1&1 IONOS.com review

First impression

IONOS's history goes all the way back to 1988 when they first opened their doors as 1&1 in Montabaur, Germany, with the aim of making information technology and hosting easy for everyone to use. In 2003 they expanded their operations to the USA with the launch of 1&1 Inc, and quickly ranked among the top ten web hosting providers in the United States. The name later changed to 1&1 IONOS before finally settling as IONOS in 2020. They are currently the largest hosting company in Europe.

This industry-leading provider offers Shared Hosting (including ASP.net Hosting), VPS Hosting, Domain Registrations, and Microsoft 365 products to customers around the globe. They are made up of a team of over 4000+ highly capable hosting professionals that manage more than 8 million customers and over 12 million domains from their 10 proprietary, geo redundant, and ISO 27001 certified data centers.

Trial Period

As with most Web Hosting companies, IONOS doesn’t offer a free test period on their plans, but they do have a 30-day money-back guarantee in place. If you are not satisfied with a package you have ordered and still fall within the first 30 days, you can submit a formal cancellation from within your IONOS Account for a full refund.

Billing Cycle

Monthly and yearly billing cycles are offered on both Shared Hosting and VPS packages, with the annual options adding a slight discount for the first year of service.

They accept all major Credit and Debit cards, as well as PayPal as valid payment methods. Clients are advised to make sure their Credit Cards are not connected to any Cash Apps should they want to make use of card payments.

Control Panel

IONOS offers its own, custom-built control panel on its Shared Hosting plans. It features a user-friendly and interactive UI (User Interface), from where you can manage all aspects of your account and website, and is more aesthetically pleasing than the traditional cPanel. 

On their server contracts, cPanel is included free of charge on Linux and Plesk on Windows-based plans.

Limits

Their Shared Hosting plans come in four options namely, Essential, Starter, Plus, and Ultimate. The Essential plan comes bundled with 10GB storage, 384MB PHP Memory, 512MB RAM, 10 MariaDB or MySQL databases, and you are limited to hosting a single web project. This in my opinion is suited for nothing more than a personal blog or website. The Starter plan comes slightly better equipped, with 100GB space, 384MB PHP memory, 512MB RAM, and 50 data. 

Plus, their best-selling plan, and Ultimate both feature unlimited space, databases, and websites allowed, as well as 768 MB PHP memory with up to 6 GB RAM and 896 MB PHP memory with up to 19 GB RAM respectively.

All Shared plans come standard with a Domain (free for the first year), a Wildcard SSL, and a 2GB POP3/IMAP email account.

Although their Shared plans still make use of outdated HDD storage, they are running on dual-platform technology (web servers and storage are on the same platform) with the latest version of PHP and JIT compiler (to improve the performance of Java programmes), which means visitors to your website will still get faster performance.

VPS plans, all running on super-fast NVMe SSD drives for increased performance, scalability, and efficiency, and unlimited traffic up to 1 Gbit/s, come in various options. The entry-level plan features 10GB SSD space, 1GB RAM, and 1vCore CPU, whilst their most powerful plan, the VPS XXL, boasts 12vCore CPUs, 24GB RAM, and 640GB SSD space.

Website Builder

IONOS offers an intuitive, AI (Artificial Intelligence) assisted builder, simply named the MyWebsite Now Builder. From as low as $1 per month, it allows you to create stunningly beautiful and responsive websites within minutes, by either editing an existing professional template or letting AI handle the design (including all text and images), simply by providing a few details.

Security

The IONOS data centers, located in the USA, UK, and EU, are all ISO27001 (the international standard for information security) certified for maximum security and reliability, as well as Georedundant to ensure your hosting stays uninterrupted even during maintenance and outages. 

All Shared Hosting plans come standard with DDoS (distributed denial of service) protection, a free WildCard SSL certificate to safeguard your domain and up to 10,000 subdomains, Site Scan to check your webpages for threats and vulnerabilities, Anti-Spam and Anti-Phishing filters, and Daily Backups of up to six days, that will allow you to recover files from restore points.

VPS plans include SIEM (Security information and event management), Firewall Management where you can define individual rules to control traffic according to your configuration, as well as IDS (intrusion detection system) and IPS (intrusion prevention system), to detect and prevent security incidents and imminent threats. 

One should note though that on VPS plans, backups are not included as standard but can be added for an additional monthly fee.

OS

IONOS offers both Linux and Windows-based Shared Hosting plans. Their Linux packages run on Debian, a free open-sourced and community-supported Operating System (OS), whilst Windows-based plans run on Windows Server 2022 (it includes the ASP.NET 4.8 and .NET 6.0 framework). 

VPS plans offer the latest stable versions of AlmaLinux, CentOS, Debian, Rocky Linux, and Ubuntu, as well as Windows Server 2019 or 2022 for Windows-based servers.

Older PHP Versions, from 4.0, 5.2, 5.4, 5.6, 7, 7.1, and 7.2 are all still supported by IONOS.

Support

When it comes to support, IONOS goes above and beyond. They offer expert help via Phone, Email, or Live Chat. Although support is available 24/7, the Live Chat option is only available from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. EST time. 

What sets them apart from most providers is the fact that they assign each customer their own personal consultant to answer any questions they might have and to help them succeed online. Should your personal consultant be unavailable, an experienced colleague from their team will step in to provide assistance.

Response times on email vary, with an average of about an hour, but Live Chat is blazingly fast! Each time I tried them out a friendly, well-trained agent replied within 5 seconds.

Conclusion

IONOS has been around for longer than most and has a solid reputation worldwide. Their hosting plans are scalable, reliable, and complimented with excellent customer support and low-cost intro fees. Having dealt with them personally on multiple hosting projects, I have first-hand experience of how good their services are and can definitely vouch for them. An excellent choice if you are in the market for a quality hosting provider.