Ionos by 1&1

Businesses looking for hosting services with lots of features at an affordable price should check out 1&1 Ionos. A wide range of alluring packages are available from the web host, including shared, virtual private server (VPS), WordPress, and dedicated hosting. In spite of this, 1&1 Ionos stands out from the competition thanks to its robust cloud hosting plans, which the company offers to both small businesses and enterprise-class clients.

Plans and Pricing

Shared, VPS, Dedicated Servers, WordPress, and Cloud hosting are all available from IONOS Hosting. Furthermore, you can choose from a variety of hosting packages tailored to particular markets, including those for ASP.NET hosting for Windows OS, Joomla hosting, WooCommerce hosting, and Jamstack hosting. In addition to these plans, IONOS provides email hosting and website development services.

Every IONOS Hosting plan includes a 30-day money-back guarantee that covers all fees with the exception of server usage fees and setup fees for search engine marketing. However, before selecting any of the IONOS Hosting plans, consider your needs, goals, and budget.

Shared Hosting

The business plan, which is a better choice because it’s more affordable, is recommended by IONOS Hosting. You will have access to free CDN, daily backups, 1-click installations for more than 70 apps, free wildcard SSL certificates, and many other things. However, after a year, it goes back to the initial price of $10/month.

Advice: IONOS shared hosting plans are ideal for small, low-traffic websites. Like other hosting providers, the renewal rates for each package are slightly higher than the initial price.

VPS Hosting

Standard

The VPS XL plan is recommended by IONOS, and it’s easy to see why. For only $2 per month, you get a massive 160GB SSD storage space, 4vCores, Ubuntu 22.04, and other configuration features.

Advice: The Standard VPS plan is an excellent choice if you are a freelancer, agency, or medium-sized business owner with high traffic. It should be noted that all VPS plans include SSD SAN storage, DDoS protection, SSL encryption, firewall management, and daily backups.

Memory Optimized

IONOS recommends the VPS XL RAM, which is the most affordable six-month plan on the list. After the grace period has expired, this price reverts to $25 per month. The daily backup feature is not included in this plan and must be purchased separately.

Advice: The IONOS VPU memory-optimized plan is more expensive than the preceding package, but it has more cores. Choose this option if you anticipate high monthly traffic to your website.

VPU Optimized

The VPS vCore XL plan, which starts at $4 per month, is recommended by IONOS Hosting. It renews after six months for $27 per month. Extra features such as the Windows operating system, the Plesk management system, and backup come at an additional cost.

Advice: If you own a large eCommerce store or expect a high volume of website visitors on a monthly basis, the IONOS Hosting VPU optimized plan is ideal. The package has been designed to handle more requests without crashing.

Dedicated Servers

SSD

The SSD dedicated hosting plan comes with SSD storage which is faster than the traditional hard drives. This means your website will load faster, perform better, and have lower latency. You’ll also get SSH access, IPv6 support, unlimited FTP accounts, daily backups, and a lot more.

Advice: SSD dedicated hosting gives you complete control over your hosting environment, and you can configure the server to meet your specific requirements. This is an excellent choice for customers who have a high-traffic website and projects that require custom configurations.

HDD

The HHD dedicated hosting plan offers more storage capacity, but it employs HHDs (hard disk drives), which are slower than SSDs. Because they are less expensive than SSD plans, they are an excellent choice for businesses that require dedicated resources but have a limited budget.

Advice: Each plan includes 4 cores (HT) * 3.5 GHz, free domain, Intel Quad-Core and Intel Xeon ES-1230 v6, among other things. The XL – 32 HHD plan, which starts at $90/month, is recommended by IONOS Hosting. It reverts to the original monthly price of $110 after three months.

Windows Hosting

Customers can install custom software, add free domain extensions, access advanced and updated versions of developer tools such as MariaDB 10 and MySQL database, and more with the IONOS Windows Hosting plan.

Advice: Windows hosting is intended for users who require the use of a Windows-specific application or other applications that are incompatible with Linux-based hosting plans. Each plan includes the most recent versions of ASP.NET and MSSQL, which are necessary for Windows-based projects.

WordPress Hosting

IONOS Hosting provides two types of WordPress hosting: MUanaged and Unmanaged. Both have comparable pricing plans with minor differences in features. The WordPress assistant manages your WordPress account for the managed plan. This AI can create your WordPress site as well as recommend and install themes, plugins, and other components.

Advice: IONOS recommends the Grow plan for both managed and unmanaged plans, which costs $1/month for the first 12 months.

Features

• Free SSL certificates and Cloudflare CDN
• Offers shared, WordPress, Dedicated, VPS, Windows hosting
• Sustainable data centers
• Reliable uptime

One feature that stood out to me and set them apart from other providers is their ASP.NET hosting plans, which are designed specifically for Windows OS. This is advantageous for Windows developers because it allows them to easily access the requirements for building websites with .net and ASP.NET languages.

The IONOS Windows Hosting plan is compatible with the most recent versions of the Windows server, ASP.NET, and.Net languages. Most importantly, each package in this plan includes MS SQL, a Cron manager, unlimited FTPS accounts, SSH access, free domains, and a slew of other developer-friendly features.

Furthermore, I like the IONOS custom-designed control panel, which is more appealing than the standard cPanel. You’ll find all of the tools you need to set up and manage your website here.

Performance

IONOS provides all of its users with fast and scalable hosting services. I tested the uptime, speed, and page load time to demonstrate this. However, the distance between your data center and your audience affects loading time and speed. For better ranking and performance, choose the closest location to any IONOS Hosting data center.

IONOS Hosting guarantees 99.9% uptime, which is incredible for the price. This demonstrates that IONOS Hosting is a dependable provider, with only a few seconds of downtime per year for server maintenance.

I tested for speed and response time. The overall performance was 87%, which is also noteworthy.

In terms of speed, the results fell slightly short of my expectations and can be improved. The LCP took 780 ms, which was less than the market average of 1.2 ms. This means that your website will appear higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Finally, I tested the page load time and the TTFB, and the results were satisfactory but could be improved. The website took 1.7 seconds to fully load:

In conclusion, IONOS Hosting performs above average and outperforms many competitors offering comparable packages at higher prices.

Customer Support

If you have any issues with your hosting plan or simply have a hosting-related question, you can rest easy knowing that 1&1 Ionos offers email, web chat, and phone support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. How a company’s customer service department responds to your complaint or query is vital, so we tested 1&1 Ionos’ resolve by placing a call on a weekday morning and evening. We wanted to know if there was a difference between 1&1 Ionos’ standard web hosting and its WordPress hosting offer. A 1&1 Ionos support representative answered our call about a minute later. The representative correctly stated that the WordPress hosting allows 1&1 Ionos to automatically update WordPress and any installed plug-ins, which users would otherwise have to do manually with 1&1’s standard offering.

Unfortunately, that support is only available by phone or by logging into an Ionos user account. Many competing services offer open online support, either via email or online chat.

1&1 Ionos also offers a personal consultant service to anyone who has signed up for hosting. The free service connects you with an agent who provides hosting advice and tips. We learned how to use 1&1 Ionos’ web-building software, for example. You can also learn how to grow your audience by having your business appear on Google Maps. It’s a useful service that more businesses should offer. The personal consultant can be reached via web chat, email, or phone.

1&1 Ionos provides a reasonable 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can cancel at any time.

Conclusion

1&1 Ionos provides feature-rich hosting, especially in the cloud hosting category, as well as excellent uptime, solid customer service options, and a useful website builder.   However, 1&1 Ionos’ plans have limited storage capacities. If you require more storage space for your files, consider DreamHost.