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VPS in Falkenstein: a big campus in a small town
Falkenstein is a small town in the Vogtland, in south-western Saxony, with fewer than ten thousand residents. It became a hosting hub thanks to one large German provider that built a campus of many buildings here. There are no other data centres of that scale in town, so almost all plans with this location sit in the same campus one way or another: either with the owner itself or with hosts that rent its servers and resell the resources under their own brand.
Why a data centre in the countryside
The logic is simple: land and electricity in the countryside cost less than in Frankfurt, and the network to the major hubs can be built over the operator's own fibre. The campus owner is connected to exchange points in Frankfurt and other cities, so to a user a server in Falkenstein looks almost like one in Frankfurt:
- Frankfurt is about 5–8 ms away, Prague 5–10 ms, Vienna and Warsaw 10–20 ms;
- Amsterdam and London are about 15–20 ms away, Paris about 15–20 ms;
- the US east coast is usually 90–100 ms away.
The savings on the site go into the price: for the same money you often get more cores, RAM and NVMe here than in a hub city. A country overview with GDPR rules and abuse policies is on the VPS in Germany page.
Own plan or resale
The key thing to understand about Falkenstein: many plans in the table above physically run on the same hardware but are sold by different companies. A reseller may offer a more convenient payment method, a control panel in your language or a type of virtualization the campus owner doesn't offer. In exchange you get one more link in the chain: if the reseller has trouble paying for its servers or shuts down, your machine disappears with it.
So when choosing:
- ask what hardware the plan runs on and how often the reseller backs up virtual machines;
- check how many years the company has been around and whether it has other locations you could move to;
- keep your own backups outside the campus, even if the host promises its own.
This setup has an upside too. If you'd rather not deal with the campus owner directly, didn't pass its verification or prefer different billing, a reseller gives you access to the same network and the same latency. And if a reseller's plan no longer suits you, moving to another seller in the same campus barely changes ping for your users.
The backup mistake: Nuremberg and Falkenstein
A common idea is to put the main server in Falkenstein and the backup in Nuremberg, "in another city". These are indeed different buildings, but with the same network owner: shared backbones, shared attack protection, shared rules for handling complaints and a single account. An outage in the provider's network or an account suspension will hit both sites at once. For a real backup, take the second server from a different host in a different country, for example in Finland or the Netherlands.
What Falkenstein is best for
- Builds and tests: CI runners need cores and a fast disk, not a short path to the clouds; see the VPS for CI/CD selection.
- Storage and backups, where disk space per euro matters.
- Backends and databases for European projects, when a CDN serves the frontend.
- Game servers for players in Central Europe: Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland and Austria within 20 ms.
What to check when a plan says "Falkenstein"
The city in the catalogue comes from the host's list of sites. Resellers sometimes list "Germany" or "Falkenstein" for any site of their supplier, so make sure the server won't end up in another city or country. Check the test IP: a route out of the campus is recognisable by the provider's network name in the traceroute. And read the traffic rules: a reseller's "unlimited" is often limited, and they pass the supplier's quota on to the customer. Finally, ask who handles complaints: usually the notice goes to the campus owner, who forwards it to the reseller, who forwards it to you, and that chain leaves you less time to respond.
On payment: the campus owner works in euros, with cards, PayPal and bank transfer, and businesses get an invoice with VAT handled under EU rules. Resellers often offer a wider choice, including other currencies and cryptocurrency as a payment method. The "Payment" column in the table above shows what is available for each plan.