Strato Prepares For .fr Land Rush (June 15, 2006) - German Web hosting provider Strato AG (strato.de) announced on Wednesday it is preparing for a land rush for Frances' .fr top level domain when rules change there next week. The Web host predict that by the end of this year the number of registered sites will double from the current 1.4 million.
Strato CEO Damian Schmidt says the French TLD has been subject to strict controls until now, with companies having to go through a lot of red tape to prove eligibility. This will change starting June 20 and Schmidt anticipates a surge in new registrations, similar to what happened in Spain earlier this year when restrictions were removed from the .es TLD.
Currently, Strato is the second most popular Web hosting company in Europe, behind its fellow German rivals, 1&1 Internet AG. Strato has 1 million customers and 2 million domains registered, compared to 1&1's 3.5 million and 5 million. Of Stratos registered domains, 80 percent are .de, making up for about 16 percent of the total German market of 10 million registered domains.
In April Strato expanded its European reach in the UK, France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands, driven entirely by the land rush for the new .eu TLD. The company seeks to differentiate its strategy by rejecting the US market, arguing that the expansion would be too costly in terms of the investment required in infrastructure and marketing.
Web Host STRATO Picks Plesk 7.5 Linux (November 23, 2005) - Web hosting automation software developer SWsoft (swsoft.com) announced on Wednesday that German Web hosting provider STRATO (strato.de) would use Plesk 7.5 Reloaded for Linux on all its high-end dedicated servers.
The announcement comes on the heels of STRATO's launch of a new line of 64-bit, AMD Opteron high-end dedicated servers priced at 69 Euros per month.
"In combination with Plesk 7.5 Reloaded, we are able to offer our customers an optimal price-to-performance ratio and ideal comfort for server management," says Markus Schrodt, CEO of STRATO Medien AG.
STRATO, based in Berlin, is home to over 2,000,000 domains.
"We are pleased that one of the foremost hosting service providers decided to partner with SWsoft," says Serguei Beloussov, CEO of SWsoft. "We are convinced that based on this partnership, SWsoft and STRATO will establish integrated and cost effective products that help to expand the customer base, revenue and profitability through complete integrated hosting automation and virtualization solutions."
Freenet.de Acquires Web Host Strato (December 13, 2004) - Internet service provider Freenet.de AG (freenet.de) has acquired German Internet service provider Teles AG's (teles.de) Web hosting division Strato (strato.de) for $132 million Euros, 80 million of which will be paid in cash and 3.1 million in shares of freenet.de, according to a report by Heise Online.
Teles will also receive 10 million Euros in the next three years for ?technical network systems from the product range of Teles that freenet.de,? the report said.
Sigram Schindler, chief executive officer at Teles AG, said in the report that the company has sold its Web hosting operations to concentrate on its wireless broadband Internet access service, which the company believes will be its main area of future growth.
All of Strato's staff and management will be retained, the report said, including chief executive officer Rochus Wegener.
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