IONOS Web Hosting Review 2025: Is This Low-Cost Web Host a Good Option for You?

During our extensive hands-on testing, we found IONOS to be an extremely intuitive platform, making it an excellent choice for businesses new to launching a website. We enjoyed the streamlined dashboard and simple tools that can help with usually complex tasks, such as managing DNS settings.

We also appreciated the additional tools available with IONOS’s specialized WordPress hosting, which further simplify the process of setting up a new website or online business.

Read on for our full IONOS web hosting review to learn more about exactly how these services work, with all the details you need to decide whether IONOS is right for you.

IONOS web hosting review at a glance

Price	$1.00-$15.00/mo
Money-back guarantee	Yes, 30 days
Uptime guarantee	99.99%
Monthly visits	Unlimited
Number of websites	1 - unlimited
Storage	10 GB - unlimited
Free SSL certificate	On all plans
Free domain for a year	On most plans, with the exception of VPS and dedicated hosting
Backup frequency	Daily
Migration assistance	Available as a separate service
24/7 support	On all plans
Learn more	Get IONOS web hosting

Score summary

Here's how our star rating is calculated:

Decision factor	Weight	IONOS Verdict
Our experience	10%	4.5/5
Prices and capacity	18%	4.8/5
Performance	20%	5/5
Features	25%	4.5/5
Security	20%	5/5
Support and reputation	7%	4.4/5

We last tested IONOS on October 24, 2025.

Our experience

We had an overwhelmingly positive experience using IONOS. The web hosting dashboard provides clear links to everything you need, and the IONOS control panel — a proprietary alternative to cPanel — makes domain and DNS management very simple.

We started by navigating to the Websites and Stores area, which contained basic information for a web project created during account setup. We then clicked Launch WordPress and followed IONOS’s instructions to create a title and description for our site.

We had the WordPress Grow plan, which directed us straight to the WordPress Cockpit, which provides a checklist with links to basic setup tasks, like editing your homepage.

Grow also provides an AI-based WordPress website builder. We used this tool to build a site for software tutorials with a professional tone.

We then filled in some basic information about what we wanted the site to do, such as allowing visitors to contact us. IONOS used this information to generate several designs for us to choose from.

We also used the AI builder to create several essential pages, including a home page, an about page, and a contact page. The builder spent roughly 2 minutes generating these pages alongside the rest of the site. In total, the process took around 5 minutes and produced an impressive site foundation for us to build upon.

Satisfied with the basic setup, we returned to the Websites and Stores page to enable analytics and connect the domain to our website. Both of these processes took just a few clicks. We were also pleased to see WordPress auto-updates and malware/vulnerability scanning features already enabled, with the most recent results displayed alongside our site analytics.

IONOS web hosting plans and pricing options

IONOS has four shared hosting plans, with starting prices ranging from $1.00/mo to $15.00/mo and renewal prices ranging from $6/mo to $16/mo.

The $1/mo introductory rate for Plus is very inexpensive when compared to standard web hosting costs. The $12/mo renewal rate is also exceptional, considering it includes unlimited websites and storage — features typically unavailable from other hosting companies, even with more expensive plans.

In terms of value, your best choice depends on the type of site you’re building. A small website, like a professional portfolio, likely won’t need more than 10 GB of storage, so you’ll get great long-term value from Essential’s low-cost renewal. However, if you’re planning to create hundreds of pages or host hundreds of high-res images, you can take full advantage of the unlimited storage and great value offered with Plus.

Features	Essential (Yearly)	Starter (Yearly)	Plus (Yearly)	Ultimate (Yearly)
Price	$4.00/mo	$5.00/mo	$1.00/mo	$15.00/mo
Uptime guarantee	99.99%	99.99%	99.99%	99.99%
Monthly visits	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Number of websites	1	10	Unlimited	Unlimited
Storage	10 GB	100 GB	Unlimited	Unlimited
Bandwidth	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Free domain for a year	On all plans	On all plans	On all plans	On all plans
Backup frequency	Daily	Daily	Daily	Daily
Learn more	View Plan	View Plan	View Plan	View Plan

IONOS web hosting features

IONOS offers a wide range of features to ensure excellent usability, site performance, and security. These include:

• Free domain for one year
• Wildcard (unlimited) SSL certificate
• 1-click installs for WordPress and other content management systems
• PHP caching for improved site speed
• Gzip compression to maximize site speed
• Site scans
• Daily backups
• DDoS protection
• Unlimited bandwidth
• An email address with built-in anti-spam protection
• SiteAnalytics
• Proprietary control panel for server management
• 24/7 customer support via live chat and phone

Types of web hosting available

Most users will want to start with IONOS’s shared hosting, which provides server space and basic security tools, or WordPress hosting, which includes additional site-building tools for beginners.

IONOS also offers website builder hosting for beginners, but our IONOS website builder review found it more difficult to use and less feature-rich than other website builders.

IONOS provides other types of web hosting as well, including:

• Ecommerce hosting through WooCommerce or PrestaShop
• VPS hosting
• Dedicated server hosting

Web building features

IONOS has a one-click WordPress installation for all users. We tested the WordPress Grow plan, which offered a guided site-creation experience in the IONOS WordPress Cockpit. These tools make it remarkably simple for first-time website owners to get started with WordPress.

