netcup is a German VPS, dedicated-server, and web-hosting provider operated by netcup GmbH (Emmy-Noether-Straße 10, 76131 Karlsruhe; HRB 705547 at Amtsgericht Mannheim; VAT DE262851304; managing directors Oliver Werner and Alexander Windbichler). The company traces back to a sole proprietorship run by Felix Preuß, was incorporated as netcup GmbH in 2008, and has been part of the Austrian Anexia group since November 2016. Anexia Holding GmbH (Klagenfurt, Austria) is wholly owned by its founder, Alexander Windbichler, with no private-equity or venture-capital investor identified on the cap table; both companies stated at the time of the acquisition that netcup would keep operating its own German infrastructure as a distinct brand. netcup reports more than 200,000 customers. The product line covers vServer (Lite, x86, ARM64), Root Server dedicated hardware on AMD EPYC, a vGPU line, server-attached block and backup storage, Managed Server and Managed Cloud Cluster (netcup's own in-house virtualization platform, not a managed Kubernetes offering), web hosting, and domain registration and reselling.
For an EU-sovereignty audit the picture is mixed but net-positive. netcup holds ISO/IEC 27001 (information security), ISO/IEC 27701 (privacy information management), ISO 9001, and ISO 14001, all audited by TÜV Nord since 2023, and covering the netcup, Anexia, and DATASIX group entities together. The company operates five customer-selectable data-centre locations: Nuremberg (Germany, the flagship, marketed as fully GDPR-compliant) and Vienna (Austria) are EU; Amsterdam (Netherlands) is EU; Manassas, Virginia (USA) and Singapore are not. Customers who don't pin their order to an EU location can end up on US or Singaporean infrastructure under netcup's own brand, not through a third-party reseller. netcup's own "Digital Sovereignty" marketing page states that customer data "is not subject to laws such as the CLOUD Act or the Patriot Act," a blanket claim that sits awkwardly next to the company's own Manassas facility and is less specific than the explicit per-facility court-jurisdiction commitments some EU competitors publish; this directory records the exposure as minor rather than none on that basis. The privacy policy also names OpenAI Ireland Ltd, with an explicit transfer to the USA, as a processor for AI-assisted support chat, alongside Stripe (Ireland, with its own sub-processors in third countries) for identity checks and PayPal (Luxembourg) for payments; these touch the support and billing layer, not customer VM workloads. A Data Processing Agreement under Art. 28 GDPR is offered at no extra charge but is generated per customer inside the login-gated Customer Control Panel rather than published as a static, publicly readable document, and no standalone public sub-processor registry was found.
Pricing is the headline differentiator: the cheapest vServer Lite tier (piko) starts at €1.84/month including 19% VAT on standard monthly billing with no minimum term advertised; the standard VPS 500 line starts at roughly €5.91/month (or €0.010/hour on pure hourly billing), and Root Server dedicated hardware and vGPU instances are priced separately. Infrastructure-as-code support exists only through unofficial, community-maintained Terraform providers (not a netcup-published provider), so iac_terraform is recorded as false. Best fit: indie developers, small SaaS builders, and prosumers who want low-cost, German-branded infrastructure with EU location pinning and don't need enterprise-grade compliance certifications such as BSI C5 or SecNumCloud. Procurement-grade buyers needing a stricter EU-only compliance posture should prefer Hetzner, OVHcloud, Scaleway, or STACKIT, listed above in this category.