As a hosting expert/website owner, I’ve reviewed many providers, so it made sense I evaluated IONOS – a provider that’s becoming popular. In the rest of this piece, I’ll give my honest thoughts on the host’s pricing plans, performance, and customer support. Whether you’re a total newbie or an expert developer, this review will help you make an informed decision before getting on board.

IONOS Hosting Review

Previously known as 1&1 or 1&1 IONOS, IONOS is constantly evolving to outperform its competitors. Widely known for its affordable pricing plans and reliable hosting services, this web host provider uses cutting-edge technology to serve over 12 million domains. As a result, IONOS emerged as the largest web hosting company in Europe.

IONOS offers a wide variety of pricing plans to cater to diverse audiences. These include shared VPS, dedicated, and even cloud plans. They have data centers on three continents: Europe, the US, and the UK. This is perfect if your audience is located in the said regions.

IONOS is rated A+ on the BBB directory. They have a rating of 4.1 out of 5.0 from 16,587 customers on TrustPilot.

Learn more about IONOS:

Pros and Cons

Pros:

Cons:

Unleash the potential of your website with high scalability and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. IONOS web hosting is a one-stop shop for everything you need to build and manage your website – lightning speed, reliable uptime, and out-of-the-box security features. Get started with IONOS today.

Rating Breakdown

Hosting providers come in all shapes and sizes… and offer a ton of varied features. To compare them fairly, it’s important we have a standardized comparison method that evaluates each host’s performance in an important area - speed, reliable uptime, accessibility to advanced developer tools, etc.

At HostAdvise, our expert team has created this standardized web hosting rating guide that scores each host and gives an overall ranking based on their performance. This way, it will be easier for you to make an informed decision that best fits your needs and budget.

IONOS Prices & Plans – 2023

IONOS offers shared, VPS, dedicated, WordPress, and cloud hosting. In addition, you’ll find more niche-specific plans such as Jamstack , woo-commerce , Joomla , ASP.NET for Windows OS, etc. In addition to these plans, IONOS offers email hosting and website-building services.

Each IONOS plan comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee which covers all fees except server usage fees and search engine marketing setup fees. However, before opting for any of the IONOS plans, consider your needs, goals, and budget.

Shared Hosting

IONOS recommends the business plan which is a better option since it’s most affordable. You’ll have access to 1-click installations for over 70 apps, free wildcard SSL certificates, daily backups, free CDN, and many more. However, it returns to the initial price of $10/mo after one year

VPS Hosting

Standard

IONOS recommends the VPS XL plan, and it’s not hard to see why. You get a whooping 160GB SSD storage space, 4vCores, Ubuntu 22.04, and other configuration features for just $2 per month.

Memory Optimized

IONOS recommends the VPS XL RAM, which is the most affordable plan on the list for the six months. This price reverts to $25 per month after the grace period is maximized. The daily backup feature isn’t included in this plan and has to be purchased as an additional service.

VPU Optimized

IONOS recommends the VPS vCore XL plan, starting at $4 monthly. After six months, it renews at $27 per month. Extra features like the Windows OS, Plesk management system, and backup attract extra cost.

Dedicated Hosting

SSD

The SSD dedicated plan comes with SSD storage which is faster than the traditional hard drives. This means your website will load faster, boost performance and reduce latency. In addition, you’ll get SSH access, IPv6 support, unlimited FTP accounts, daily backups, and many more.

HDD

The HHD dedicated plan has larger storage capacity but uses HHDs (hard disk drive) which is slower than the SSDs. Since they’re cheaper than SSD plans, it’s a perfect option for businesses that want access to dedicated resources but have a limited budget.

Windows Hosting

The IONOS Windows plan offers fully customizable options to customers including installation of custom software, adding free domain extensions, access to advanced and updated versions of developer tools such as MariaDB 10 and MySQL database, etc.

WordPress Hosting

IONOS offers two types of WordPress Hosting: Managed and unmanaged WordPress hosting. Both have similar pricing plans with a slight difference in the features. For the managed plan, the WordPress assistant manages your WordPress account. This AI can build your WordPress site and suggest and install themes, plugins, etc.

IONOS Features

• Free SSL certificates and Cloudflare CDN
• Offers shared, WordPress, Dedicated, VPS, Windows hosting
• Sustainable data centers
• Reliable uptime

One of the features that stood out to me and made them unique from other providers is their ASP.NET hosting plans – specifically for Windows OS. This benefits Windows developers because they can easily access the requirements for building websites with .net and ASP.NET languages.