Users on some plans can also use IONOS’s other AI tools to generate text, images, and even whole web pages.

WordPress integration

IONOS offers one-click WordPress installation with all of its plans. WordPress hosting includes automated updates to the CMS and plugins, plus an AI site builder specifically for WordPress.

Web migration

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to find a straightforward website migration option. This may be because IONOS wants users to purchase its site migration service.

IONOS web hosting performance

Your site needs to be consistently available and quick to load if you want to engage your visitors. We performed speed tests and stress testing to determine how quickly IONOS sites load for the average visitor and how well they handle spikes in visitor numbers. We also monitored uptime to ensure that IONOS kept our site online at all times.

Speed test

The faster your website is, the more likely it is that your visitors will stick around. We used Dotcom-Tools to test IONOS’s site speed across three locations: Montreal, Dallas, and Strasbourg. We also manually navigated the pages to get a feel for the real-life experience of our site.

Product	Performance score	Fastest Contentful Paint	Largest Contentful Paint
IONOS average	99.6	0.46 s	0.53 s

The site performed admirably during our speed tests, with loading times well under 1 second. We also saw rapid loading times when navigating the site ourselves.

Uptime and response

IONOS offers a 99.99% uptime guarantee, which means your site shouldn’t spend more than 2 minutes offline per week. This is higher than the usual 99.9% uptime guarantee, which means your site can be offline for up to 10 minutes per week.

We spent 3 days monitoring our IONOS site with Uptime Robot to determine whether IONOS lives up to this guarantee.

Product	Uptime	Average response time	Minimum response time	Maximum response time
IONOS average	100%	311 ms	237 ms	743 ms

IONOS exceeded its uptime guarantee during our tests, achieving 100% uptime and impressive response times of 237 ms to 743 ms. This shows that you can trust IONOS to rapidly serve your website content to visitors at all times of day and night.

Stress tests

Stress tests determine how your site handles large groups of concurrent visitors. We used Loader.io to send 250 simultaneous visitors to our IONOS site. IONOS passed our stress test, and the average response time was an impressive 397 milliseconds, suggesting near-instantaneous loading for most users.

IONOS security features

IONOS provides a range of security features to protect your site from threats, including:

• Firewall for identifying and blocking malware
• SSL certification for encrypting data sent to and from your site
• DDoS shield to protect your website from malicious traffic sent to overwhelm your server
• Malware scanning and repair tools that automatically find and fix any malware that makes it past the firewall
• Vulnerability scanner with daily automated scans to find and fix vulnerabilities on your site
• Backups performed on a daily basis, with a quick restore option to reboot your site

IONOS customer support and reputation

Support type	IONOS Help Center
Live chat
Email
Phone	Yes, with a range of international numbers available
Online guides or forums

IONOS’s support options start with a help center that contains hundreds of tutorials. These articles are clearly laid out, with step-by-step instructions for completing a wide range of tasks.

If you need additional assistance, you can use IONOS’s 24/7 live chat, which offers both a chatbot and human reps. IONOS also offers 24/7 phone support, with dedicated phone numbers for support in various countries.

IONOS user reviews

Trustpilot rating: 4.7/5

Many of the IONOS reviews on Trustpilot point to the provider’s excellent customer support and its easy onboarding processes.^[1]

IONOS reviews on Reddit are more mixed. Some threads refer to positive experiences with IONOS, while others contain scathing reviews complaining of shady billing practices and refund refusals.^[2][3] However, the negative reviews we’ve seen are all over a year old, suggesting that any billing issues may have been a temporary problem.

Top IONOS alternatives

There are a few web hosts on the market with comparable prices to IONOS and similar feature sets. Here are the key details that differentiate them:

Hostinger

Hostinger offers affordable shared, WordPress, and cloud hosting for websites of all sizes and types. The introductory pricing is cheaper than IONOS, but you get relatively limited storage and bandwidth, and the uptime guarantee allows for ten times more downtime.

Learn more in our Hostinger review.

Bluehost

Bluehost offers shared and WordPress hosting that starts at very affordable prices. It also offers additional options, such as cloud, VPS, and dedicated hosting, for sites with more complex needs. Its introductory pricing very closely matches IONOS, and it now offers a 99.99% uptime guarantee across shared plans as well.

Learn more in our Bluehost review.

DreamHost

DreamHost has low-cost shared and WordPress hosting for beginners. DreamHost’s VPS hosting is also cheaper than most web hosts', but its dedicated hosting is on the more expensive side. We particularly liked its easy-to-use control panel and its impressive 100% uptime guarantee.

Learn more in our DreamHost review.

Bottom line: Is IONOS good for web hosting?

IONOS is a good web host for most users and use cases. The dashboard and associated tools are easy to use, and its WordPress hosting features are particularly good for beginners. During our tests, IONOS also delivered strong site speed and uptime, suggesting you can count on it to provide visitors with a smooth browsing experience.

Combined with the excellent renewal pricing, including $5.00/mo for the Starter plan, which is an absolute bargain, these features make IONOS an excellent choice for starting a hobby site, a blog, or a business website.

FAQs