plusserver in 2026: an honest review for teams leaving AWS or Azure

plusserver (PlusServer until March 2025) is a Cologne company that sells two clouds side by side: pluscloud open, built on OpenStack, and pluscloud VMware, for companies moving off their own VMware estates. It charges nothing for traffic in or out, publishes simple per-resource prices that have not moved since at least September 2024, and lets you download its full BSI C5 audit report: our production workload costs EUR 736.06 a month there, 68% of the AWS price. The weak points are what you cannot see or check. Nobody outside the company can say who owns it today, the SLA and the data processing agreement arrive only with your order, and the C5 report carries a qualified opinion. Each zone is a separate OpenStack cloud, so redundancy across zones is your job.

This article is one of a series comparing 24 European cloud providers with AWS and Azure; the overview puts them side by side. Everything below was checked on 15 and 16 October 2026 against plusserver's documentation, legal terms, product pages, audit report and status page, two English court judgments and register data, each at its source. We did not open an account or run workloads.

At a glance

What you can build

The managed services (Kubernetes, databases, caching, registry) run on pluscloud open. Nothing is labelled beta.

Missing outright: dedicated-vCPU cloud VMs, hourly GPUs, MongoDB, Kafka, OpenSearch, functions, queues, a DNS service with an API, a first-party CDN, managed logging, and any region outside Germany.

The developer surface is OpenStack's rather than plusserver's: the upstream CLI, Ansible and the community Terraform provider (3.4.0, published 11 November 2025, not maintained by plusserver). plusserver's own Terraform providers were last released in 2020 and 2021. Each zone has its own API endpoint, so three zones are three clouds in one clouds.yaml. The docs contradict each other in places: PostgreSQL versions are 15 to 18 in the docs, 14 to 17 in the order wizard and "14 and PostgreSQL 15" in the FAQ.

What it costs

plusserver list prices in EUR, VAT excluded, from its product pages (there is no public price API or calculator), checked 15 and 16 October 2026, in DE-WEST-1 (Cologne) at 730 hours a month. pluscloud open bills each vCPU at EUR 0.0205 an hour, RAM at EUR 0.007 an hour (the pages write "per vRAM/hour" without a unit; we read it as per GB) and volumes at EUR 0.09 per GB.

Workload A, a starter setup: one VM with 2 vCPU and 4 GB, a 40 GB disk, one IPv4 address, 1 TB of egress and 100 GB of object storage.

AWS charges EUR 112.37 and Azure EUR 116.15 for the same in Frankfurt, so plusserver costs 52% of AWS and 50% of Azure; on AWS the 1 TB of egress alone is USD 81.00 of a USD 125.95 bill. New projects come with a router whose gateway IP may or may not be billed as a public address; if it is, add EUR 2.19.

Workload B, a small production system: three VMs of 4 vCPU and 16 GB with an IPv4 address each, 300 GB of SSD block storage, a load balancer, PostgreSQL with 2 vCPU, 8 GB and 100 GB as primary plus standby, 1 TB of object storage with 1 million PUT and 10 million GET requests, a Kubernetes control plane and 2 TB of egress.

AWS charges EUR 1,082.61 for workload B on m7i.xlarge and Azure EUR 1,091.88 on D4s_v5, so plusserver costs 68% of AWS and 67% of Azure; against AWS's burstable t3.xlarge (EUR 985.89) it is 75%. Those totals include a database standby in another zone; plusserver's does not. The gap is two lines: AWS bills the 2 TB of egress at USD 171.00 and its HA database at USD 320.13 with storage, where plusserver charges nothing for egress and EUR 138.10 for one database node with storage. The VMs go the other way: three SCS-4V-16 cost EUR 424.86, more than three t3.xlarge on AWS (USD 420.48, about EUR 375), because memory is most of a 16 GB VM's price. The control plane is level with EKS (EUR 65.13), and there is no free tier.

pluscloud open sells no dedicated vCPUs. pluscloud VMware's "High Performance vCPU" may be dedicated (plusserver does not say); three such VMs cost EUR 1,419.12. Worker nodes are not included, as everywhere in this series.

Egress and IPv4. Traffic is free "incoming & outgoing" on pluscloud open, Kubernetes, pluscloud VMware and S3, under a fair use policy that says only "Usage of the network according to normal behavior is free of charge". S3 has no request fees, but objects under 128 KB are billed as 128 KB. VMs get 1 Gbit/s by default; faster policies cost extra, at an unpublished price. A floating IPv4 address costs EUR 0.003 an hour and is billed while reserved, attached or not; AWS and Azure charge USD 0.005.

