Today intergenia launched its Dutch operations with its consumer and small medium oriented brand SERVER4YOU. Dutch customers now have the choice of discount priced shared hosting, vps and dedicated servers starting from 2.85 Euro/month for a fully featured shared plan, 12.85 Euro/month for a vps and 58.85 Euro/month for a DELL PowerEdge SC420 dedicated server. During the launch period SERVER4YOU offers Dutch customers up to 333 days of free service. All offers can be found on the company's website www.server4you.nl. The company is based in the Dutch city of Soest, around 30km outside of Amsterdam. The Dutch operations are a joint venture between the German intergenia AG and the Dutch BBOV B.V. with Bertil Brendeke as Managing Director. Before Bertil joined the company he was Commercial Director of IS-Interned Services, a large business hoster in the Netherlands. The launch is supported by a large nationwide printed ads campaign.

Wow, I really did not expect this to happen: 1&1 announced last week that they will close their famous and well respected German business brand Schlund6Partner (www.schlund.de)All existing customers of Schlund&Partner have been offered 1&1 packages, advertisement for the brand stopped, by Januar 1, 2007 the brand will disappear. With more than 70.000 business sites hosted Schlund&Partner is one of the largest business hosts in Germany and serves mainly small to medium sized business with high priced shared and dedicated hosting packages. Schlund&Partner was founded 10 years in 1996 by Rainer Schlund, Andreas Gauger and other partners. Back then Schlund&Partner was the first professional shared hosting provider offering web space in Germany, others would just resell US space. Prior to 1998 1&1 had not been active in the hosting business but then bought the majority of shares of Schlund&Partner and developed together with Schlund&Partner its own consumer orientated shared hosting products. In 1999 1&1 bought the remainig shares of the business. Rainer Schlund left the company to pursue other businesses, Andreas Gauger stayed and became on of the masterminds behind the success of 1&1. Schlund&Partner was the origin and "mother" of the success of 1&1 and set the foundation for 1&1 becoming the largest host in the world.

Apart all emotional feelings about Schlund&Partner's roll in the German hosting industry for me the decision of 1&1 is also hard to understand from a business standpoint. At least from the outside Schlund&Partner seemed like a very succesful and respected brand selling services at a very high margin. Schlund&Partner had its own reseller structure with more than 6000 resellers all over Germany, and for many people in the industry was one of the first options for high quality business hosting. So to say, Schlund&Partner could be considered the German Rackspace.com. In my opinion 1&1 destroys a lot of value by closing such a strong brand. But I am sure they know what they do...

More than 2,5 million votes have been casted to determine the most favourite web sites in Germany in this year's OnlineStar award. OnlineStar is the largest web award in Germany and has been organized for eight years in a row now. It's an audience award where out of over 20,000 entries the most popular web sites are selected by the general Internet audience in Germany. In total there are 14 awards, with five going to internationally known web sites: Best portal to Google.de, best news and information to Wikipedia.de, best shopping to Amazon.de, best travel site to Expedia.de and finally best videoblog to YouTube.com. The awards celebration took place last week in Munich during the Systems computer show.

And I thought, the price war was over... Lycos Europe, the joint venture of Germany based Bertelsmann and Spanish Telefonica, just launched a new shared hosting offer for its European customers: For a monthly fee of 99 Euro Cent (approx. US$ 1,20) and one time Setup of 9,90 Euro customers will get a fully featured web hosting account including one domain (.de, CNO, .info, .biz), 1 GB webspace and 8 GB bandwidth. The account which is called "Active Start" also features up to 20 mailboxes, full PHP-Support and a web site builder. Quite a lot of features for just a hand full of pennies...More details on the offer can be found on the Lycos Europe homepage.

With fully featured web hosting accounts selling from less than US1 per month hosting is dirt cheap in Germany. The same story with dedicated servers: You can manage to get a nice, powerful server with unlimited bandwidth for around US$40 per month. Germany's largest host 1&1 has not taken part in the price fight with its major brand "1&1" but introduced a separate discount brand called "Alturo" around 30 month ago. Now the time of "Alturo" is over. 1&1 has notified all customers on very short notice around 2 weeks ago that the company will cancel all contracts by the end of November and that all customers will have to look for a new host. Several competing companies (among others 1&1 number one rival Strato) have reacted with special discounted offers for former Alturo-customers. Even though there have been rumors in the market for a long time that 1&1 is not really happy with the development of the brand Alturo the rush to close the business really surprises. Why does 1&1 react on such short notice and why do they almost "force" their customers to sign up with the competition? One rumor says that 1&1 is reacting to the price raise of its long time rival SERVER4YOU. SERVER4YOU introduced a new line of dedicated servers beginning of September and raised pricing for all new customers by up to 45%.