Guide · To managed hosting
Managed hosting, cloud or your own server — cost, data protection and responsibility, compared honestly.
The short answer: the server is the smallest item. What separates the routes is who is on duty at night — and what that costs per year, in euros, in hours and in data protection. The long answer is on this page, with the figures providers publish themselves.
It is not the rent that decides, but four duties that come due every month — wherever the application runs. The invoice only shows what somebody actually does.
The same application, three operating models, four invoices. The ranges come from providers' price lists and from salary data — not from a noalen quote.
hardware once — plus a person
A server in the back room costs a few thousand euros once, plus power, spare parts and a UPS. The real item is the responsibility: a system administrator in Germany earns around €47,600 a year on average. Even a fifth of that time is almost €10,000 a year — and holidays, illness and retirement all hang on one person.
approx. €5–70 per month — plus your time
A small cloud machine starts at around €5, a dedicated server at around €68 per month (German provider, prices since April 2026). The price buys metal and bandwidth, not duties: patching, backups, monitoring and on-call stay with you. It is only cheap if somebody has the hours.
from approx. €50 per machine — traffic extra
A small virtual machine is around €50 a month; outbound traffic on AWS costs $0.09 per gigabyte, so one terabyte a month is about $83. The bill consists of dozens of line items, operations remain your work — and the provider is subject to US law. 85 percent of German companies consider that dependency too great.
typically €350–600 per machine per month
The price includes the work: patching, backups with restore drills, monitoring, on-call, data processing agreement. Compared with a fifth of an administrator it is not a surcharge but the same bill with a response time in the contract. Watch for two sentences: where are the servers, and what does it say when something fails?
The sources the figures come from: hagel IT, "Cloud-Server 2026: IaaS vs. Managed Server für KMU" (managed servers typically €350–600/month per VM, Azure B2s from ~€50/month, Hetzner CX22 from €4.90) · Deskmodder, "Hetzner erhöht Preise ab April 2026" (dedicated AX42 €68.19/month, cloud CAX11 €5.34/month) · EgressCost, "AWS Data Transfer & Egress Pricing 2026" ($0.09/GB outbound up to 10 TB, 1 TB/month ≈ $83) · StepStone, system administrator salary 2026 (average €47,600 gross per year) · Bitkom, Cloud Report 2026 (86% of companies use cloud services, 85% consider Germany too dependent on US providers).
Every invoice omits what nobody does. Three items that usually fall off the table when comparing routes — and decide in the second year.
The application stops responding, a customer calls. If you self-operate, you are now the operations team — with managed hosting the contract says who gets up and by when. Count those hours before comparing monthly prices.
Almost everyone has a backup. Far fewer have ever restored it. The difference shows exactly once — when data is lost. Ask for the last restore drill with a date, not for the backup schedule.
Proprietary cloud services, data export for a fee, contracts with minimum terms: the deeper the application sits inside one provider, the more expensive the move. Ask beforehand how you get your data back in full — and what that costs.
The difference is not the server — you can rent one anywhere. The difference is what runs on it: a security stack and an operations stack — update management, vulnerability scans, attack detection (SIEM) and role-based access on one side; monitoring and alerting, backups with restore drills and operations by ITIL processes on the other. Both on our own hardware in Germany, with a GDPR data processing agreement — also for software you bring along.
And every change takes the same way into operations: the source code is versioned, every change traceable. An automatic build with unit and end-to-end tests checks it. Security checks scan dependencies and image, then sign and attest the result. An approval via review and quality gate decides what goes on. Delivery runs via GitOps with a pinned version — a gatekeeper lets only signed code run. Every change has a documented way back, a rollback takes minutes. And when something happens: alert, on-call, fix, root cause. So you get what large companies expect from their operations — fixed processes, commitments, responsibility — combined with the DevOps principles that keep them affordable: automation, short paths, every change checked and reversible.
Deliberately no prices here: operations are calculated after intake — size, data volume, commitments — and then stated in the contract, with target availability, response times and maintenance windows. How we work together is agreed individually; your data comes back in full in any case.
To managed hostingThe drawing at the top shows an application's way into operations — the way it should look at a managed hosting provider working by DevOps principles. What the individual stations mean:
For a fully managed server — patching, backups, monitoring, on-call — providers typically quote €350 to €600 per machine per month, depending on size and data volume. A self-managed server is available from about €5 to €70, but includes none of these services. noalen calculates operations after intake and states the price in the contract.
For a single application with steady load, a rented dedicated server is usually cheaper than a comparable cloud machine, mainly because cloud traffic is billed per gigabyte. The cloud pays off with strongly fluctuating load. Neither route includes operations — the person who patches and backs up comes on top in every case.
It can be set up to comply, but it remains a transfer to a provider under US law. The legal basis is an EU adequacy decision that has already been struck down twice by the European Court of Justice. If you do not want to carry that risk, choose a provider in Germany without sub-processors outside the EU.
That the provider takes over the duties that would otherwise be yours: installing security updates, backing up and testing the backup, monitoring, responding to incidents, providing the data processing agreement. Ask about each of these five services individually — "managed" is not a protected term.
Through a fixed chain that is the same for every change: versioned source code, automatic build with tests, security checks (dependencies and image scanned, signed, attested), approval via review and quality gate, delivery via GitOps with a pinned version. A gatekeeper in the cluster lets only signed code run; every change has a way back. That is exactly what the drawing at the top of this page shows.
Yes. Managed hosting at noalen also covers applications you bring along: line-of-business software, shop, database. The move starts with an intake — what runs where, which data, which dependencies — and ends with a test run before switching over.
That should be settled before the contract: notice period, complete data export in an open format, no fee for handing it over. At noalen, term and notice are agreed individually — and you get your data back in full in any case.
No. It is orientation from the practice of operating software — which questions to ask and how to recognise solid answers. For your specific case, your contracts and your sector, proper data-protection counsel remains the right path.
What follows from the comparison depends on your application. These pages describe what noalen operates for you — complete, with responsibility, in Germany.
Your application runs: servers, backups, monitoring, on-call — all from one source.
Operations plus maintenance, further development and support.
If the application still needs to be built.
And the questions that come before operations: What does custom software cost? — the guide with the market's figures.
As well as: Is it GDPR-compliant? — the four questions to ask before commissioning.
Contact
What runs where today, which data, which commitments do you need? An intake, an operations concept — then you know what it costs.
Request a conversationOr the service in detail first: Managed hosting at noalen.