IONOS Introduction:

Visit IONOS.co.uk (£1/Month)

IONOS do a lot of things differently, and are one of the few major players in the hosting industry that still offer scalable, tiered hosting plans rather than the kind of all-inclusive hosting that many leading brands are moving towards.

This gave me a number of different options when it came to choosing which plan to focus on for today’s review. In the end, I opted for the Plus package for two main reasons:

1. It’s the plan I have the most experience with
2. In my opinion, it’s the best value-for-money solution offered by IONOS.

Pricing

The cost of this particular package starts at a rock bottom price of just £1 per month for a 12-month term, after which it increases to the regular hosting fee of £9 per month.

As you can see above, going by the regular fees this isn’t actually the cheapest plan offered by IONOS, because they occasionally offer massive discounts on some plans. Without those extra discounts, the Standard plan is usually the cheapest.

Unlimited hosting

Whilst the Standard plan might work out cheaper after the initial 12-month term expires, the limited amount of features and resources on offer do mean the Standard plan is only really suitable for those of you looking to create a single, small website.

Consider the extra storage and RAM offered with the Plus plan and you’ll see why I think Plus is the better long-term option.

Other key features

As well as unmetered bandwidth and 250 GB of redundant storage, you’ll also have access to all of the following:

• 250 x 2GB MySQL databases
• 9 GB RAM, 1 vCPU
• 200 SFTP accounts
• 1 x 2GB email account
• Content Delivery Network

There’s also a free domain name included. Let’s head on to the next section to learn more about that together.

Ease of use

Apart from the welcome fact that they’re European rather than based in the US, the other major difference between IONOS and their nearest rivals seems to be their target audience.

Whilst a number of companies (iPage and SiteGround spring immediately to mind) pitch their services predominantly at beginners and those looking for a quick, simple and hassle-free way to build and run a website, IONOS do no such thing.  Sure, they don’t outright claim that they’re targeting intermediate and advanced users, but spend any amount of time with their unlimited hosting plans and this quickly becomes apparent.

For starters, they use their own control panel, which deviates from the standard models employed by cPanel and vDeck. Then there’s the way the company’s tech support reps assume a high level of technical knowledge on the part of their customers. Plus there’s a focus on high performance technology over simple-to-use tools. Added together, all of this suggests IONOS is far more suited to those of us with some previous experience of working with a hosting company, rather than those looking to create a website for the first time.

Performance and Reliability

IONOS’s unlimited shared hosting plans may have their issues but, thankfully, performance and reliability aren’t some of them.

As we all know, consistently high levels of uptime from web servers – which deliver your site to browsers with optimum speed – are vital to the success of any web project, and this is something the company use as one of their biggest selling points.

Geo-Redundancy

The company employs geo-redundancy technology, which involves running your shared hosting plan simultaneously from two separate data centres. This means that if there’s a problem with one, the other one automatically kicks in, eliminating most common downtime issues and keeping IONOS hosted sites up and online more consistently than many of their competitors.

Content Delivery Network

The company also utilises a powerful Content Delivery Network (CDN). With this, when a visitor drops by your website, pages are loaded from the closest data centre to them, guaranteeing lightning fast loading speeds and overall enhanced performance.

Combined with the brand’s powerful IONOS SiteLock tool and highly efficient Denial of Service (DDoS) Protection system, I’ve found nothing but good things to say about IONOS when it comes to making sure my sites are always available and performing at their optimum best.

Whatever issues IONOS may have elsewhere, if you’re currently looking for a new host because you’re fed up with the amount of downtime and slow loading speeds provided by your current host, this one should definitely be one to consider.

Building a website

As I mentioned when discussing IONOS’s ease of use, this is a company far better suited for intermediate to advanced users, rather than complete beginners, and the website building tools available is one of the main reasons why.

The company’s shared hosting plans focus primarily on one-click installation of Content Management Systems like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, as well as add-ons, interaction tools and other web purpose-specific tools such as the Moodle e-learning platform and wiki creator, MediaWiki.

Whilst these are easy enough to install and start using, they do require a learning curve that is at least a little steeper than customising a template with the kind of drag-and-drop website builders which IONOS unfortunately don’t bundle in with their unlimited plans.

