Review: Uberspace – Web Hosting

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Uberspace in any way. This post doesn’t make any claim to comprehensiveness.

Uberspace is a German hosting provider that offers web hosting in an unique way. This article’s intent is to highlight what makes Uberspace unique and why I so highly recommend them.

The Good

Pay as much as you want

Yes, you read that right. Uberspace lets you pay as much (or as little) as you want for your web site – to be fair, 1€/month is the minimum. Uberspace also lets you adjust these rates monthly, so you’re able to pay less if you’re short on money and can then afterwards increase payments if you so chose.

No formal contract

There is no formal contract when you sign up to Uberspace. You create an account and you’re immediately good to go! The financial site is handled by charging that account via credit transfer. Credit cards and Paypal are currently not accepted.

Linux at your fingertips

Upon account creation, you’ll be able to set a password or a ssh-key and can then login to a Linux host, currently based on Centos 7. While you obviously can’t do a lot of things that require root access, Uberspace still allows you to install various compilers, add cron jobs, and a lot of other cool stuff that is, for the most part, not available for other hosting services.

Competent support and a great community

The Uberspace team is extremely fast and dilligent in helping their customers. So far, I’ve been able to get help quickly whenever I needed it. There are also two wikis:

  • The Uberspace manual (standard functions like web hosting and e-mail)
  • Uberlab (a bunch of guides how to install apps like WordPress, Gitlab Runner, etc

Flexible

Uberspace doesn’t provide a Domain Registering service. Why is this an advantage? Because then you can use any Domain Registry that you like (for example inwx.de).

One month of free Testing

Yep, that’s right. You can sign up for an account just now, test Uberspace and if you like what you see, sign up. Otherwise, your space eventually gets deleted.

The Bad

There isn’t any.

But, if we must and for the sake of completion: For people who hate working with a Linux Terminal, Uberspace is not the right kind of service. If you’re looking for a complete web hosting offering, you need to be aware that Uberspace doesn’t do Domain Registering. There are limitations to what you can do on your Uberspace – for example, Java as a backend is currently not supported (actually, Java 8 is available as of now). As such, Uberspace isn’t quite as powerful and flexible as a full Virtual Private Server. Any sort of operations that require sudo rights are obviously out of scope. Furthermore, there are limitations to the amount of traffic that is allowed for a standard account (100 GB of traffic, 500 mails per hour). Uberspace allows only one (predefined) mysql database user and places some further constraints on how the databases may be called.

Summary

Uberspace is exactly the sort of web hosting service that I need. It offers flexibility, yet is easy to configure. It also runs on Linux. The pay as you go and pay as much as you want models are unique and enable people who are short on money to have their own web space. Overall, my experience with Uberspace has been nothing but pleasant. There are some drawbacks, but these can be mostly be traced back to the pricing model and the inherent implications of a shared host. Payment options could and maybe should include Paypal and credit cards, but overall, there’s just not much to complain about here. As such, I award Uberspace a rating of 4.5/5.

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