Servage GmbH is a German web hosting provider headquartered in

Flensburg Flensburg (; Danish, Low Saxon: ''Flensborg''; North Frisian: ''Flansborj''; South Jutlandic: ''Flensborre'') is an independent town (''kreisfreie Stadt'') in the north of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Flensburg is the centre of the ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

. The company is doing business as Servage Hosting. The company is a subsidiary to the Swedish company Servage AB (publ). The corporate name Servage is an offspring of "Serve" and "Age". As such, the name equates to the company's branding toward modern service.

Early years

The company was incorporated in 2004 by

Steffan Sondermark Fallesen Steffan Søndermark Fallesen (born 1981) is an Internet entrepreneur. He founded Servage Hosting (one of Germany's largest hosting companies) immediately after moving to Flensburg. He sold Servage Hosting to the Swedish firm Tele5 Voice Servic ...

and later sold to the

publicly listed A public company is a company whose ownership is organized via shares of share capital, stock which are intended to be freely traded on a stock exchange or in Over-the-counter (finance), over-the-counter markets. A public (publicly traded) comp ...

Swedish telecommunication firm Tele5 Voice Services AB for $3.5 million cash in May 2007 and left the company in October 2009. In 2008 Tele5 Voice Services AB changed its name to Servage AB as chairman of the Tele5 Voice Services AB board

Per Bergström Per is a Latin preposition which means "through" or "for each", as in per capita. Per or PER may also refer to: Places * IOC country code for Peru * Pér, a village in Hungary * Chapman code for Perthshire, historic county in Scotland Math ...

felt that Servage was a better suited brand name for an international corporation. During the first three years the company operated only an

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

version but in recent years

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...

Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent * Polish chicken *Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...

Danish Danish may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the country of Denmark People * A national or citizen of Denmark, also called a "Dane," see Demographics of Denmark * Culture of Denmark * Danish people or Danes, people with a Danish ance ...

and

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

versions are also offered. Company is now among the 20 largest

web hosts.

Criticism

Servage has been criticized for overselling its services in order to keep up with competition in recent years. There have also been large numbers of Servage customers reporting that their sites have been repeatedly hacked, resulting in malicious code being inserted into their web-pages. Servage claims that the issue is resolved by their new server operating system ServageOS. Servage has also used the term "

WebDrive WebDrive is a drive mapping utility that supports accessing remote file servers using open FTP, FTPS, SFTP, and WebDAV protocols, and proprietary or vendor-specific protocols. It can be run as a Windows service and supports automatic mounting o ...

" which is a registered trademark of South River Technologies

Network

Servage is operating network AS 29671 which interconnects to

Versatel Tele2 Netherlands (formerly ''Versatel Telecom International N.V'') is a brand name of telecommunications company T-Mobile Netherlands, operating on the Dutch and Belgian market. It sells fixed telephony, mobile telephony, broadband internet and d ...

TeliaSonera Telia Company AB is a Swedish multinational telecommunications company and mobile network operator present in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Telia also owns TV4 Media which includes TV4 in Sweden, MTV Oy in Fi ...

Tiscali Tiscali S.p.a. () is an Italian telecommunications company, based in Cagliari, Sardinia, that provides internet and telecommunications services to its domestic market. It previously had operations in other European nations through its acquisitio ...

and

Cogent Communications Cogent Communications is a multinational internet service provider based in the United States. Cogent's primary services consist of Internet access and data transport, offered on a fiber optic, IP data-only network, along with colocation in data ...

. In an attempt to become fully

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

powered Servage changed its entire

network infrastructure A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...

to the open-source routing platform

GNU Zebra Zebra is a routing software package that provides TCP/IP based routing services with routing protocols support such as RIP, OSPF and BGP. Zebra also supports special BGP Route Reflector and Route Server behavior. In addition to traditional IPv4 ...

in 2007. Prior to the change Servage had been using Cisco routers. As of 28 April 2010, mass hacking of Servage hosted sites identified by url=http://blog.unmaskparasites.com/2010/04/28/hackers-abuse-servage-hosting-to-poison-google-image-search/. Hackers hotlink images scraped from google image search on hundreds of hacked Servage domains, then manage to take the place of the original host domain in the google image SERPs. When a surfer clicks the hijacked image, traffic from google is redirected to malware site.

ServageOS

October 21, 2008 the company released a new customized

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

version (ServageOS) for use on its server clusters. Most notable features is full process separation between customers and other similar security enhancements suitable for hosting environments.

Servage Control Panel

Servage has an in-house developed Control Panel, some of the functions found inside the Control Panel are mentioned below. - E-Mail Management - Optional Antispam System - Autoinstaller - FTP Management - Online Filemanager - WebDrive - Full DNS Control - Integrated Accounting - Help Center

Award Nominations

* 2010 XBIZ Award Nominee: Web Host of the Year XBIZ Announces Finalist Nominees for 2010 XBIZ Awards
'' XBIZ'', Wednesday, Dec 16, 2009

Additional information

Servage Magazine

Servage runs a blog, or as it is called Servage Magazine which offers tips for web hosting customers regardless if they have a Servage Hosting accounts or not, the blog is interactive and allows for comments from the readers. The blog is updated regularly and the feed is also available at Servage's page on Facebook.

Servage Wiki

Along with the blog/magazine, Servage also provides an online knowledge base in Wiki-form, Servage Wiki, with information about an account with Servage. Being a Wiki it is encouraging contribution by anyone possessing relevant knowledge on a subject.