Billing and contract. Usage is billed by the hour and invoiced monthly, to a credit card for self-service orders. Whether a stopped VM still pays for vCPU and RAM is not stated, and we found no spending limit or budget alert. A 30-day trial exists, and VMware migrations can get up to four months of pluscloud VMware free. pluscloud open is advertised with "no minimum term", but the General Terms default is that "Unless otherwise agreed, the minimum contract term is 24 months and the notice period for ordinary termination is three months"; the notice period for your order sits in the order confirmation. plusserver may raise prices for changed costs with six weeks' notice; if you object within four weeks, it may keep the old price or end the contract with three months' notice.

GPUs and bare metal. No GPU is billed by the hour. An RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell server is listed "From 1,900 € per Month", "available to order in November"; on 16 October 2026 the page took registrations only. Dedicated servers start at EUR 99 a month (Essential-100: 16 cores, 64 GB, two 960 GB SSDs).

Price changes. pluscloud open prices match archived copies of 18 September 2024 and 21 April 2025, Kubernetes prices match a copy of 2 July 2025, and S3 prices are "List Prices as of 08/02/2024". pluscloud VMware first published a price list between November 2024 and June 2025. We found no price change in the last 24 months.

Reliability

What a zone is. plusserver defines a zone as "one or more data centers designed to be independent of one another", especially in power, network, cooling and buildings, with regions at least 300 km apart. In DE-WEST the zones are in two cities, Cologne (CGN3) and Düsseldorf (DUS6); in DE-NORTH both are in Hamburg, at Norderstedt (HAM5) and Wilhelmsburg (HAM6). The order wizard offers pluscloud open in Cologne, Düsseldorf and Hamburg Wilhelmsburg only.

One zone is one cloud. Each pluscloud open environment is "completely independent and does not share any underlying resources or management capabilities with other environments", and "there is only one availability zone per pluscloud open environment". No private network, load balancer or volume spans two zones; plusserver's own tutorials link zones with an overlay VPN and build a PostgreSQL cluster with Patroni. Inside a zone, Ceph block storage is "synchronously replicated across three nodes". AWS and Azure run three Frankfurt zones under one API, with networks and load balancers that span them.

The database standby. The PostgreSQL overview promises "Multi-AZ Deployment: Configurable for Multi-AZ (Availability Zones) deployments", and the product page "a clustered & highly available PostgreSQL database". But the order wizard has no HA or standby option, and the only replicas documented are read replicas on "native asynchronous replication": "It is not possible to convert a secondary server into a primary server to enable write access". Where a standby would sit and how long a failover takes are not documented, so we priced a single node. Backups run daily and are kept 7 days. The Kubernetes control plane is "always highly available" with failureTolerance: node: a failed node, not a lost zone.

The SLA. The legal SLA is not public. The web portal terms list "the Service Level Agreement contained in the order confirmation" as a contract document, beside the service descriptions, the special terms and the DPA; none is on plusserver.com. Product pages state "99.99 % SLA on a monthly average" for pluscloud open and "99,5 % SLA" for dedicated servers, and nothing for Kubernetes, databases, S3 or pluscloud VMware. The General Terms confirm that credits exist, but the schedule, cap, exclusions and claim window cannot be checked, nor what 99.99% covers: a VM, the API, or a zone that is a whole cloud.

AWS commits to 99.99% for EC2 across two or more zones and 99.5% for a single instance, with credits up to 100% and claims until the end of the second billing cycle; Azure gives 99.99% across zones and 60 days to claim. Both publish the terms before you buy.

Hypervisors are patched "usually ... once a month"; VMs are live-migrated, except those on local SSD, with a GPU or in a hard-affinity group, which restart in about 15 minutes.

Status page and incidents. status.plusserver.com lists the last 50 incidents, back to 9 February 2024, in German and English; none links a postmortem. When we checked, every pluscloud open and Kubernetes component showed "under_maintenance".

The June 2025 incident matters most for design: zones that share nothing still slowed down together, in both regions. The customer portal had "critical" incidents on 4 January and 8 December 2025.

Support

Support is "24/7 ... completely in-house", in German or English, by phone ("available anytime") and by ticket in the portal; accounting answers Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 17:00. Trial accounts get technical support in office hours only.

Nothing else is public: no support plans, prices or response targets per severity. Managed service levels are sold through sales. pluscloud open orders can add a two-hour onboarding workshop, and Kubernetes comes with a free one. There is no public forum, Slack or Discord.

Round-the-clock phone support for every customer is more than AWS Basic (no technical cases) and Azure Basic (no technical response targets) include. Without a target, though, it cannot be set against the one-hour response that costs the greater of USD 29 or 9% of spend on AWS Business Support+, or USD 100 a month on Azure Standard.

