UltraVPS

What UltraVPS actually is

UltraVPS.eu is the virtual-server brand of Bradler & Krantz GmbH & Co. KG, a German company registered in Bochum (Amtsgericht Bochum, HRA 4523, managing directors Daniel Bradler and Joachim Krantz) that has sold hosting since 1999. That puts it among the older independent providers in Europe — 25+ years old, self-described as one of the most established, and small enough that the phone number on the imprint reaches the same Bochum office that runs the brand. Our correction file for this listing starts here, because the DB row described UltraVPS as a "Bulgarian VPS with SSD and hourly billing," and every part of that is wrong. It is German, its cheapest lines run on SAS hard drives rather than SSD, and it bills on fixed contract terms of one to six months, not by the hour. (A separate provider does sell hourly Sofia VPS plans; that appears to be where the confusion came from.)

The product is three KVM/BHYVE virtual-server lines plus a reseller program. The UltraKVM line runs on enterprise SAS storage behind ZFS: UltraKVM-30 (1 core, 1.5 GB RAM, 30 GB, 1 TB transfer) at €3.00 per month on a six-month term, up to UltraKVM-250 (4 cores, 8 GB RAM, 250 GB, 5 TB) at €20.00 on a one-month term. The Cloud line is all-flash SSD, aimed at databases: Cloud-30 (2 cores, 2 GB RAM, 30 GB SSD, 2 TB) at €4.50 per month up to Cloud-500 (6 cores, 32 GB, 500 GB SSD, 5 TB) at €69.00. The Storage line trades RAM for capacity: Storage-250 (250 GB) at €3.00 on a six-month term up to Storage-5000 (5 TB storage, 10 TB transfer, 4 cores, 6 GB RAM) at €45.00. Every plan includes one IPv4 address and ten IPv6 addresses, and every price shown includes 19% German VAT — removed automatically for non-EU customers or anyone supplying a valid VAT ID, so the effective ex-VAT price is roughly 16% lower than the sticker.

Under the hood the design is deliberately old-school and, in our view, defensible: branded host hardware with Intel Xeon CPUs and registered ECC RAM, redundant power and fans, and ZFS storage with SHA-256 checksums against silent corruption, with data redundantly stored across enterprise SAS drives and SSDs. You get a full virtual machine with your own kernel and custom kernel modules — closer to a dedicated server in behavior than the container-based VPS products that dominate the budget market.

Pricing: what you really pay

The contract-term structure is the first thing to understand, because it is the opposite of the hourly-billing image this listing had. Plans come with fixed minimum terms: six months on the cheapest UltraKVM and Storage entries, three months on the mid-tier entries, one month on most Cloud plans and the larger SAS and Storage plans. Terms lengthen as prices fall — UltraKVM-30 at €3.00/mo is a six-month commitment, while Cloud-30 at €4.50/mo is month-to-month. There is no published hourly billing anywhere on the site.

Prices are quoted inclusive of 19% VAT and the site is explicit that end prices differ with your local VAT rate and that VAT is removed for valid EU VAT IDs and non-EU customers. Practical consequence for a business buyer: the €4.50 Cloud-30 plan is roughly €3.78 net. The initial invoice must be paid with PayPal; the server is provisioned automatically after payment. Setup fees do not appear on any published plan.

The cost-performance picture is genuinely competitive at the low end. An all-flash KVM VM with two dedicated cores, 2 GB RAM, 30 GB SSD and 2 TB of transfer at €4.50 per month (€3.78 net) undercuts most of the EU budget field on paper, and the SAS line goes cheaper still at €3.00. The catch is in the fine print of what you get: the plan lists are the whole product — no managed layer, no backup product visible on public pages, and RAM allocations are conservative (8 GB at the top of the SAS line, 32 GB at the top of Cloud). For a granular look at how similar configurations perform when you actually push them, our /benchmarks page covers the methodology we use.

The reseller program is worth a mention: white-label sales under your own brand, a public API, and a WHMCS module for provisioning inside your own billing system. You buy any plan to get portal access, generate an API key, and go. For small hosting resellers in Europe this is a practical, low-ceremony route to offering VPS without operating hosts.

Performance & infrastructure

We have not run UltraVPS hardware through our own tests, so no benchmark claims from us. What the company publishes is specific enough to evaluate. Hosts are branded Xeon systems with ECC RAM; storage is ZFS on enterprise SAS and SSD with checksumming; virtualization is KVM and BHYVE with hardware-level isolation and customer-controlled kernels. The all-flash Cloud line is explicitly positioned for MySQL and Postgres workloads, and the ZFS redundancy story (data mirrored across enterprise drives) is about surviving drive failure, not about snapshots or backups — an important distinction we return to below.

