There is actually a lot more search engines that you might think, plus there are privacy frontends for them you can aggregate.
Edit: Also the main poin't of searxng is to use it as a proxy for them which hepps if you use an instance with multiple users, or host an instance for you and your friends for example.
I had not so good experiences with Contabo lately. Lot of outages and they withdrew 2 more month after the end of my subscription. Ionos had no outtages so far (5th month). In addition their web interface is better than Contabos.
Then it must've been bad luck. I had plenty more over the course of a few month with a CS GO server and it wasn't the game server because I often couldn't login via SSH or the session just froze. And I definitely took precautions with a firewall, fail2ban and no root, no password only certificate SSH login (a tried and tested combination of measurements I use on plenty other ionos VPS).
You're right the webinterface doesn't really matter but the overall impression was much more professional on ionos with a slick interface for the config of the hw firewall.