Ionos Review: The Best Web Host We’ve Tested So Far

Pros

• Excellent long-term pricing, especially for shared hosting
• Wide variety of plans, including VPS and dedicated hosting
• Excellent uptime
• Fast, reliable customer service

Cons

• Lots of upsells during the purchase process and initial site creation
• Mediocre site speed

Ionos, formerly 1&1 Ionos, is a web-hosting and data infrastructure company founded in Germany in 1988, with over 6.2 million customers around the globe. The numbers are impressive -- but is the company? That’s what I set out to discover in my hands-on Ionos review.

I purchased an Ionos plan and spent a week testing Ionos’s account management, site creation, server management and customer service. I also ran one week of uptime monitoring and several speed tests, as outlined in CNET's explainer on How We Test Web Hosting.

Despite some initial complications, Ionos impressed me at almost every stage of my review. My favorite part was the fast and reliable customer support, especially after the disappointment I’ve experienced with the customer service of other web-hosting services I’ve tested. If you’re looking for shared hosting, Ionos is a great choice.

Ionos plans and pricing: Versatile and affordable

Ionos offers several types of web hosting:

• Shared hosting 
• WordPress hosting
• Website builder hosting
• eCommerce hosting
• VPS hosting
• Dedicated hosting

Ionos also features cloud computing, allowing developers, large companies and businesses with unique data needs to build custom cloud servers and virtual data centers. 

Here’s a quick breakdown of Ionos’s customer-focused hosting types:

Ionos’s pricing structure is unique, with most hosting types -- including shared, WordPress and website builder -- offering midtier plans at $1 a month for the first year. That’s cheaper than the basic plans, so you get more value for your dollar initially, like the ability to host more websites and more data storage. While the renewal pricing is higher, often $12 or more, Ionos’s competitively priced midrange plans give you more value for the first year than competitors. You can switch to the base plan in a year if you’re not using all the midtier plan’s features.

Let’s take a closer look at what Ionos offers for each type of web hosting.

Shared hosting

In shared hosting, a web host splits a web server’s resources -- like storage and processing power -- between numerous websites. This limits your site’s space for files -- like blog posts and web pages -- and how many monthly visitors it can have. However, most shared hosting includes enough data for hundreds or thousands of pages and bandwidth for 10,000 to 400,000 monthly visitors, making it suitable for most hobby sites, blogs and small business websites.

Splitting a server between many websites allows the hosting company to also divide the cost of maintaining the server between many customers, making shared hosting highly affordable. Many plans start at $2 to $5 a month and rise to $10 to $20 per month on renewal. This, along with the ease-of-use offered by a prebuilt server, makes shared hosting great for first-time website creators.

All four of Ionos’s shared hosting plans include:

• A free domain for the first year
• SSL certification
• Email hosting for one email address
• Daily backups
• 99.99% uptime guarantee
• Unmetered bandwidth
• 24/7 access to support via phone and live chat

The main differences between plans are the storage, bandwidth and price:

All of the prices listed above are based on a one-year contract. You may end up paying more if you choose a different contract length.

WordPress hosting

WordPress is a popular content management system (aka CMS) for creating, organizing and maintaining blog posts and web pages. Many companies, including Ionos, offer specialized hosting with automated WordPress updates and other tools to simplify running a WordPress site. Ionos’s WordPress hosting also includes dedicated resources (memory and processing power) to ensure reliable and fast site performance, plus advanced security tools like a vulnerabilities scanner.

Ionos offers its midrange Grow plan for a starting price of $1 a month, with 50GB of storage, enough for at least 500 pages, and unlimited traffic. However, this plan increases to $10 a month on renewal. You can build a smaller website for a lower long-term cost by purchasing the entry-level Start plan for $5 a month. The Start plan renews at just $6 a month and includes enough storage for at least 250 pages, plus unlimited traffic. 

Larger websites can use Ionos’s Boost plan, which provides enough storage for at least 750 web pages, 20GB of RAM for improved site speed and email hosting for 10 email addresses. The Boost plan costs $12 a month to start and renews at $15 a month.

Website builder hosting

Ionos offers specialized web hosting for its website builder, a tool designed to help you build a site without using any code, complicated updates or a need to install additional software. Ionos’s website builder even includes an AI site generator that lets you enter basic information about your website -- like the name you want and the purpose of your site -- and uses that to build a site for you in minutes.

