Strato WordPress Hosting

Strato WordPress Hosting Review: How good is the everything hoster from Berlin for bloggers?

You will surely know the hoster Strato. It is what I always like to call an everything hoster. However, by that I basically just mean that it offers all services in this area. So Strato doesn’t focus on smooth WordPress hosting, but offers store hosting, web hosting and all other forms from this area at the same time.

Of course, WordPress hosting is also part of the offer, after all, no major hosting provider can do without such tariffs. How these look in detail at Strato and how well the WordPress hosting is equipped there, I would like to explain to you in more detail in this post.

Here are my experiences with Strato.

Who or what is Strato actually?

Strato is a public company with its headquarters in Berlin. It belongs to United Internet, a service provider that also owns 1&1, GMX and Web.de. Other webhosters are also part of the group, but that doesn’t mean anything. Most companies are run independently and therefore naturally follow their own principles and values.

So back to the short history lesson about Strato. The hoster has been around since 1997 and has around two million customer contracts and around five million domains under its belt. With its own data center in Berlin Karlsruhe, Strato is also quite well positioned. About five hundred employees take care of the smooth operation of the company.

As an all-round hoster, Strato offers classic web hosting, domain and e-mail hosting, as well as store hosting, homepage construction kits and WordPress hosting. Also included are cloud servers, V servers and managed servers, which are also part of Strato’s offering. Meanwhile, there is even a small marketing software that provides basic information for online marketing.

The WordPress hosting rates from Strato in comparison

StarterBasicPlusPro
Website351020
Visitors / monthunlimitedunlimitedunlimitedunlimited
Storage space25 GB50 GB75 GB100 GB
Backups1 days1 days1 days30 days
Stagingyesyesyesyes
WooCommerceyesyesyesyes
€ 4,50 / month€ 9,00 / month€ 11,00 / month€ 21,00 / month
There is a setup fee of €15. Prices with monthly payment and VAT included.

Of course, I’m only interested in the company’s WordPress hosting here, because I need everything else for myself and my customers rather less. Strato currently offers four tariffs in this area, which are logically sorted by their performance and thus also differ accordingly in price. But let’s take a closer look.

WordPress Hosting Price List
WordPress Hosting Price List

Starter: The WordPress hosting in the Starter tariff is available for four euros per month. Three domains are included, as well as an SSL certificate. 25 gigabytes of memory and a MySQL SSD database are an integral part of the package. For the price, this is not bad and very fair.

Basic: The Basic plan costs eight euros per month. For this you get five domains, which come with five SSL certificates. The memory increases to 50 gigabytes and instead of just one database, six are now included. There is also a test environment for WordPress.

Plus: The first serious package follows with the Plus plan. For ten euros a month, customers get ten domains and ten SSL certificates here. 75 gigabytes of memory and ten SSD databases are included, as are automatic backups, a WordPress test environment, and web statistics, which are also part of the tariff.

Pro: The highest tariff at the moment is the Pro variant. Here Strato gives twenty domains with twenty SSL certificates in addition. 100 gigabytes of memory are also sufficient for large projects and twenty SSD databases may be set up. In addition to the test environment, the backups and the statistics, there is also the possibility for cron jobs only in the Pro tariff.

By the way, you get even more with the web hoster:

  • HomePage-Builder
  • Server
  • vServer
  • Domains and e-mail
  • Cloud storage HiDrive
  • Individual business solutions

Use Strato 1-Click installation of WordPress

At Strato WordPress is copied to your webspace via a fast 1-Click-Installation. Here you can additionally choose between the “flexibility mode” and a so-called “security mode”. But what exactly distinguishes the two modes from each other?

The differences are much smaller than the name would suggest. Basically, the security mode installs updates automatically, while in the flexibility mode you can choose yourself what, when and, above all, how to install them.

The rest works quite simply. You choose a domain to be associated with the WordPress installation and then set the personal credentials. If everything is entered correctly, you will get the final links to your WordPress installation at the end. There are also the links to the actual blog and the access to the WordPress admin. All very simple. And if not completed with a single click, then pretty sure with extremely few.

Additional options with Strato WordPress hosting

Strato: Features for WordPress plans only.
Strato: Features for WordPress plans only.

WordPress hosting usually goes very specific to the CMS and its particular needs. Strato doesn’t necessarily do this, but at least brings some customized options into play. These are accordingly exclusive to WordPress, and in a way legitimize WordPress hosting as what it is ultimately presented as in the offer catalog.

