Strato

What Strato actually is

Strato is one of Germany's oldest and largest hosting brands: founded in Berlin in 1997 by Marc Alexander Ullrich and Norbert Stangl, headquartered in Berlin to this day, with roughly 440 employees, over two million customer contracts, and about four million hosted domains. It is the second-largest shared-hosting provider in Europe after 1&1, and it has been selling dedicated servers since 2003 and virtual servers since 2005. If you have looked at German web hosting any time in the last two decades, you have seen their advertising.

One correction matters before anything else, because our database had it wrong: Strato is not a Deutsche Telekom subsidiary. The ownership chain runs Teles (1998), Freenet (2004, a purchase price of 132 million euros), Deutsche Telekom (2009, 275 million euros), and then United Internet, which agreed to buy Strato in December 2016 for around 600 million euros and completed the acquisition in April 2017 after cartel approval. Today Strato sits inside United Internet's IONOS Group — it is effectively IONOS's sister brand. The Telekom era ended almost a decade ago.

What Strato sells in the VPS line is a KVM-based virtual server range (they call them V-Server) with NVMe storage, root access, and a genuinely long feature checklist: one IPv4 address, IPv6 readiness, unmetered traffic, up to 1,000 Mbit/s uplink, a free SSL certificate, an external upstream firewall, a rescue system with password reset, VNC console, Docker support, and basic monitoring included. Linux images cover current Ubuntu LTS, Debian, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux; a Windows line ships Windows Server 2025 or 2022 Datacenter. Everything is hosted in European (per Strato, German) data centers, ISO 27001 certified annually since 2004 and running on renewable electricity since 2008.

Pricing: what you really pay

The Linux V-Server lineup, at standard prices including German VAT and with a one-time setup fee of 9 euros: VPS S (1 vCore, 2GB RAM, 60GB NVMe) is 4 euros per month; VPS M (2 vCores, 4GB, 120GB) is 10 euros; VPS L (4 vCores, 8GB, 240GB) is 20 euros and is flagged as their bestseller; VPS XL (8 vCores, 16GB, 480GB) is 39 euros; VPS XXL (12 vCores, 24GB, 720GB) is 56 euros. The Windows versions of the same shapes run 20, 40, 79, and 116 euros per month (no Windows VPS S), with the Windows Server Datacenter licenses included.

Two things to know about how that pricing behaves. First, promotional pricing is aggressive and temporary: at the time of writing, introductory offers bring the Linux VPS S to 2 euros per month for the first one to three months, after which standard pricing applies — the discount headline and the renewal price are very different numbers. Second, note that these are consumer prices with 19% VAT included, which flatters or distorts comparisons against ex-VAT business pricing depending on where you sit. There is no hourly billing; it is monthly subscription plus setup, and the products are sold as "unlimited" traffic rather than a terabyte allowance.

Our price-performance read versus the field: the entry VPS S at 4 euros is decent for 2GB of RAM and 60GB of NVMe with unmetered traffic, but the mid-range is where the comparison gets uncomfortable. A VPS M at 10 euros per month costs more than double the German competition's 2-vCPU/4GB offers (our own benchmarked Hetzner CX22 runs 4.35 euros per month with similar RAM and less storage), and netcup and IONOS itself compete hard at every tier. Strato charges for convenience, brand trust, and telephone support in German — not for raw price-performance.

Performance & infrastructure

Strato runs its own data centers in Germany — the company bought a Karlsruhe facility out of the KPNQwest insolvency in 2002 precisely to end its dependence on outsourcing partners, and today claims more than 100,000 physical and virtual servers under management. The security page states plainly that Strato's data centers are located in Germany; the corporate history speaks of facilities in Germany and Europe. For GDPR-sensitive workloads, data staying in Germany with a German parent company is the whole pitch, and it is a legitimate one.

