By Kai Groennings, staff reporter

GewŸrztraminer (Ge-voorts-tra-MEE-ner) is a favorite German wine throughout the world, and is one of a few whites suitable with rather rich foods. So if you are looking to consume a slice of the rich opportunity in the German Webhosting industry, you might chase it with some GewŸrztraminer.

Germany is predicted to have the largest growth in online accounts in Europe by 2003, according to the IDC (International Data Corporation), as Germans become more accustomed to using electronic channels over their personal computers. And within the last two years, Germans have finally become comfortable with online transactions.

There's no doubt that since the mid-1990s, the business landscape in Germany has been undergoing radical change; since the end of the Cold War, the corporate infrastructure has had to orient itself anew. Though retarded by German unification struggles, Germany's Internet now commands one of the largest opportunities for the online industry in the world.

Leckerer Tafelwein
(Tasty table wine)
Strato (strato.de) and Puretec (puretec.de) are the two companies that first mass-marketed hosting to the broad marketplace in Germany, reaching out and making the hosting market available and easy to use. They both spent a lot of money promoting their services, and have seen a lot of growth. Ask Strato if they'll name their competitors, and you'll receive a curt "NEIN!" but they are blowing away their American rivals. The result of their efforts is myriad services that are cheaper than the counterpart Verio acquired - the German WWW-Service.

To get up and running on the Internet with Strato you will pay as little as 19 cents per month, compared to Verio's $21. Granted, these are not comparable packages, but for one POP 3 e-mail address, 5 MB of server, and 200 MB of data transfer per month, you get a $23 Economy Account with Verio; for just under $5, with Strato, you get 50 POP 3 e-mail addresses, 50 MB of server, and 6 GB of traffic.

Go figure: If you average the percent differences across these three categories, Strato is 30 times better and 4.6 times cheaper. Verio's VP of International Operations Tony Humpage responds, "I would say that we're more oriented toward businesses that are sensitive to quality of service in terms of performance and reliability, and the support that is available should the customer have problems." Verio also points to the Teles Group, of which Strato is a subsidiary, as being in financially tough straits.

"The company guarantees 99% server reliability on Sun E6500 and E4500 servers," rebuts Press Director Ssÿren Heinze. And after two loss-making quarters the fourth quarter of 1999 and the first quarter of 2000 the Teles Group was able to cross the breakeven point in the second quarter of 2000, which was concluded with a slightly positive result after tax. This turn-around was achieved somewhat faster than expected:

The company announced in its interim report for the first quarter that a significant loss after tax would result in the second quarter.

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