What immediately stands out are, for example, additional security settings for WordPress. Directly in the menu, you can thus activate essential plugins for more security. These provide for a limitation of login attempts, an adjustment of the login URL of WordPress itself, as well as the currently used WordPress version can be hidden. All quite nice and as far as known as halfway useful.

However, now you certainly know, at least if you know a little better about WordPress, that such small options do not make the big difference in the end. They are minimal points that everyone should implement, but they won’t change much. However, that’s exactly why I think it’s good that Strato has integrated these options directly. Only you should consider them for what they ultimately are, useful little things.

Realize WordPress staging at Strato

My Strato Review: The Dashboard
Web Hosting Dashboard

Staging basically means nothing more than setting up a kind of test environment for the CMS. In the meantime, staging, especially with WordPress, often serves the other way around as a dynamic administration, while a static website is operated, but that seems too complex to me now, so that an explanation would make sense at this point. So let’s leave it at that for now and go into more detail in a separate article.

The fact is that Strato offers a test environment. As mentioned above in the tariffs, however, only from the Basic tariff. This test environment is also installed via 1-click, so it is available immediately and without major detours within the hosting.

The test environment in the web hosting is used to test new plugins, themes or snippets. Nothing can go wrong in this test environment and nothing will affect the live site. Ideal, therefore, for trying out new features or functions. Then, if everything goes smoothly, the result can be transferred to the actual website.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Pros

  • Favorable prices
  • Wide range of packages
  • Server in Germany
  • 24/7 phone support for € 10,00 monthly.

Cons

  • Not the fastest hoster
  • Not a WordPress professional

Strato speed

A server’s load time is best measured by its response time, or “time to first byte” (TTFB for short).

Time to first byte (TTFB) is a fundamental metric for measuring connection setup time and web server responsiveness, both in the lab and in practice.

Strato Time to First Byte: 0.18 – 0.25 seconds

This puts the provider in the upper third.

Strato Alternatives

Strato Support

Strato Support
Here you will be helped. The Strato Support.

Strato has an extensive online help. There you will already find a solution for most problems.

Support via contact form and telephone is of course also available. For € 10,00 per month even around the clock. Facebook and Twitter are also answered.

Unfortunately, there is no live chat.

This review is part of my hosting comparison

For the full rundown, check out the best WordPress hosting.

Frequently asked questions

For beginners and small blogs Strato is certainly recommended. However, if you want to get everything out of your WordPress website, a specialized WordPress hoster is more suitable.

The prices for domains are different for each extension. Also, you can pay domain per monthly or yearly.

A .de domain costs € 1,40 monthly, with a setup fee of € 10,00.
For a term of one year, the .de domain costs € 1,00 monthly.

Strato always includes sufficient free SSL certificates in the scope of services.

For extended security for stores, there are certificates for € 3.00, € 6.00 and € 17.00 monthly.

Conclusion about WordPress hosting from Strato

Strato offers WordPress hosting, but is not a dedicated WordPress hoster. What do I mean by that? Despite some additional features and the basic focus on WordPress with the corresponding tariffs and dedicated packages, the hosting itself is not particularly well adapted.

No dedicated servers, no hardware customizations, no special database types and no alternative web server software are used here. Rather, it is a classic web hosting that provides WordPress via 1-click installation and is accordingly particularly easy to use. No more and no less.

This is what distinguishes the hosting service provider
This is what distinguishes the hosting service provider

But wait, such a thing is not immediately wrong or bad. Rather, this kind of service is aimed at beginners and small bloggers in the private sector. So those who want to have as little as possible to do with the installation and management of WordPress. Basically, they don’t do anything wrong here, but they also don’t get any exciting extras.

If you are a professional, know your way around web servers, push WordPress to its limit with custom themes and plugins, then Strato’s WordPress hosting is absolutely not for you. You need a server that meets the needs of WordPress in the best possible way and a software that has been optimized exclusively for content management. Such WordPress hosters exist, but Strato is more of an all-rounder than a specialist.

That was the Strato review by the Blogger Pilot. So nothing for professionals, but interesting for private bloggers who want to have as little work as possible with WordPress.

Strato Review

Features
Usability
Price

Strato offers web hosting in Germany, Holland, Spain, France and the UK. Additionally, you can find special offers for WordPress and WooCommerce. Even a ready-made tariff with the page builder Elementor well it. PHP 8, fast SSDs and backups are part of the service.

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