We don't just host servers – we go far beyond traditional hosting to guarantee the availability, performance, and resilience of your mission-critical online applications. As an owner-managed company, we combine over 20 years of software development expertise with deep consulting insights and reliable platform operations.
Our Philosophy: Digital Sovereignty & Open Source
lying Circus was founded by Christian Theune and Christian Zagrodnick, who continue to lead the company today as Managing Directors. From our headquarters in Halle (Saale) and our data center location in Oberhausen (NRW), we support mid-market enterprises, banks, insurance companies, and public sector institutions—from strategic planning to daily application operations. This allows us to provide mid-sized companies with true DevOps-as-a-Service for custom applications. Our experience ranges from highly secure field-service tools for banking and insurance to digital ecosystems in professional sports and high-availability systems for the industrial sector.
To us, digital sovereignty and open source are not marketing buzzwords; they have always been part of our company's moral and strategic DNA. We consistently leverage open source and rely exclusively on hardware and components from European manufacturers for our cloud stack. In doing so, we deliberately position ourselves as an alternative to the closed ecosystems of global providers. Instead of driving you into a proprietary vendor lock-in with hyperscalers, we rely on a purely open-source technology stack running on our own hardware—or, if preferred, on yours. And we mean this with absolute transparency: both our software and the entire underlying hardware stack are fully documented and publicly accessible to everyone. What this means for you: an open, fully auditable system, 100% data control, and, if desired, complete independence.
Our Technical Foundation: Cloud Made in Germany
We view security and data privacy as a societal responsibility. We operate our proprietary, Linux-based NixOS cloud platform according to the strict security standards of ISO 27001.
Primary Data Center (Oberhausen, NRW): Hosted in a separate, biometrically secured private suite managed by KAMP, an ISO/IEC 27001-certified operator.
Backup & Development Location (Halle am der Saale): A secondary lab data center equipped with a TÜV-certified IT-Safe solution by Prior1 for geo-redundancy and maximum disaster recovery security.
NixOS – The CloudOS of Tomorrow: Thanks to NixOS's declarative approach, our entire infrastructure is 100% reproducible. Configuration drift is eliminated, updates are atomic, and in the event of an issue, a flawless rollback is executed within seconds.
How We Work: Collaboration at Eye Level
We believe in a clear division of labor with maximum integration. This means your developers focus 100% on code and new features, while we act as your outsourced operations (Ops) department—taking full operational responsibility for the application and, upon request, even continuous application maintenance. We bring a proactive understanding of your application's workflows and support you as a trusted advisor in future architectural decisions. Our well-thought-out operational concepts give you the peace of mind that your project budget will be reliably maintained during ongoing operations. We put an end to the classic ping-pong game between Dev and Ops. Our in-house platform team offers genuine, engineer-led tech support (including up to 24/7 on-call availability) instead of anonymous ticketing systems.
"We're doing our job well when nobody notices we're doing it."
This is a core principle appreciated by renowned clients such as Star Alliance, Deutscher Ärzteverlag, and the Kölner Haie (haie.de) in their daily, seamless collaboration with us.
Hands-On Application Operations:
Our Proof of Concept
The problem with traditional "100% availability" is that it is a pure infrastructure metric. It tells you whether the servers have power and network connectivity—but not whether your application is actually running without errors. In modern operations, this separation between bare metal and code falls short. Complex software environments are dynamic and unpredictable; a green ping on a server is useless if the application is down.
Ultimately, business success doesn't depend on the theoretical uptime of the hardware, but on the resilience of the entire system and a minimal Time to Recovery (TTR) in an emergency. True resilience beats any uptime promise on paper.
Because reliable operations are hard to convey in website marketing copy, we offer you a direct reality check: test us in real-world daily operations, flexibly and without long-term contractual commitments. In a Proof of Concept (PoC), we migrate your application to our platform. This allows you to see live right away how we minimize risks and eliminate complexity through rigorous automation.
Björn Langer
Let's talk about your project!
As your first technical contact, I am committed to understanding your individual requirements and developing tailor-made approaches for the successful operation of your application. Our exchange also enables us to determine an initial price indication for your individual project. I look forward to talking to you!