You can add the website builder to any Ionos plan or buy the specialized website builder plan for $1 a month in the first year and $18 a month on renewal.

eCommerce hosting

eCommerce hosting is optimized for running software necessary to create an online store. Ionos offers plans for four types of store-building software:

• WooCommerce: A plugin used to create an online store with WordPress. This plan starts at $16 a month for the first year and rises to $20 a month on renewal.
• Online store builder: The Ionos site builder with added e-commerce functionality. There are several online store builder plans, with the entry-level option starting at $6 a month and rising to $24 a month on renewal. The midrange Plus plan starts at $1 a month but rises to $30 a month on renewal, leading to higher long-term costs.
• Magento: Magento is the open-source version of Adobe Commerce, an Adobe-owned solution for creating an attractive online store. The Magento platform is aimed at developers who understand how to take advantage of its extensive customizability. Ionos’s Magento hosting plans start at $0.0097 per hour, with a maximum of $7 a month.
• PrestaShop: PrestaShop is a specialized e-commerce store builder predominantly used in Europe and Latin America. The lowest introductory price for Ionos’s PrestaShop hosting is $1 a month for the middle-of-the-pack Plus plan, but this plan increases to $12 a month on renewal. You can save more money in the long run with the base Essential plan, which starts at $4 a month and renews at $6 a month.

VPS Hosting

VPS (virtual private server) hosting involves partitioning sections of a physical web server into several virtual servers. Each virtual server has dedicated resources, like processing power and bandwidth, to ensure faster, more reliable performance than shared hosting. Most VPS plans can also accommodate more monthly users than shared hosting plans.

Ionos offers several unmanaged VPS plans, meaning you’ll be responsible for configuring and updating the digital aspects of your server -- like the operating system -- yourself. These plans start at $2 a month for the resources needed to create at least 100 pages and accommodate unlimited monthly visitors.

Dedicated hosting

Dedicated hosting involves renting an entire web server for yourself. You’ll get all of the server’s resources, often including enough storage for tens or hundreds of thousands of web pages and millions of visitors.

Ionos offers unmanaged dedicated hosting on either Intel servers or AMD servers (powered by Ryzen and Epyc processors). The most affordable plan starts at $32 a month ($65 a month on renewal) for enough resources for you to create over 100,000 pages. However, this plan relies entirely on hard drive storage (aka HDD), which isn’t as fast as the industry-standard SSD (solid state) storage. Instead, I recommend the $50-a-month plan, which uses HDD storage for static pages and SSD storage for smoothly running applications like WordPress.

Ionos ease of use: Sales-y but simple

I purchased the Essential shared hosting plan to test Ionos’s ease of use in three areas: the purchase process, account management, and website creation and server management.

Purchase process

The Ionos purchase process is very involved, with each step (from choosing a domain to making your payment) located on a different page. There’s even an entire page devoted to upsells, trying to get you to buy things like email hosting. This is cumbersome when compared to the upsells included in the checkout process of companies like HostGator, but is similar to the GoDaddy purchase process. The good news is that you don’t need to pay attention to this page; you can skip it and not worry about any preselected upsells.

Ionos web-hosting checkout with optional upsells such as cloud storage, email access and malware protection, that aren't preselected.

Screenshot/CNET

Skipping the upsells takes you to the shopping cart, where you can see the best thing about the Ionos purchase process: a clear explanation of what you’ll pay for your first term and how much the price increases on renewal. I love how well this is laid out, especially compared to how other companies, like A2 Hosting, hide this information during purchase.

Ionos web hosting makes the checkout process pretty simple.

Screenshot/CNET

Overall, purchasing a plan from Ionos is a bit cumbersome, especially when compared to the one-page checkout offered by companies like HostGator and A2 Hosting. However, the clarity around pricing is the best I’ve seen. Another benefit is that the upsells, while intrusive, aren’t preselected, so you don’t have to worry about surprise fees -- something you do have to watch out for when buying from companies like HostGator and DreamHost.

Account management

The Ionos account dashboard immediately impressed me with its easy-to-navigate layout. Important areas -- like domain and website management -- are accessible through buttons in the center of the page. You can even access account and billing settings through these buttons, which is great when compared to companies like HostGator that hide these settings in a corner menu. The categories Ionos uses are broad enough to include everything in just six categories, avoiding the overload I experienced in the InMotion dashboard. 