IONOS MyWebsite

That’s not to say there isn’t one available. A drag-and-drop website builder known as IONOS MyWebsite is available, but this is in its own separate package. First-term prices range from £1 per month to the all-encompassing £17 per month Pro plan, which is better suited for online stores and other large websites.

Sadly, the long-term, regular prices for these packages are more expensive than a basic hosting package, with the Pro setting you back a cool £30 per month after the 12-month contract term expires.

My recommendation

If you’re still interested in this solution, I’d actually recommend the same Plus level plan as with hosting. It comes with a free domain for the first 12 months, unmetered bandwidth, 50 GB storage, a basic email package, and more than 10,000 well-designed templates for you to customise.

There’s also a vast stock photo library (and when I say vast, I mean several million images) and various add-on tools for site management and user interaction.

Marketing and Advertising

Like free domain names and website builders, marketing bundles are fairly standard features of many shared hosting packages, added in by companies eager to provide the best possible value for money, and thus attract the most customers.

IONOS are no exception, offering a Google Ads Management Service. There are a lot of useful tools available, including a dedicated email marketing tool, Adwords campaign managers, SEO support and site analytics which – contrary to the rest of IONOS’s advanced functions – are actually much easier to follow than the increasingly complex world of Google Analytics.

As I’ve said in other reviews, I wouldn’t make the quantity of marketing tools a key deciding factor when it comes to choosing a new hosting company, but it’s certainly worth considering when weighing up the pros and cons of an individual hosting plan.

Ecommerce

If you’re planning to launch an online store with IONOS, I’d recommend avoiding the Starter plan and opting instead for at least the Plus plan, which is currently priced at £1 for 12 months and £28 thereafter.

Though this is undoubtedly frustrating, especially if you’re on a limited budget – reserving powerful eCommerce features for the more expensive packages is a fairly common practice among hosting companies that still deliver tiered plans, so it’s not something I’m too surprised to see.

Nor is it something I’m going to criticise when you consider that the Plus package does represent good value for money compared to the premium level plans offered by other leading web hosts like HostGator.

With this, you’ll have access not only to site analytics, a mobile app and one-click set-up of popular online store builders like Magento and PretaShop and PayPal support, but also vital eCommerce tools like SSL Certificates and dedicated IP addresses, both of which are essential in keeping sensitive customer data safe and secure.

Though the long-term cost of this is higher than that of the IONOS Starter Plan, I’d recommend it for those of you who want to take advantage of the company’s excellent uptime and performance rates whilst avoiding the complications and required technical know-how to build an online store.

Customer support

As you’ll see above, IONOS do offer the main basic channels of customer service through phone and email, and it’s good to note that these are available 24/7, a common trait of most top companies.

I also have to give the brand some credit for their extensive library of FAQs, articles and tutorials, which pretty much cover 100% of the more common set-up and maintenance issues experienced with web hosting.

Yet for everything IONOS get right about customer service, there are a number of things that I have to say are disappointing.

In my experience, I’ve often found that live web chat support is the quickest, cheapest, and most efficient way of solving problems, eliminating both the time it takes to wait for a customer support rep to respond via email and the cost of picking up the phone. Despite this being a fairly standard feature among many leading companies, it sadly isn’t one IONOS offer.

Technical support

Things get worse when you do get to speak to someone. I’ve used both email and phone support in the past, the latter when I had a genuine issue and the former solely for the purposes of writing an informed opinion in this review.

In both cases, I found that the support staff were often not the best at explaining things in simple, non-technical terms. Sure, they were helpful enough, but for your time spent dealing with support to be really effective, I’ve found you need a certain level of technical knowledge that goes above and beyond that of first-time website owners.

Final Verdict

With some of the lowest costs and highest performance levels in the industry, IONOS’s shared hosting solutions should certainly be a top contender for those with both previous experience in managing a website and at least some level of technical knowledge.

Yet for those of you looking to build your first website, I’m afraid to say that this one might not be the best option for you. The company’s focus on high tech over simplicity may be perfect for those aforementioned advanced users but, for beginners, it can present its own unique challenges.

Still, if you’re up for the task, and if you’re looking to find a hosting solution that’s based closer to home rather than over in the United States, you certainly can’t go wrong with £1 for 12 months of exceptional uptime and powerful website performance.