IONOS Is a Web Hosting Platform I Use Every Day
Domains, hosting and email in one account. I buy and manage my domains at IONOS, and I have hosted with them in the past.
Worth saying plainly: my sites are not hosted there now. Two of them are on Shopify, so hosting is not a decision I get to make. What I still use IONOS for, and have for years, is the registrar side.
Why I use it
Nobody has strong feelings about their registrar, which is rather the point. A domain needs to renew when it should, sit in an account you control, and let you change a DNS record in under a minute when something needs pointing somewhere else. IONOS does those three things and then leaves me alone.
The part that matters more than it sounds is ownership. Domains registered by a developer or an agency on your behalf quietly become somebody else's asset, and you find out on the day you need to move. Mine sit in my own account under my own login, which makes changing platform a DNS edit rather than a negotiation.
On hosting I am going on experience rather than a live account. It was cheap, it stayed up, and I moved off for reasons that had nothing to do with IONOS. Read what follows as a fair account of the product rather than a live recommendation from someone whose sites are on it today.
What you get
Low entry pricing
Among the cheapest shared hosting available, with a free domain for the first year and SSL included. Read the renewal price as well as the headline one.
Uptime
IONOS publishes a 99.99% uptime guarantee across European and US data centres. Over the period I hosted with them I do not recall an outage that cost me anything.
Domain management
Registration, DNS and renewals in one account. If you have ever had to chase a domain registered under someone else's login, you know why this is worth something.
Email on your domain
Mailboxes tied to your domains, included or cheap depending on the plan. Fine for a forwarding address or a low-volume inbox.
WordPress hosting
Managed WordPress plans with one-click install, and staging environments once you are on the higher tiers. Check which tier staging sits on before you assume you have it.
Room to grow
Shared, VPS and dedicated all sit under the same roof, so outgrowing your plan is an upgrade rather than a migration to a new provider.
Support that answers a phone
Phone, chat and a help centre, around the clock. Rarely needed. Genuinely valuable on the day it is.
A window to change your mind
A 30-day money-back period on hosting plans, which is long enough to actually put a site on it and see how it behaves.
Affiliate link. I may earn a commission if you sign up through it, at no extra cost to you. It does not change what I recommend.
What I would flag before you sign up
I earn a commission if you sign up, so it would be easy to leave this section out. These are the things that would have been useful to me.
The advertised price is the introductory price
This is the single most important thing on the page. The very low first-term price steps up substantially at renewal, and the initial term is often a year or more. Work out what you will be paying in year two and decide against that number, not the one on the button.
The free domain is free for one year
After that it renews at the standard rate like any other domain. Worth having, but it is a first-year discount rather than something you get to keep.
Expect to be sold to
This is a high-volume host and the account area and inbox reflect that. Add-ons are offered often. None of it is dishonest, but you will be declining things regularly, so go in knowing which plan you actually want.
Cheap hosting is still shared hosting
On an entry plan you are sharing a machine, and performance tuning is your problem rather than the host's. If you are running something where page speed directly drives revenue, price a managed WordPress specialist alongside this before deciding.
Who it suits
- ✓Operators running several sites and domains who want them in one account
- ✓Small businesses that need hosting and email without a monthly bill worth worrying about
- ✓Bloggers and creators putting up a first site
- ✓WordPress sites with normal rather than heavy traffic
- ✓Anyone who wants a registrar and a host in the same place
- ✓Projects that might need a VPS later but do not need one yet
Getting started
Pick the plan on renewal price rather than introductory price, take the free domain, and use the 30-day window to put something real on it.
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