Getting an account

Self-service runs through CloudHub, the customer portal, and is for businesses only: you give company details, pay by credit card, confirm that you act "as a business operator exclusively for commercial purposes" and click "Order with obligation to pay". That click is an offer, not a contract. "The Contract between plusserver and the Customer is only concluded when plusserver issues a declaration of acceptance, which is sent in a separate email", and plusserver "shall not be obliged to accept the registration". How long acceptance takes is not stated, and the contract is concluded in German only.

A company outside Germany, Austria and Switzerland cannot use self-service: the FAQ tells it to "contact us by phone ... or via our contact form". The trial is limited to "Unternehmen und öffentliche Auftraggeber", companies and public bodies.

Default quotas for a plain pluscloud open project are not published. Under Kubernetes a project starts with 256 cores, 512 GB of RAM and 10 floating IPs, raised "via a support ticket", which would cover workload B. Whether you can build it on signup day depends on when the acceptance email comes, which we could not establish. On AWS the default of 5 vCPUs for standard instances is below workload B's 12; Azure's 20 cores per region fit on paper.

A failed payment lets plusserver block your systems "without setting a deadline and without further notice"; false registration data allows termination "with immediate effect without notice"; and a customer "named on a sanctions list of the European Union, the United States of America, and/or the United Kingdom" may be terminated.

Compliance and data protection

The documents on plusserver's certificates page open after a click-through disclaimer, with no request form.

The C5 report. nbs partners audit GmbH dated it 13 March 2026, for calendar year 2025, and gave an "eingeschränktes Prüfungsurteil", a qualified opinion. Three controls were "nicht wirksam", not effective: supplier control and pluscloud open logging under C5, and backup job monitoring under ISAE 3402. Management's answers: supplier evidence was missing because of illness, backup monitoring lapsed for four weeks, and the logging control was skipped in April 2025 "aus personellen Ressourcen-Engpässen", for lack of staff. No other provider in this series lets you download its C5 report, and this one shows where the controls failed.

The SCS listing. plusserver's docs call pluscloud open "a certified Souvereing Cloud Stack" (sic). The SCS project's compliance monitor lists it under "Non-certified environments": on 16 October 2026 all four environments failed the image metadata tests and the test that the S3 service is discoverable. Whether these are real gaps or a test-harness problem, we could not tell.

DPA and sub-processors. The data processing agreement is "contained in the order confirmation", like the SLA; we found no public DPA or sub-processor list. The C5 report names the subservice providers it carves out, all with German addresses: Deutsche Telekom and Telia Carrier Germany for carrier and DDoS mitigation, Stadtwerke Norderstedt, which runs the HAM5 data centre, and firms for guarding and media destruction.

Data location. Data stays in Germany. The product pages name the jurisdiction as "Federal Republic of Germany" and say plusserver "will first verify the legal basis" of a government access request and "inform and involve the Customer" where the law allows. plusserver also says your data "is not subject to the CLOUD Act", which is its claim, not our finding.

Who controls it

You contract with plusserver GmbH, Cologne, managed by Dr. Marc Wilczek (CEO) and Raphael Bächle (CFO). GoDaddy sold it in July 2017 to funds advised by BC Partners, for an enterprise value of EUR 397 million.

On 20 October 2023 the group owed EUR 264.7 million in term loans to 36 lenders, due on 31 August 2024, and "the business has been adversely affected by a number of challenging economic and operational factors". On 21 February 2024 the English High Court sanctioned a scheme of arrangement for PlusHolding GmbH, plusserver's sole shareholder ([2024] EWHC 828 (Ch)).

In plain terms, the court approved a deal that swapped debt for ownership: the lenders became the owners of the group's holding company PlusInvestment GmbH through a new holding structure, "with 100 per cent of equity being allocated rateably to scheme claims", that is, in proportion to what each was owed. In return the loans were cut to EUR 95 million, due on 31 December 2028, up to EUR 165 million of the old debt stayed as an unsecured loan ranking behind the others, and up to EUR 50 million of new money was made available.

Neither judgment names the lenders. A 2023 Debtwire report, via Unquote, named Carlyle, Investcorp and Bain Capital among the largest loan holders; by the scheme date CLO funds held about 3.88% of the debt, so holdings had changed, and whether any of them holds equity today is not known. Register data summarised by North Data lists a merger control case between Alchemy Partners GP Ltd. and PlusInvestment GmbH on 16 April 2025, with no share stated; Alchemy is a London special situations investor. BC Partners left on 1 November 2024, according to the-playbook.de, which calls the new owner "nicht öffentlich bestätigt", not publicly confirmed. No source we found names a current owner or the country of the new holding companies. Management changed often meanwhile: seven register changes of managing director in 22 months.

