STRATO Review: Do They Deliver?
STRATO is a German hosting provider that has been around since the 1990s. They primarily focus on the German and Dutch markets. Are they worth considering?
STRATO review summary
Speed
Not great, but acceptable speeds for smaller websites.
Uptime
Quite a few complaints about outages/disruptions.
Support
Good knowledge base, but support team is inconsistent.
Simplicity
Self-developed dashboard that is user-friendly.
Features
Decent features but nothing out of this world.
Costs
Extremely cheap (but prices increase 6x after the first year).
Our score:
3 out of 5
Strato pros
Strato cons
STRATO hosts more than 4 million websites and has over 2 million domain names registered with them. Their headquarters are located in Berlin. They're part of United Internet AG, a massive German internet service company that encompasses a total of 13 brands (including IONOS) and numerous subsidiaries.
STRATO is one of the few web hosting companies with TV commercials. You might know them from their loud advertisement featuring Scooter frontman H.P. Baxxter. Faster. Better. STRATO.
In summary, STRATO is a provider that's just fine for hobbyists. You can host a site with them for very little money. As a serious business owner, you might want to think twice about using them due to their inadequate support and less-than-impressive uptime.
Look, STRATO is a provider that targets the mass market. You get web hosting for a low price from a well-known, stable, and predictable company. For some people, that's enough.
In this STRATO review, I'll examine this German web host in detail so you can determine if they're the right fit for you.
TIP: Our Cloud86 review takes a deeper look at the hosting provider that we ourselves use for WebsiteGecko.
Plus, you'll pay less for it and get 60% off your first year with Cloud86.
STRATO at a glance
STRATO speed, uptime and customer service
Speed
Most of STRATO's customers use their shared hosting. With shared hosting, your website shares a server with other websites.
STRATO is a budget provider that heavily invests in marketing. As a logical consequence, relatively little money remains for R&D investments, forcing them to cram their servers with as many websites as possible to maintain profitability.
This means your site with STRATO won't load extremely quickly.
Is this a disaster for a small hobby site or a tiny business website that might expect just a handful of visitors per month? Not really.
For more serious websites though, you shouldn't settle for suboptimal speed.
Uptime
Uptime refers to the period when your website is accessible online. Every hosting provider experiences some downtime. This can be caused by server maintenance, hardware issues, or hacking incidents. With quality hosting providers, the annual downtime remains below 0.01%.
STRATO doesn't offer an uptime guarantee, but if you look at their fine print, you'll see that their servers should be available 99% of the time annually. That's not very reassuring. A 1% downtime per year would mean your site could be offline for multiple days.
Looking at customer reviews, we can see that downtime is regularly mentioned as a drawback of STRATO.
To be fair: STRATO has a huge customer base, and it's entirely possible that you might experience little to no downtime issues.
Anyway, a little bit of downtime for a small hobby site isn't the end of the world.
Customer service
STRATO's customer service is not fantastic. Wait times can be substantial, and the quality of the support staff varies considerably.
You can reach STRATO in two ways: by email or by phone. They are available from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Monday through Friday.
Again, this holds true: as long as your expectations aren't too high, it's not a disaster.
Fortunately, STRATO's knowledge base is very comprehensive and easy to follow thanks to the use of images and videos.
STRATO further examined
Dashboard
Instead of using standard solutions like cPanel or Plesk, STRATO utilizes a self-developed dashboard. This dashboard isn't particularly difficult to use, but it does lack some advanced features. You can pay your bills, install an SSL certificate, and install WordPress.
Security
In terms of security, STRATO has you covered. Their servers are located in Germany, which has strict privacy laws. Additionally, they have their data centers certified by an independent third party (TÜV-SÜD).
STRATO, in collaboration with a research team from Humboldt University in Berlin, has also developed two server-side security systems: STRATO ServerSide AntiVirus and STRATO ServerSide AntiSpam.
In addition, STRATO offers a free SSL certificate with all their plans.
Additional hosting features
Here are some of the extras you'll get with a STRATO plan:
- Email hosting
- Automatic backups
- SSL Certificate
- Free domain name for one year
STRATO website builder
STRATO also offers a website builder. Depending on which plan you choose, you can add between 5 and 1000 pages to your website, and select from 75 to 200 templates.
However, if you'd prefer to build your site using a website builder, I would recommend looking at providers like Webador or Wix.
STRATO offers environmentally-friendly hosting
STRATO has been offering green hosting since 2008.
I am impressed by this. Web hosting has an enormous impact on the climate.
The fact that STRATO has been working so hard to reduce this impact for such a long time speaks volumes in their favor.
STRATO hosting plans and pricing
STRATO offers shared hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated hosting.
Their shared hosting – which they're known for – costs between €1 and €28 per month. Most of their plans also have a €5 setup fee, which is fairly unusual.
STRATO also offers WordPress hosting which is exactly the same as their shared hosting, except that the specifications (such as disk space) look slightly different.
Alternatives to STRATO
Alternative hosting providers you might want to consider include the companies listed below:
- Cloud86. Cloud86 is a Dutch hosting provider with servers located in Friesland. They're a reliable company offering excellent speed and uptime. Moreover, their customer service is truly outstanding. Their team consists of genuine WordPress experts who are available on weekdays with no wait times. Additionally, you can get hosting from them for just a few euros per month. WebsiteGecko runs on this provider. Read our Cloud86 review here.
- Hostinger. This is an international budget hosting provider. They use LiteSpeed servers which make your site load extremely fast on their platform, provide reliable uptime, and offer customer service that might not be the quickest (30-minute wait time), but is available 24/7. Read our Hostinger review here.
Conclusion
STRATO is a big name that has been doing business since the '90s. Additionally, they offer competitive pricing – and have been doing so for many years.
In other words, you know exactly what you're getting with them. You can rest assured they won't be going bankrupt anytime soon or making radical changes to their pricing structure.
Are they offering world-class hosting? Absolutely not. But Strato's target audience doesn't need that anyway. The speed won't be spectacular, the uptime won't win any awards, and the features aren't particularly special.
The support team won't exactly have you breaking into a happy dance either.
In principle, none of this is actually necessary for a simple site with, say, a few hundred visitors per month.
And what's more, it's not entirely reasonable to expect this from hosting services that only cost a few euros per month.
Personally, I prefer to go with smaller, more personalized hosting companies. But that's just me. Perhaps you feel more comfortable with a giant provider that has a proven track record spanning more than a decade.
If that's the case, then you might want to consider STRATO.