Screenshot/CNET

Website and server management

At first glance, creating a website with Ionos seemed easy. The Websites & Storesbutton takes you to a page listing various options for building a site:

Screenshot/CNET

However, if you click Create a Website, Ionos takes you to a page listing various hosting plans. The Continue buttons don’t mention payment, but when you click on one, you’ll see that you’re only getting a free trial -- Ionos will automatically charge you for this plan as an add-on after the first month.

Screenshot/CNET

To create a website without making additional purchases, I had to return to the original Websites & Stores page and click Create a WordPress Project. This led to yet another upsell -- for managed WordPress hosting -- but I did find a button saying Manage WordPress Yourself underneath. This whole process was rather shocking, as I’ve never encountered such aggressive upsells when trying to perform initial site setup on other hosts.

Screenshot/CNET

The WordPress installation process itself was partially guided, offering some preselected themes for me to choose from based on the purpose of my site -- blogging -- and plugins to optimize the theme. The only hiccup was the lack of automatic SSL certification, an issue I fixed with two more quick clicks.

The WordPress install is pretty standard, without additional tools like the A2 Hosting Site Assistant. This isn’t a big deal for most users, as the WordPress dashboard is fairly simple to navigate and there are thousands of tutorials to help you. However, you might want to consider A2 Hosting if you want your web host to hold your hand through site creation.

The one additional tool Ionos offers for WordPress users is Ionos Performance, a plugin that lets you control various site settings to improve speed.

Screenshot/CNET

Server management

Ionos uses a proprietary system for server management instead of the industry-standard cPanel. Clicking on the Hosting button in the account dashboard takes you to a page where you can view different aspects of this system, including Webspace -- a dedicated area for storage information -- Databases and PHP management.

Screenshot/CNET

Everything is clearly labeled and the individual areas are intuitive to navigate. In fact, I found the user interface for Ionos’s hosting management system easier to navigate than cPanel -- and I’m an experienced cPanel user.

Screenshot/CNET

Despite the simplicity of this system, it can be a drawback if you’re already used to cPanel and you don’t want to switch to something else. Ionos’s proprietary system can also complicate transferring your site to a new host later on, as many free web-hosting transfer services transfer the cPanel from one host to another and aren’t trained to deal with other systems. Similarly, most tutorials for manually transferring your site to a new host focus on how to transfer a cPanel site.

Overall ease of use

The unwieldy purchase process and the aggressive attempts to upsell higher-tier plans when I was trying to install WordPress made it incredibly frustrating to get started with Ionos. Things got easier once I had WordPress set up, and I’m a big fan of how simple the hosting management tools are, but I’m still only giving Ionos a 6.5/10 ranking for ease of use. This is one of the lowest ease-of-use rankings of any hosting company I’ve tested so far; only DreamHost scored lower, with a ranking of 4/10.

Ionos performance: Excellent uptime, mediocre speed

The next thing I considered for my Ionos review is how well the servers perform in two areas: uptime, the percentage of time sites are accessible online for; and site speed, how quickly a site loads. I also took a quick look at the performance tools offered by Ionos.

Performance tools

Ionos doesn’t list any performance tools on the page for shared hosting plans, but when I booted up WordPress, I found a preinstalled Ionos Performance Plugin. This plugin lets you enable things like file compression to improve site speeds.

Screenshot/CNET

Ionos Performance automatically enables basic caching, a specialized storage protocol that increases your site speed by reducing the amount of data visitors’ browsers have to pull from your host server.

Uptime

Uptime matters because users who can’t access your site will often go elsewhere, which can result in lost traffic and income. Most hosting companies guarantee 99.9% uptime, meaning that server issues won’t shut down your site for more than 10 minutes per week. Ionos goes beyond this with a 99.99% guarantee, so your site won’t experience more than two minutes of server-related downtime per week.

I monitored my Ionos site with BetterStack for one week to see how it lived up to this guarantee -- and I’m pleased to report that my site experienced no downtime at all, earning Ionos a 10/10 uptime ranking. This uptime ranking is on par with what I’ve experienced with other top web hosts I’ve reviewed, like A2 Hosting and GoDaddy, and miles ahead of the spotty uptime of InMotion Hosting.

Site speed

Site speed, a measurement of how many seconds your site takes to load, is essential because many people will leave your site if it doesn’t load fast enough. In fact, bounce rate, the percentage of people who leave your website after viewing only one page, increases by 32% when site load time goes from one to three seconds. Many experts recommend keeping your site speed to less than three seconds for this reason.

