IONOS Review: Is This Ultra-Affordable Hosting Any Good?

If you’ve been shopping around for a hosting service, you may have heard of IONOS. This company has been around since 1988, and it has a large European market. However, you’ll need a comprehensive IONOS review to determine if it’s the right solution for your needs.

To help you out, we’ve put together a guide that covers everything you need to know about IONOS. After exploring its features, pricing options, and performance, you should be able to make a more informed decision.

In this IONOS review, we’ll list the main features of this hosting service, discuss its plans, provide some key performance metrics, and more. But first, let us begin with an overview. (Skip to full review.)

An overview of IONOS

IONOS versus main competitors

IONOS review for WordPress

IONOS offers a variety of hosting services, including shared, dedicated, and VPS hosting. It also provides WordPress hosting (managed and unmanaged) and WooCommerce hosting:

📚 Table of contents:

Features ⚙️

For this IONOS review, let’s look at the features available with the WordPress hosting plans:

Auto updates

The company takes care of software and security updates for you, and you can select which updates you’d like them to carry out.

Malware protection (by Site Scan)

Your website will be scanned for malware, threats, and plugin vulnerabilities. Site Scan will also recommend actions you can take to protect your site.

Blueprint tool

With this feature, you can easily import your themes and plugins from an existing site to a new one.

Isolated hosting

IONOS provides a single-site environment to help boost your site’s performance and make it more secure.

Daily backups

Some WordPress plans come with 12 months of daily Jetpack backups and one-click restores.

DDoS Shield

This gives your site extra protection against denial-of-service attacks.

Caching solution

With a 12-month plan, IONOS offers a free caching plugin (OPcache) to help your site load faster.

SSL and domain name

Plans include one free domain name and a free SSL certificate to enable HTTPS on your site. Plus, unlike most other hosting providers that offer a free SSL for only the first year, IONOS gives it to you for the life of your plan. In other words, as long as you continue to host your site with them, you will get a free SSL certificate.

Also, depending on the plan you choose, you can get up to ten custom email accounts. This is very useful if you have multiple departments within your company and want separate email addresses for sales, marketing, accounting, etc.

Additionally, there’s no limit on bandwidth and traffic. This means your site should perform smoothly at peak traffic times.

IONOS also offers developer-friendly features, such as a domain API. Its WordPress hosting supports Git, SSI, and IPv6.

As you can see, the WordPress hosting plan is geared towards businesses and professionals. It’s designed to provide optimal performance and extra security, which are essential for ecommerce sites.

Support 🧑‍💻

Even if you opt for a reliable hosting provider, you may still encounter issues from time to time.

This is why it’s good to choose a hosting provider that can help you resolve problems in a timely manner. If you’re unable to get a quick response and diagnosis, you may lose out on potential leads and sales.

With that in mind, let’s look at the support channels available to IONOS customers. This company has an extensive help center with resources on different services, including WordPress, domains, SSL certificates, and email:

Each section contains links to popular topics, troubleshooting guides to common issues, and step-by-step instructions for carrying out related tasks:

If you can’t find what you’re looking for, IONOS offers 24/7 customer support. You can contact them by phone or via live chat.

We tested the response time and friendliness of their live chat ourselves, two times, spaced a few hours apart. Although it was just two interactions, both were excellent.

There was virtually no delay in getting a human to help us – we’re talking within seconds. In addition, there weren’t any unnecessary questions, no AI bots trying to route you to the “correct department”, no pressure to register or sign in, or any other kind of obstacles that are often the case with these live chats.

Both times the representative was friendly, answered our questions, provided additional resources and wished us a nice day. It was the ideal live chat support scenario that we wish every company would offer.

Another nice touch is that if you sign up as an IONOS customer, you’ll also get your own personal consultant:

This consultant will help you with everything from technical issues to advice on running your website and selling products online. The service is available by phone, email, or chat.

Performance 🔋

If you’re looking for hosting for your business site, you’ll want to choose a provider that guarantees fast loading times and powerful performance. Many web hosts, including IONOS, present speed and reliability as their unique selling points.

We’ve decided to run our own tests to see how IONOS fares in terms of performance. Here are the results:

IONOS only offers data centers in the USA and Europe, so you might want to choose a different host if your audience is solely targeted toward an Asian or Australian market. Alternatively, you could implement a content delivery network (CDN).

It’s also worth noting that IONOS provides 100% SSD storage, which can make your content load faster.

Pricing 💳

Next up in our IONOS review, let’s look at pricing. There are three pricing plans for WordPress hosting:

1. Start
2. Grow
3. Boost

The first one is ideal for small websites. However, larger sites or businesses may want to opt for the Boost plan, which is designed to handle higher volumes of traffic:

Let’s take a closer look at each plan:

• Start ($3 per month for the first year, then $6/month): 25 GB of SSD storage, 9 GB RAM, and 1 email address.
• Grow ($1 per month for the first year, then $10/month): 50 GB of SSD storage, 15 GB RAM, and 5 email addresses.
• Boost ($7 per month for the first year, then $15/month): 75 GB of SSD storage, 20 GB RAM, and 10 email addresses.

All plans include customizable updates and malware scanning. They also come with a free domain (for one year) and an SSL certificate. With Grow and Boost, you’ll also get a caching plugin and Jetpack Backup.

If you’re interested in managed WordPress hosting, these plans have the same price tags and key features as unmanaged hosting. However, you’ll get fully managed updates and a user-friendly WordPress setup.

As mentioned earlier, IONOS also offers a dedicated WooCommerce plan:

This starts at $10 per month for the first six months, and then goes up to $20 per month. It comes with 100 GB SSD storage, automatic software updates, Jetpack Backup, and more features.

Overall IONOS pros & cons 👍👎

Let’s wrap up this IONOS review with some pros and cons to help make your final decision easier:

Pros 👍

Hosting plans are relatively affordable, even for individuals.

There’s an extensive knowledge base to help you resolve issues on your own, and support is available 24/7.

You get a few premium services included with your hosting plan, for example Jetpack Backup.

If you run a large business or store sensitive information, you’ll benefit from advanced security solutions and performance optimization tools.

If you have a European or US-based audience, IONOS can deliver your content to them faster than other providers.

Cons 👎

You can only host one website on each WordPress plan, which is probably one of the reasons this service is quite affordable compared to similar options on the market.

There’s a limit on SSD storage capacity, although this shouldn’t be an issue if you only have one site on your plan.

If you have a large Asian or Australian audience, they may experience slower loading times because IONOS doesn’t offer data centers in those locations.

IONOS is not available in some countries. If you’re based in China, Iran, Morocco, Egypt, and Myanmar, then you won’t be able to open an account. Some EU countries are also excluded, including Poland, Portugal, and the Czech Republic.

Final thoughts on our IONOS review ⌛

If you cater to a European or US market and only need one business site, IONOS is an option well worth considering. However, if you have multiple projects and need to deliver fast loading times to an international audience, you might want to consider a different option.

👉 To see some other great options for hosting WordPress sites, check out our full roundup of the best WordPress hosting companies – backed by real data.

Do you have any questions about what we’ve discussed in this IONOS review? Let us know in the comments section below!