Location coverage is the headline infrastructure feature: the site advertises seven locations worldwide and enumerates six — Düsseldorf (Germany), Amsterdam (Iron Mountain), Dallas (Psychz), London (Virtus/Clouvider), Šiauliai (Lithuania) and Chișinău (Moldova, Trabia). That spread is unusual for a provider this size: you get EU residency in Germany, the Netherlands, Lithuania, a US presence in Dallas, and a UK option post-Brexit. The about page documents each facility in detail — ISO 27001 at Düsseldorf and Amsterdam (plus ISO 50001/14001/9001 in Amsterdam), 24/7 on-site security and CCTV everywhere listed, VESDA smoke detection and argon fire suppression, N+1 or N+2 cooling, UPS with generator backup. London is a Tier 3-specification Virtus facility with 72-hour generator endurance; Amsterdam runs on 100% renewable energy.

Network is Tier-1 heavy: Deutsche Telekom and Cogent in Düsseldorf with AMS-IX peering, Core-Backbone and Fiberring in Amsterdam, Level3/GTT/NTT/Cogent in Chișinău, Retn/Bite/TEO in Šiauliai, and over 250 Gbps of total bandwidth quoted at several sites. Looking glasses are published per location — a small transparency touch that makes network claims checkable before you buy.

Where it falls short

No published SLA. The "Our guarantees" section promises premium hardware, Tier-1 connectivity, friendly support and fast provisioning, but we found no uptime commitment with credits on the public pages, and the site's own Status page is the reliability artifact you actually get. For a 25-year-old European operator this is a conservative choice rather than a red flag, but if your workload needs contractual availability, you will be negotiating individually or looking elsewhere.

Backups and snapshots are not part of the published product. ZFS checksumming protects against bit rot and drive failure; it is not a point-in-time recovery story. Assume you are responsible for your own backup strategy, and price external backup storage into the comparison.

The plan catalog shows its age. The SAS line's storage tiers (30 GB to 250 GB) are small next to NVMe-era expectations, RAM allocations top out at 32 GB on Cloud and 6 GB on Storage, and there is no GPU, bare-metal, or object-storage product. Contract terms on the cheapest plans (six months at €3.00, three months at €6.00) mean the headline prices are commitment prices — fine if the fit is right, wrong for a two-week experiment. Payment friction exists too: PayPal-only for the first invoice is a small but real barrier for corporate buyers on POs.

Finally, this is a small team. Support is described as first-class and friendly; there are no published response-time targets we could find, and no 24/7 support claim beyond datacenter security staffing. Expect business-hours competence, not an enterprise follow-the-sun desk.

Who should pick this

Our pick for European developers and small businesses that want EU-hosted KVM servers with honest specs and no marketing layer: staging and development environments, small databases on the SSD Cloud line, file and backup targets on the Storage line (€5.00/mo for 500 GB is a fair deal), and EU-residency workloads that want data pinned in Germany or the Netherlands. The reseller program fits small hosts and agencies who want to sell VPS under their own brand via WHMCS without operating infrastructure. Dallas makes it a reasonable option for US-facing side projects that also need EU presence from the same provider.

We would look elsewhere for hourly-billed burst capacity (this is not that), for managed service or bundled backups, for NVMe-heavy modern specs, or for contractual SLA-backed production. Hetzner and the larger EU clouds beat UltraVPS on raw spec-per-euro in most of our /benchmarks comparisons; UltraVPS competes on location spread, ZFS reliability engineering, and being a company small enough to answer the phone.

Key takeaways

• German, not Bulgarian: UltraVPS.eu is a brand of Bradler & Krantz GmbH & Co. KG (Bochum), hosting since 1999.
• No hourly billing — plans run on one- to six-month contract terms; cheapest is UltraKVM-30 at €3.00/mo (6-month term), SSD Cloud-30 at €4.50/mo month-to-month.
• All prices include 19% VAT (removed for valid EU VAT IDs / non-EU); first invoice is PayPal-only.
• Six enumerated locations (Düsseldorf, Amsterdam, Dallas, London, Šiauliai, Chișinău) on certified Tier-3-spec facilities; the site claims seven — worth confirming at order time.
• KVM/BHYVE with ZFS on SAS or all-flash SSD, ECC Xeon hosts, per-site looking glasses; IPv4 + 10 IPv6 on every plan.
• No published SLA and no backup product: you own uptime commitments and data recovery — see more EU VPS options in /category/vps-providers.

Sources

• https://www.ultravps.eu/en/
• https://www.ultravps.eu/en/vps/
• https://www.ultravps.eu/en/about-us/
• https://www.ultravps.eu/en/about-us/imprint
• https://www.ultravps.eu/en/vps/resellers/
• https://ultravps.eu/order/order.pl?cat=cloudserver_ultra
• https://platform.tracxn.com/a/d/company/53327e6ae4b0398cae2745d1/ultravps