I created a test page simulating a simple homepage with two images and two text boxes and ran speed tests on WebPageTest at different times of day over the course of five days. I also tested from devices in several locations, allowing me to simulate how international users may experience Ionos sites.

Through these tests, I came up with the following average site speeds (remember, lower numbers are better):

Based on these numbers, the average site speeds are:

• An average mobile site speed of 3.63 seconds.
• An average desktop site speed of 2.31 seconds.

This equals out to an overall average of 2.97 seconds. While this does fall under the recommended maximum of three seconds of loading time, it’s not great, especially when compared to GoDaddy’s 2.29 second average or HostGator’s 2.41 second average. The only hosting company I’ve experienced worse loading speeds with was InMotion Hosting, which had an abysmal average loading speed of 3.84 seconds.

Loading speed will vary for users based on their location, internet plan and the device they’re using, but my tests provide a good representation of the average user’s experience, giving me the confidence to grant Ionos a 7.5/10 speed ranking. This ranking is disappointing, especially considering that I left Ionos Performance on during my speed tests, but it’s not bad enough for me to suggest avoiding Ionos altogether. You can always improve site speed with a caching plugin other than Ionos Performance, many of which are free.

Overall performance

Ionos has excellent server uptime, on par with what I experienced with other CNET-recommended hosting companies like A2 Hosting and GoDaddy -- and better than some hosts, like HostGator. The site speed isn’t so great. My Ionos site experienced the second-highest loading time of any test site I’ve created so far, but it’s still reasonable, leading Ionos to earn an 8.75/10 performance ranking.

Ionos security: Better than many rivals

Ionos provides the following security protocols for all customers:

• Secure socket layer (SSL) certification: A security protocol that encrypts data sent to and from your website, protecting sensitive information like email addresses submitted through a contact form. SSL certification also signals that your site is safe; some VPNs and browsers won’t even let users open a site without it. Moreover, Google may penalize sites without SSL certification, making it harder for your site to rank well.
• Firewall: Software that scans all data attempting to enter your site, preventing malware and other threats from harming it. No firewall is perfect (there’s always a chance something will get through), but a good one will protect your site from most malware.
• Malware scanning: A daily scan of your website to discover any malware that makes it through the firewall. You’ll be immediately notified of any threats discovered. Customer service can then walk you through the process of removing them.
• Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection: A DDoS attack involves malicious traffic flooding your site in an attempt to overwhelm the server, causing it to shut down. Ionos offers comprehensive protection against these attacks to keep your site running continuously.
• Automated backups: Ionos creates daily backup copies of your site that are stored in a separate server for six days. If your site goes down, you can recover it using one of these backups.

This is one of the most comprehensive security packages I’ve seen for shared hosting users, with the automated backups being especially notable. Even A2 Hosting, which offers multilayered malware protection, doesn’t offer automated backup on its lowest-tier plan.

Ionos customer support: The best in the biz

If something goes wrong with your site, you want to be able to reach customer service quickly and get helpful answers to your questions. Ionos promises 24/7 customer service via live chat and phone, plus a personal consultant who Ionos claims will provide personalized advice on improving your site. There’s also a knowledge base you can use to figure out basic problems on your own. I tested all of these customer support avenues to determine if Ionos lives up to its promises.

Knowledge base

The Ionos knowledge base is called the Help Center and provides answers for performing many basic web-hosting tasks, including domain transfers, site setup and SSL certification. There’s a search bar at the top, plus buttons leading to sections related to various website management tasks.

Screenshot/CNET

Each button leads to an area where you can quickly view basic answers and find links to articles about performing more complex tasks. I especially like the accordion-style content blocks that minimize information you’re not likely to need, so you’re not overwhelmed when you open the page.

Screenshot/CNET

The articles themselves are clearly laid out, with step-by-step instructions and images showing how to perform each step. However, none of the articles I looked at included video tutorials, which could be an obstacle for users who prefer learning through video. This leads to the Ionos Help Center earning a 9/10 ranking.

Direct communication

Ionos offers 24/7 customer service via live chat and phone, plus a personal consultant who can be contacted between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. ET. Your personal consultant can also be reached via both live chat and phone.

I tested the general live chat first and was connected to a customer support representative in under two minutes, a similar response time to what I’ve experienced with other web hosts like A2 Hosting and GoDaddy. They were polite and helpful, providing an immediate solution to my problem. This earns Ionos a live chat ranking of 10/10.