The VPS platform itself is KVM, so you get full virtualization, real root, arbitrary kernels and images, and no container-style overselling caveats. Storage is NVMe across the range, uplinks are up to 1 Gbit/s with unmetered transfer, and an upstream firewall sits in front of every instance. Plesk is optional (paid), and there is an escape hatch most budget hosts lack: a rescue system you can boot into to repair a broken OS or reset passwords, plus a VNC console.

On measured performance we have nothing to report — we have not benchmarked Strato VPS instances, and we will not invent numbers. What we can say from the spec sheet is that the hardware configuration (modern vCores, NVMe, generous disk per tier) is competitive on paper; whether the CPU allocation is dedicated or shared is not published, which is the usual question we ask vendors in this segment. For the measurements we do publish on other German providers, see benchmarks.

Where it falls short

Price discipline, again. The jump from the promotional price to the standard price is four to five times on the entry tier, the setup fee returns on every plan, and backups are explicitly not included in the VPS products — "Backups nicht inbegriffen" is stated on both the Linux and Windows VPS pages. If you want backups you buy them (Strato resells Acronis-based managed backup), which makes the effective price higher than the headline. Snapshots are not part of the package either. Hetzner charges 20% of server price for automatic backups; here it is a separate product conversation.

There is no uptime SLA on the VPS line either — SLA is an optional add-on that Strato lists for dedicated servers (alongside optional 24/7 hotline and monitoring). For a host with a 25-year track record that is less scary than it sounds, but if you are contract-minded, you are buying a service level you cannot point to in a contract.

Market focus is the other limitation. Strato is built for the German market: documentation, sales, and support are German-first, the pricing is VAT-inclusive consumer pricing, and the product surface (website builders, HiDrive cloud storage, email hosting, domains) is aimed at small businesses and prosumers rather than engineers. Developers from our VPS category expectations will find the API story thinner than Hetzner's or DigitalOcean's, the console more hosting-panel than cloud-console, and the marketing pages heavy going.

Who should pick this

Our pick for German small businesses and self-hosters who value a German data center, German-speaking phone support, and a brand their accountant has heard of — and who are willing to pay a modest premium over the budget German hosts for it. If you want one vendor for domain, email, website, and a VPS in the same account, Strato's breadth is convenient, and the KVM + NVMe + unmetered traffic VPS is a perfectly competent server for websites, mail, small databases, and self-hosted tools (they now market exactly that: n8n automation, personal AI agents, game servers).

We would not pick it for price-sensitive builds, performance-critical workloads, or teams that want cloud-style APIs, hourly billing, and global regions. For those, Hetzner Cloud, netcup, or the international clouds give you more per euro and better tooling. And whatever you buy, bring your own backup plan — Strato will happily sell you one, but it is not in the box.

Key takeaways

• Strato (Berlin, founded 1997) is a mainstream German hosting brand inside United Internet's IONOS Group — not a Deutsche Telekom subsidiary; Telekom sold it in 2017 for around 600 million euros.
• Linux VPS range: 4 to 56 euros per month (1–12 vCores, 2–24GB RAM, 60–720GB NVMe) plus 9 euros setup; Windows VPS 20 to 116 euros per month with licenses included; promotional intro prices run from 2 euros.
• Everything is unmetered traffic on up to 1 Gbit/s, KVM-based, IPv6-ready, with upstream firewall, rescue system, and basic monitoring included.
• Backups are explicitly not included and snapshots are not offered; SLA is an optional add-on — budget for both separately.
• All data centers are in Germany (ISO 27001 certified annually since 2004), which is the core reason to pick Strato over cheaper rivals.
• Price-performance trails Hetzner and netcup at every tier; you pay for brand trust, German support, and the bundled hosting ecosystem.

Sources

• https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strato_AG
• https://www.strato.de/server/linux-vserver/
• https://www.strato.de/server/windows-vserver/
• https://www.strato.de/server/
• https://www.strato.de/sicherheit
• https://telekom.com/en/media/media-information/archive/deutsche-telekom-sells-strato-ag-to-united-internet-ag-479448
• https://reuters.com/article/deutsche-telekom-ma-united-internet-idUSL5N1EA1DK