The IONOS Windows plan supports the latest version of the Windows server, ASP.NET, and .Net languages, respectively. Most importantly, each package in this plan comes with MS SQL, Cron manager, unlimited FTPS accounts, SSH access, free domains, and many other developer-friendly tools.

In addition, I love the IONOS custom-designed control panel, which looks more appealing than the regular cPanel. Here, you’ll find all the tools for setting up and managing your website.

Performance

IONOS boasts fast and scalable hosting services for all its users. To prove this, I tested the uptime, speed, and page load time. However, the proximity of your data center to your audience impacts the loading time and speed. Choose the nearest location to any IONOS Hosting data centers for better ranking and performance.

IONOS promises a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which is incredible considering the price. This proves IONOS is a reliable provider with only a few seconds of downtime annually for server maintenance.

Then, I tested for speed and response time using blinkforhome.com, a website hosted on IONOS . The overall performance showed 87%, which is also impressive.

Regarding speed, the results were slightly below my expectations and can be improved. The LCP took 780 ms, below the market average of 1.2 ms. This means your website can rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Lastly, I tested the page load time and the TTFB, and the results were reasonably good and can be improved. It took 1.7s to load the website fully:

Conclusively, IONOS performance is above average and surpasses many competitors offering similar packages at higher prices.

Level of Support

IONOS offers three kinds of support for all their customers:

Phone

IONOS provides a list of helplines for specific regions:

They have an additional customer support line available for US and non-US countries. Although this comes at a cost for countries outside the US:

Live chat

The live chat support is always faster, and I prefer using it when I encounter technical issues. But at the time of computing this review, IONOS live chat option was temporarily unavailable. So I couldn’t test that feature:

A vast knowledge base

The help center has a search engine feature where you can access almost all issues you’ll encounter while using IONOS:

Cloud support

Cloud support is specifically for users using or interested in IONOS cloud hosting. Opt for the free consultation if you are interested in using cloud hosting but need to figure out the right package that best fits your business. They have a team of experts ready to guide you and ease your decision-making process.

Secondly, IONOS has a rich library with guides, tutorials, FAQs, and other resources that give in-depth explanations of using the IONOS cloud hosting feature:

Lastly, they offer their special ‘Personal Consultant’ where you get a dedicated agent to attend to your needs:

User-Friendliness – Ease of use

Registration

Creating an account with Hosting is pretty straightforward. All you need to do is to purchase any of their plans from the homepage. You’ll find the list of hosting services they provide here:

Simply click on any of the services listed, and you’ll see a drop-down list of hosting packages available:

Once you’ve found the right package that fits your needs, click the ‘add to cart’ button:

Next, you’ll see a page to add your domain. If you don’t have a domain name yet, no worries! Simply click the ‘proceed without domain’ button at the bottom right corner of the page:

Once that’s sorted, IONOS automatically recommends add-ons that are beneficial to your web hosting plan. The add-ons are free for 30 days, and you won’t be charged until after this period. If you don’t want any, you can skip this page:

Lastly, you’ll be directed to the check-out page:

Congratulations! You’ll now have access to the IONOS account management dashboard.

IONOS Control Panel

IONOS has a neat and modern custom-made control panel that doubles as the main dashboard. Here, you can access your account and manage your website. The UI is interactive and intuitive, and you’ll find no trouble navigating the platform:

Overall, I love that the dashboard/control panel has a steep learning curve, well-organized, and is highly practical.

Installing WordPress on IONOS 

Installing WordPress on IONOS is almost instant. They provide a 1-Click WordPress installation tool to create a WordPress account. You’ll also find a WordPress Setup Assistant plugin that automatically creates your account, suggests and installs design templates, installs various plugins, and many more.

IONOS provides a more detailed explanation to help you get started. Check it out here.

Add an email account with IONOS 

To set up your email account(s) on IONOS , simply log into your account and click the email icon on the dashboard. Click the ‘add email address’ button.

Next, you’ll be directed to choose your desired IONOS email product. IONOS recommends the Mail Basic option, but two other options are available. Lastly, you’ll fill out a form where you can add your email and password and choose a domain.

Click ‘save,’ and your email account is ready.

Conclusion: Do We Recommend IONOS ?

IONOS is a great host, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for reliable web hosting. The wide range of hosting options and fair pricing plans is alluring, especially to business owners with a minimal budget.

Another intriguing aspect is that their plans come with unmetered bandwidth, unlimited traffic, and advanced developer tools. Aside from the customer service, which needs improvements, I believe IONOS is a solid web provider and an excellent choice for anyone who wants to build and manage a website.

And lastly, IONO has incredible support features you get to enjoy, especially as a paid customer.