Next, I reached out via phone. A customer service agent responded almost immediately, transferring me to another department based on my questions. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself speaking to the new department in two minutes. This new department provided helpful answers and the entire conversation only took 14 minutes, a speed only matched by GoDaddy’s phone service. My only complaint is that they tried to sell me email hosting, reducing the rating from what would have been a 10/10 to a phone support ranking of 9.5/10.

Finally, I attempted to contact my personal support consultant. Reaching out via live chat got a near-instant response from a different support representative who said my agent was working on a different case and offered to answer my questions themselves in the meantime. They also told me a phone call might allow me to reach my personal consultant faster.

I called the number for my personal assistant and received the same answers: My personal consultant was unavailable, but the person who picked up would be happy to help. This leads me to believe that personal consultants are given a higher caseload than they can reasonably manage, forcing them to rely on other team members to assist everyone. 

The representative I spoke to also explained that they can help me with any technical issues I’m having but not provide advanced support on things like optimizing my site design, which is what I expected from a service claiming to provide “personalized advice.” I was somewhat disappointed by this because of Ionos’s marketing about personal consultants, but I’m still pleased with the fast, helpful service.

Overall customer service

Despite my inability to contact my personal consultant, I had an excellent experience with Ionos customer service on both live chat and phone. This earns Ionos a customer support ranking of 9.5/10, the best customer service ranking I’ve given any company so far. This is particularly impressive considering that most web hosts I’ve tested offered average or even abysmal customer service, with the second highest-ranking company, GoDaddy, earning only 8/10.

Reputation

Along with my own testing, I read other Ionos reviews to determine how other customers feel about the company. I was pleased to discover that Ionos has a ranking of 4.6 out of 5 stars on Trustpilot, and the BBB page shows no outstanding complaints.

Ionos value

Now that we’ve established how well Ionos stands on its own, it’s time to ask the last big question: How does Ionos compare to other popular web hosts?

Here’s a quick look at the offerings from three of the most popular web-hosting companies:

Based on this data, we can come to the following conclusions:

• Ionos’s starting prices are average. The lowest starting price from Ionos, $1 a month, comes in below all of the introductory prices listed above. However, the Essentials plan -- the plan most beginners will want -- starts at $4 a month, a higher cost than the prices of comparable plans from GoDaddy, DreamHost and A2 Hosting.
• Ionos’s renewal prices are low. The Essentials plan only costs $6 per month on renewal, a price only matched by DreamHost. The Starter plan also comes in under $10 a month (specifically, $8 per month) on renewal, which is still less than the lowest-cost plans offered by HostGator and A2 Hosting.
• Ionos offers mediocre storage on the lowest-tier plan. The 10GB storage of the Essentials plan is matched by HostGator’s Hatchling plan and the A2 Hosting Ignite plan, but notably less than the 50GB of DreamHost’s Starter plan. However, 10GB is still enough for at least 100 web pages, and you can upgrade to the Starter plan for 100GB of storage for just $2 more per month.
• Ionos offers above-average security. All Ionos plans include 24/7 malware scanning, a feature not included in the lowest-tier plans from DreamHost or HostGator. A2 Hosting’s security suite -- available for all users -- does include 24/7 malware scanning, but daily backups -- a feature built into every Ionos plan -- aren’t included.
• Ionos’s WordPress tools are limited. Guided setup is offered for all Ionos WordPress users, but there’s no site assistant like the ones offered by HostGator and A2 Hosting. Ionos also doesn’t offer WordPress auto-updates, a feature included with the lowest-tier plans from both DreamHost and A2 Hosting, on its regular shared hosting plans.

In short, Ionos doesn’t offer the same level of features as other popular web hosts covered here, especially not for WordPress users, but the features it offers are excellent for the low long-term costs. This earns Ionos a value ranking of 9/10.

Ionos: Is it right for you?

Is Ionos a good web host to invest in? Let’s take a look at the category rankings covered in this review:

• Ease of use: 6.5/10
• Performance: 8.75/10
• Customer support: 9.5/10
• Value: 9/10

Together, these subrankings earn Ionos an overall ranking of 8.45/10 -- the highest ranking earned by any of the hosts I’ve tested so far. A2 Hosting, the second highest-ranking web host, comes in right below it at 8.25/10.

In other words, despite the annoying upsells you’ll face when trying to set up your website, Ionos is an excellent web host. I strongly recommend Ionos if you’re looking for shared hosting, especially if you’re on a shoestring budget.