The infrastructure is plusserver's own: four data centres in Germany, of which Stadtwerke Norderstedt runs HAM5. pluscloud open is OpenStack on the Sovereign Cloud Stack, pluscloud VMware runs on VMware software licensed from Broadcom, and DDoS defence and CDN are resold from Akamai.

Leaving

Egress is free under fair use, so moving data out costs nothing per gigabyte. The interfaces are standard: upstream OpenStack with upstream images, the community Terraform provider and the openstack.cloud Ansible collection, so infrastructure code moves to another OpenStack cloud with endpoint and flavor changes, and the flavor names follow the SCS standard other SCS clouds share. Kubernetes uses standard kubeconfigs and the Cinder CSI driver; S3 Storage has rclone tutorials. One convention does not travel: the S3 storage class is chosen by a suffix on the bucket name (-repl, -mirr).

pluscloud VMware workloads are VMware VMs in vCloud Director, portable to another VMware cloud but not to OpenStack without conversion. The databases have import tutorials and no documented export procedure, so plan on dumps.

The contract is the bigger exit cost. plusserver's Data Act disclosure allows "a one-time penalty payment amounting to 90% of the fees agreed for the remaining contract term until the next possible termination date". For pay-as-you-go pluscloud open that should be small, but the notice period is in the order confirmation, and the General Terms default to 24 months with three months' notice. Termination needs written form or the portal's termination function.

What users report

Independent reports from pluscloud open or Kubernetes customers are close to absent: we found no forum thread, blog post or migration write-up outside plusserver's own reference stories, so no theme meets our evidence bar.

Who it suits, and who should look elsewhere

plusserver suits German, Austrian and Swiss companies and public bodies that want a German-run OpenStack or VMware cloud with free egress, published per-resource prices, a C5 report they can read and 24/7 support in German, and that can build their own redundancy across zones. It also suits VMware estates looking for a landing zone in Germany, or a path from VMware to Proxmox or OpenStack under one contract.

Look elsewhere if you must know who ultimately owns your provider; if you are outside Germany, Austria and Switzerland and want to sign up and deploy the same day; if you need managed database failover that is documented, dedicated vCPUs, hourly GPUs, serverless, Kafka or queues; or if you need to read the SLA and DPA before you sign.

Sources

Checked on 15 and 16 October 2026.

Pricing

• pluscloud open and datasheet 02/2026
• Managed Kubernetes, PostgreSQL as a Service, S3 Storage, pluscloud VMware
• Dedicated server, GPU server, AI platform
• S3 pricing and policies
• Archived copies: pluscloud open, 18 September 2024, 21 April 2025; Managed Kubernetes, 2 July 2025; pluscloud VMware, 8 November 2024 and 24 June 2025
• AWS and Azure figures: AWS Price List bulk API and Azure Retail Prices API, converted at the ECB rate of 15 October 2026

Terms and SLA

• General Terms and Conditions v3.1.4, 30 September 2026
• Web Portal Terms v1.1.0, 12 September 2025
• pluscloud open trial

Documentation

• Regions and availability zones
• pluscloud open environments, flavors, storage, networks, load balancers and floating IPs, maintenance
• PostgreSQL overview, read replicas, database order wizard
• PSKE high availability, limits and quotas, release notes 1.49.0
• CloudHub registration, pluscloud open order wizard, support page and CloudHub FAQ
• Terraform registry: OpenStack provider and plusserver namespace

Status and incidents

• Status page, incidents feed
• Incidents linked in the table above

Compliance

• Certificates and attestations
• BSI C5:2020 Type 2 and ISAE 3402 report, 2025
• ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certificate and BSI IT-Grundschutz certificate
• SCS Compliance Monitor and pluscloud open detail
• CNCF landscape data

Company and ownership

• Imprint and about us
• Re PlusHolding GmbH [2024] EWHC 828 (Ch), 21 February 2024 and [2023] EWHC 2915 (Ch), 17 November 2023
• GLEIF record and parent reporting exception
• GoDaddy, sale of PlusServer, 18 July 2017
• Alchemy Partners, legal and regulatory
• Secondary: North Data, plusserver GmbH and PlusInvestment GmbH; Unquote, 15 August 2023; the-playbook.de

User reports

• None met the evidence bar. Hacker News, English and German web search and GitHub were searched on 16 October 2026; Reddit could not be searched.