At A Glance

IONOS offers affordable and speedy web hosting plans for individuals and businesses. All plans include a 99.9% uptime guarantee, 24/7 customer support, and professional email at your domain. The platform offers a one-click installer for WordPress and a drag-and-drop website builder. Overall, IONOS provides great value and offers a wide range of options for scaling your online presence.

Bandwidth: Unlimited

Free marketing offer: No

Uptime: 99.9%

Website builder: Yes (not included)

Money-back guarantee: 30 days

Price per month: From $6/mo

Overview

IONOS is a web hosting company that’s been helping individuals and businesses get online since 1988. The company offers a wide range of hosting options, including shared hosting, managed WordPress hosting, VPS (virtual private server) hosting, and dedicated servers.

All hosting plans include a professional email, an SSL certificate, 24/7 customer support, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. IONOS offers a drag-and-drop website builder to help you create your site, or, if you prefer, it makes it simple to install content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla! with one-click installers. Your site’s bandwidth is unlimited, but storage space varies based on your plan.

IONOS offers promotional pricing as low as $1 per month for your first six months. After this introductory offer, hosting plans start at only $5 per month.

Best Suited For

IONOS is suitable for a wide range of individuals and businesses. The platform offers an inexpensive shared hosting plan for a single website as well as business plans that let you build unlimited sites with unlimited storage. This hosting company especially stands out for businesses that want to have a consistent online presence thanks to its fast loading speeds and 99.9% uptime guarantee.

IONOS is also suitable if you need a website builder to help create your site. All website-builder plans include shared hosting. The drag-and-drop builder supports blogging, e-commerce, and multilingual websites.

In addition, IONOS may be a good option if you plan to rapidly increase your online presence. The company offers managed WordPress, VPS, and dedicated hosting options that you can scale as your site’s traffic grows.

Hosting Types

IONOS offers a wide range of hosting types for every need.

Shared hosting plans, the most basic tier, offer 10GB to unlimited storage as well as unlimited bandwidth. These plans include one-click installers for WordPress and other popular content management systems.

VPS hosting, a higher-tier product, offers 10-240GB of solid-state storage and support for Linux and Windows operating systems. VPS hosting plans include unlimited email inboxes and distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection.

The high-capacity dedicated hosting plans offer 240-800GB of solid-state storage and 8-64GB of RAM. All dedicated hosting plans include malware scanning, a content delivery network, access to a hosting management app, and automatic server backups.

Managed WordPress hosting plans, for those who want to build their site on WordPress, include 25GB to unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, and 12 months of free daily backups. These plans also include malware and DDoS protection.

Hosting Features

A professional email address comes with every IONOS plan. You can set up a single email at your domain (or more, depending on your plan) and manage an inbox with up to 2GB of storage.

Notably, IONOS doesn’t use cPanel to help you manage your website. Instead, the company has developed its own custom control panel. We found the control panel to be very straightforward to use, especially for first-time site owners who might be overwhelmed by cPanel. You can easily manage your email, domains, databases, and more.

IONOS supports MariaDB and MySQL databases and includes a free domain for one year with most plans. Storage space varies by plan (starting from 10GB), but unlimited storage is available for shared hosting on some plans. In addition, all shared hosting plans include unlimited bandwidth.

The IONOS drag-and-drop website builder has 18 templates and supports both standard and e-commerce websites. The builder is user-friendly and offers a fair amount of customization options, including the ability to edit your site’s CSS code. You can set up a blog and build an unlimited number of pages. You won’t find as many content elements as you would in website builders like Wix or Squarespace, but IONOS’s builder costs a lot less.

Plans & Pricing

IONOS offers three shared hosting plans, from lowest tier to highest: Essential, Starter, Plus and Ultimate. The Essential plan costs $6 per month and includes 10GB of storage. The Starter plan costs $8 per month and offers 100GB storage. The Plus plan costs $12 per month and adds malware protection, DDoS protection, and a content delivery network. The Ultimate plan starts at $10 per month with unlimited websites and storage and is excellent for multiple large web projects.

WordPress and VPS hosting plans are also available depending on your needs

Free Offerings

All IONOS plans include a 2GB email inbox, a free SSL certificate, and a free domain for one year.

Uptime and Performance

IONOS offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee for shared and managed WordPress hosting and a 99.99% uptime guarantee for VPS and dedicated server hosting plans. In a test using its Expert shared hosting plan, IONOS found that a basic website had an average page loading speed of 1.23 seconds.

All IONOS plans include an SSL certificate, but you must upgrade to get features like malware scanning, daily backups, or DDoS protection.

Technology

IONOS uses Intel Atom and Intel Xeon servers for its hosting service. VPS and dedicated server plans include solid-state drive storage in a RAID 1 configuration to provide redundant storage. Plans that include a content delivery network use the RailGun platform. For shared hosting, all site data is mirrored across two data centers in the US.

Ease of Use

IONOS has developed its own control panel instead of using the popular cPanel software. The custom control panel is well-organized and very easy to use. It separates your email and hosting features, making it easier to access your inbox. In addition, you can install WordPress and other content management systems using one-click installers.

Support Services

IONOS offers 24/7 customer service by phone and email. We called and were connected to a representative within a minute. The IONOS website also has an in-depth online knowledge base with dozens of step-by-step tutorials.

In Conclusion

IONOS caters to almost any user with its wide menu of shared, managed, VPS, and dedicated server plans. The platform offers a drag-and-drop website builder as well as one-click installers for popular content management systems, and its custom control panel is easy to navigate.

Best of all, every IONOS plan includes 99.9% uptime, 24/7 customer support, and professional email at your domain. Overall, IONOS offers excellent value for the money and provides options to scale up as your online presence grows.