 1-month trial
Hi LES! Thanks for the warm welcome on the provider request. Here's our first offer for the community.
Coupon: LES50OFF gives 50% off your first billing period
- 40 uses in total, one per customer
- Valid until 30 December 2026
Plans (normal price → with coupon)
| Plan | RAM | CPU | SSD | Ports | Bandwidth | Monthly | Yearly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nano | 512 MB | 0.5 shared | 5 GB | 10 | 250 GB | $1.00 $0.50 | $9 $4.50 |
| Box | 1 GB | 1 shared | 10 GB | 20 | 500 GB | $1.25 $0.63 | $12 $6.00 |
| Box Plus | 2 GB | 2 shared | 20 GB | 30 | 1 TB | $2.25 $1.13 | $20 $10.00 |
| Box CPU | 1 GB | 1 dedicated | 10 GB | 20 | 500 GB | $4.50 $2.25 | $45 $22.50 |
3 and 6 month terms are available too.
Free trial: 256 MB RAM, 3 GB SSD, 5 ports and a /80 of IPv6, free for one month. One per person, verified email needed.
Every plan includes
- Unprivileged Incus LXC container with Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine or AlmaLinux, and root over SSH
- Forwarded IPv4 ports (TCP and UDP) on a shared IPv4
- A routed /80 of IPv6
- Your own domains on ports 80 and 443 (HTTP routed by hostname, HTTPS by SNI, TLS stays with you)
- 100 Mbit/s each way. Above your monthly allowance, speed drops to 10 Mbit/s instead of being cut off.
- Hard RAM limits with no swap inside your server
- Client area with power, reinstall, browser console, snapshots and usage graphs, plus a Telegram bot
Being upfront about it
- It runs on Contabo KVM VPSes in Germany, not dedicated servers. Benchmarks are on the home page (from a Box server on a quiet host, 30 Oct): 559 single-thread sysbench events/s, about 2,200 random 4K IOPS, and about 5 ms to 1.1.1.1.
- No Docker or nested containers, no dedicated IPv4, no Windows.
- Outbound ports 25, 465 and 587 are blocked. A relay on port 2525 or a mail API works.
- Our minimums are $1 for PayPal and $3 for crypto and credit top-ups. A monthly Nano or Box with the coupon is under $1, so top up $3 of account credit and pay from it, or choose 3 months or longer.
- Backups: every server is snapshotted nightly on the host, and our own systems are backed up off-site. Your server's files are not copied off-site, so please keep your own backups.
- Abuse reports go to [email protected] and are usually handled within 24 hours. Both IPs are checked against the main blacklists every hour.
Payment: PayPal, crypto through NOWPayments, or account credit. Your first paid server has a 7-day money-back guarantee.
Links: Order · Status · Terms · AUP · Privacy · Operator details
Questions are welcome here, and I'll answer them myself.
— Mohammad
Comments
I’ve been given a free container.
It’s working quite well, and the website’s functionality is largely complete.
However, for reasons unknown to me, the internet is rather slow (it took several tens of minutes to complete an
apt install), and there seems to be an issue with the default IPv6 inbound traffic, manually adding a static neighbor entry resolved the issue completely.Thanks for trying it and for the detailed report. The IPv6 one sounds like neighbor discovery for your /80 not being answered on our side, so the fact a static neighbor entry fixed it is a very useful clue. I'm looking into it now. On the speed: plans are 100 Mbit/s, so tens of minutes for an apt install definitely isn't normal. Could you DM me your container name and the mirror you were using? I'll check it on the host and post back here once both are fixed.
Update on both issues @tulipyun reported, and thanks again, this was a really useful report.
IPv6: fixed for everyone. You were right that NDP was the problem. Our bridge filter only allowed IPv6 from each server's global addresses, so the neighbour solicitations your server sent from its link-local address to the gateway were dropped, and the gateway entry went FAILED. Every server is now allowed its own link-local address. We applied it live to all existing servers, with no restart needed, and new servers get it automatically. You can remove your static neighbour entry.
Slow apt: found and improved. The network wasn't the problem: apt update takes about 20 seconds and downloads run at 4–6 MB/s. The slow part was dpkg syncing every single file to disk, which is slow on our storage layout, and it was worst this morning when several new trials were updating at the same time. Skipping those per-file syncs took a python3-pip install on a trial server from 470 s to 208 s. It's safe on our ZFS storage, because writes are committed in order.
New servers and reinstalls now have this by default. On an existing server, you can turn it on yourself with:
Most of the remaining time on the free trial is its half CPU core. The paid plans have more.
Thanks for testing, and keep the reports coming.
If I get more than one, can I request they are in different host KVMs?
@aphs Yes. We run two host VMs, and we can put your second server on the other one. Order it, then open a ticket (or DM me) with the invoice number before you pay, and I'll pin it to the other host. They'll also be on different IPv4 addresses.
To be clear about what that buys you: both hosts are Contabo KVM VPSes in the same datacenter in Germany. Separate hosts protect you from one VM having a problem or being rebooted, but not from an outage of the whole datacenter.
Do you plan on expanding to all of Contabo locations? / Do you check with contabo whether if you order two KVM in one DC they are also on different hypervisors?
@aphs We're planning to expand onto dedicated servers across Europe, but right now we're still in the launch stage.
Thus Nat servers have root user access?
@stormhanma Yes, you get full root over SSH. Each server is an unprivileged Incus LXC container, so you can install packages, run services, edit configs and manage users as you like. The limits that come with LXC: no Docker or nested containers, and you can't load kernel modules or change kernel settings.
Great
The prices are really cheap. I'll save this.
@jaehyun1122 Thanks! The free trial slots are all taken right now, but more should open up tomorrow or the day after, so check back then. The LES50OFF coupon is good until 30 December, but it's limited to 40 uses, so don't wait too long if you want one.
IPv6 less than /64 Hall of Incompetence
/64 is the smallest sensible IPv6 sub-assignment size.
Offer /64 or larger subnet on every plan in every location to get delisted.
The last flan is taken. 🍮 affbrr