IONOS Review: The Pros and Cons of its WordPress Hosting
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A leader in the online world, IONOS was founded in Germany in 1988. It provides services to several countries, including the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. This web hosting giant has over 7,000 employees and hosts 12 million websites.
It has an extensive product offering: you can purchase domain names, website builders, dedicated servers, and much more. But in this review we’ll just focus on WordPress hosting, one of its star products.
IONOS claims that its web hosting is fast, reliable, and trustworthy. But is this true? Let’s have a look.
Screenshots
IONOS Hosting Prices
Essential
Business
Unlimited
This review focuses on the IONOS WordPress hosting services, so the prices below refer to these hosting plans.
Essential: $4/month for 25 GB of storage and 2 databases.
Business: $8/month for 100 GB of storage and up to 10 databases.
Unlimited: $18/month for unlimited storage and databases.
Please note that the above prices reference the monthly cost of annual plans, be aware that the full amount needs to be paid in advanced.
IONOS Hosting Pros & Cons
- Pros
- Cons
Pros
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Unlimited traffic
IONOS doesn’t limit the amount of traffic or number of visits to your website each month.
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Plenty of web space
They give you plenty of space for hosting your site, starting at 25 GB. And you have unlimited space if you opt for its Unlimited package.
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Affordable
IONOS WordPress hosting is very affordable. It’s among the cheapest WordPress hosts on the market, even for renewals.
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Decent speed
IONOS hosting scored pretty well in our speed tests (read more below).
When is IONOS the best choice?
You could consider using IONOS if you’re planning to host a small or medium-sized website and don’t expect to receive many visitors. Performance wise, it’s unlikely to impress the most demanding webmasters as its uptime leaves a lot to be desired.
It’s suitable for traditional websites (e.g. a bakery or restaurant), portfolio sites and other personal web projects (not professional projects).
When is IONOS not the best choice?
If you have a professional, moderately large web project and you need the best performance – e.g. to compete organically on Google – then I don’t think IONOS is the best choice.
If you have an ecommerce business, a blog, or similar, that receives a lot of visitors, have a look at other services like SiteGround, Cloudways and GreenGeeks.
IONOS Hosting Specifications
IONOS Performance Test
Below are all the tests we carried out on IONOS hosting to give you an idea about its performance.
Loading Speed
Based on the results of our tests, IONOS hosting is quite fast, and it’s a reliable hosting provider. Read about why speed is important in our website loading time study.
| Provider | GTmetrix | Pingdom | Webpage test | Pagespeed insights | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SiteGround | 0.71 | 0.71 | 1.78 | 2.94 | 1.54 |
| GreenGeeks | 0.81 | 1.49 | 1.79 | 2.2 | 1.56 |
| Namecheap | 0.99 | 1.40 | 1.92 | 2.08 | 1.6 |
| Hostinger | 0.97 | 2.07 | 1.77 | 1.62 | 1.61 |
| WP Engine | 1 | 1.99 | 1.46 | 2.2 | 1.65 |
| Cloudways | 0.80 | 1.39 | 1.89 | 2.84 | 1.73 |
| Kinsta | 0.78 | 2.18 | 2.17 | 1.98 | 1.77 |
| DreamHost | 1.16 | 1.72 | 2.56 | 1.92 | 1.84 |
| GoDaddy | 1.14 | 2.27 | 2.23 | 2.1 | 1.94 |
| IONOS | 1.21 | 2.08 | 1.74 | 2.78 | 1.95 |
| A2 Hosting | 0.96 | 1.40 | 3.78 | 1.9 | 2.01 |
| InMotion | 2.02 | 2.86 | 2.61 | 3.52 | 2.75 |
| iPage | 1.76 | 2.82 | 2.73 | 3.74 | 2.76 |
| HostGator | 2.4 | 5.21 | 1.87 | 1.65 | 2.78 |
| Bluehost | 1.74 | 4.5 | 2.42 | 2.82 | 2.87 |
Results in seconds
To ensure the validity of our results, we conducted the tests using GTmetrix, Webpagetest.org, Pingdom and PageSpeed Insights (by Google).
Although there are things you can do to try to fix a slow website or make WordPress faster, you won’t have much success if your web host is slow.
So, for best speed, we recommend SiteGround and GreenGeeks (among others).
Uptime
As you can see from the results of our availability tests, IONOS has a lot of work to do in this area ‒ they had the worst results of all the hosting providers. Ideally, the uptime should be 99.95% or higher for serious online projects.
| Provider | 2019 Uptime | 2020 Uptime | 2021 Uptime | Starts at |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kinsta | No data | 100% | 100% | $25/month |
| Cloudways | No data | 100% | 100% | $10/month |
| SiteGround | 99.98% | 99.97% | 100% | €12.99/month |
| Namecheap | No data | No data | 100% | $2.40/month |
| WP Engine | No data | 99.99% | 99.99% | €23.25/month |
| Bluehost | 99.98% | 99.96% | 99.99% | $9.99/month |
| HostGator | 99.94% | 99.91% | 99.99% | $8.95/month |
| A2 Hosting | 99.93% | 99.99% | 99.98% | $8.99/month |
| GreenGeeks | No data | 99.98% | 99.98% | $10.95/month |
| DreamHost | 100% | 99.99% | 99.96% | $6.99/month |
| GoDaddy | 99.97% | 99.9% | 99.96% | $8.99/month |
| InMotion | 99.97% | 99.73% | 99.95% | $11.99/month |
| IONOS | No data | No data | 99.93% | $4/month |
| Hostinger | 99.62% | 99.48% | 99.92% | $5.99/month |
| iPage | 99.66% | 98.45% | 99.85% | $8.99/month |
To monitor uptime, I use StatusCake, a tool that checks each website every 5 minutes.
So, if you have a project that needs a high availability rate, then IONOS hosting is not your best option. Other providers such as Kinsta, Cloudways and SiteGround give better results.
Conclusion
Our final impression of IONOS web hosting (for WordPress) service is a mixed bag. We were pleasantly surprised by some aspects, while not so impressed by others.
A few of its strong points are that they have no limit on monthly data transfer and are very generous with web space. Speed is pretty decent too, and prices are very competitive.
However, there’s room for improvement in some areas. Its hosting management system is not the easiest to use; it’s not very intuitive and lacks many advanced options. Availability could be improved too, and the functions for managing and creating website backups could be better.
> Try IONOS or read about other providers in our guide to the best web hosting!
Frequently Asked Questions
IONOS web hosting packages give you plenty of web space for your project. But keep in mind that availability is not so good, so make sure you do your homework before you decide. IONOS also offers hosting packages that run on Windows servers, so it’s particularly suitable for .NET web development. Also, if you’re thinking about using Python, Perl or Ruby, then IONOS is one of your best options.
It’s only interesting for small web projects, where your website is not a priority for your business. Also, we weren’t exactly enamored with its customer service. So, if you think you might need help on a regular basis, you’d be better off taking a look at other providers such as SiteGround or Dreamhost. You can also check out other cheap web hosting providers here.
Its Unlimited package gives you access to the IONOS CDN. You also have the option of adding an external CDN (some of which are free) if your package doesn’t include one.
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10 Oct 2021 – Initial IONOS review
THE BEHIND THE SCENES OF THIS REVIEW
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