1&1 IONOS Review

Are 1&1 IONOS right for you? Find out with our review below

1&1 IONOS review scores

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IONOS (formerly known as 1&1, aka 1and1) is one of Europe’s largest web hosts. Over the years, 1&1 IONOS has developed in to a one-stop shop for all your hosting and ecommerce needs.

1&1 IONOS offer a range of additional services such as; e-commerce tools, cloud storage, Office 365, custom made websites and advertising services.

1&1 IONOS currently manages over 9 million websites worldwide. That works out at just under 5% of all active websites.

1&1 IONOS domain & hosting products

1&1 IONOS has a wide variety of different web hosting plans, and there’s pretty much something for anyone – from first-time bloggers up to enterprise level customers.

1&1 IONOS domain names

1&1 IONOS offer pretty much every domain name extension going. They also regularly run very aggressive price promotions, so you’re sure to get a good deal.

1&1 IONOS domain names also include:

• 2 GB mailbox
• Wildcard SSL Certificate
• Up to 10,000 subdomains

As well as new domain names, you can also buy “Premium domain names”. These are domains that have already been registered, and the owners have put them up for sale.

1&1 IONOS Shared Web Hosting

1&1 IONOS’ entry level web hosting is available in three plans

The shared hosting plans all come with at least one free domain name and wildcard SSL certificate to keep your site’s and visitors’ data safe.

Like many web hosts, 1&1 IONOS runs a lot of price promotions for its hosting. Once the promotional period ends, the price can go up quite a lot.

They key thing is to choose the hosting based on the price you’ll end up paying.

The prices below are the regular prices, they do not include the current offer they are running (or VAT).

• Business £5 per month: 1 x free domain, Free wildcard SSL, 25 x 2GB email accounts, 100GB webspace, 25 x databases
• Pro: £7 per month: 2 x free domain, Free wildcard SSL, 100 x 2GB email accounts, 250GB webspace, 100 x databases
• Expert £10 per month: 3 x free domain, Free wildcard SSL, 500 x 2GB email accounts, Unlimited webspace, Unlimited x databases

These plans are very competitively priced and come with a decent specification set.

Unlike many other webhosts, 1&1 IONOS do not limit how many websites you can host. Instead, you are limited by the amount of webspace included in you account.

It takes a little bit of getting used to, by I prefer this approach now.

1&1 IONOS claim they will keep your website online with 99.9% uptime with their “georedundant infrastructure”.

Essentially, your data is mirrored in two data centres, so your hosting is uninterrupted during maintenance downtime and outages.

1&1 IONOS WordPress Hosting

1&1 IONOS’ WordPress hosting sits on a shared hosting platform. Their WordPress hosting is slightly different to the normal shared web hosting plans covered in the previous section. They also have some features specific to optimising WordPress.

WordPress Hosting includes an auto-update option for the WordPress core files, themes, plugins and PHP. You can turn this off anytime and do it manually yourself if you prefer.

From a technical perspective, 1&1 IONOS’ WordPress platform is powered by PHP and NGINX, with 2GB guaranteed RAM and 360 Gbit/s fibre connectivity.

Additionally, webspace and databases are stored with SSD technology, which they claim gives your website a performance boost of up to 50%.

1&1 IONOS WordPress Hosting plans…

• Essential £4 per month: 25GB storage, 2 x databases, 10 x email accounts, free wildcard SSL, 1 x free domain.
• Business £7 per month: 100GB storage, 10 x databases, 100 x email accounts, free wildcard SSL, 1 x free domain.
• Ultimate £18 per month: Unlimited storage, Unlimited x databases, Unlimited x email accounts, 3 x free wildcard SSL, 3 x free domain, CDN.

1&1 IONOS also have VPS powered WordPress plans for larger websites.

Starting at £15 per month and going up to £100 per month, these plans are for those with big plans, agencies and already established sites.

These come with more dedicated WordPress features and tools, including:

• Staging environments
• Cache plugin
• Auto-image optimsation
• Multi-site management
• Auto-backups

20i offer a number of these with their basic WordPress hosting plans, and I suspect a number of hosts will follow in time.

1&1 IONOS websites & shops

If you don’t have know how to create your own website using HTML/CSS or WordPress (or pay someone else to do it), the alternative is a service like 1&1 IONOS’ Website builder.

Their promise is “Create a professional-looking website with no coding required.”

1&1 IONOS Website builder is available in two plans called “Creator” and “Now” the prices (£15 per month) and hosting specs are the same, the difference comes with how you’ll build the website.

‘Creator’ has a more advanced set of tools to customise and build your website. ‘Now’ is largely template driven, and you simply add your copy and images.

Both plans come with:

• Free domain name
• Unlimited webspace
• Free wildcard SSL
• 5 email accounts

You can expand the functionality of your website by adding widgets. Examples include:

• Customer reviews
• Map and route planner
• Multi-language widget
• Online appointment scheduler
• Photo gallery

Having used tools like this in the past, I’d question how good anyone could ever make it look in comparison to a site using a good WordPress theme.

One positive is your website will be responsive. this means it will work seamlessly across all desktops, mobiles and tablets.

If you want to build a website with the ability to sell online, 1&1 IONOS have three E-Commerce Website Builder plans to choose from.

The E-Commerce Website Builder is very similar to the Website Builder covered above, but it comes with the features you need to create an online store, including:

• Payment processing integration
• Integration with marketplaces and shopping tools like Amazon, eBay, and Google Shopping
• Inventory management features
• Wish lists
• Advanced SEO

1&1 IONOS VPS

1&1 IONOS’ low cost VPS hosting options, provide servers powerful enough to host large sites (or many small to medium sized websites) and have more control of their own server administration, but with out the cost of having your own dedicated server.

You can choose a VPS in one of the data centres based in UK, Germany, Spain, or USA.

All VPS come with:

• Full root access
• Free SSL certificates to keep your site safe
• Plesk Web Host Edition control panel
• Choice of Linux operating system – Windows hosting is available for a fee
• Unlimited traffic
• 24×7 support
• Free Wildcard SSL Certificate
• Server snapshot

1&1 IONOS marketing services

1&1 IONOS offers a number of marketing related services to help you promote your website and business.

Google Ads Management

Starting from £25 per month, 1&1 IONOS will manage your Google Ads campaign for you. This includes keyword research, ad writing, location-specific targeting and campaign reporting. I would say this type of service only becomes worthwhile if you have a £1,000+ monthly budget and no experience of managing an account yourself.

Email Marketing

Assuming you have a good-sized mailing list to work with, this is a self-serve tool, powered by a drag and drop editor. You can use it for one-off mail shots or to create schedule emails. There can be set-up to to be sent when certain conditions are met. For example, welcome emails can be sent automatically, or with a scheduled delay.

Local Business Listings

Local SEO is one of the most important, but over looked aspects of a small business’ SEO. With this tool, you provide all of your business-related details in one place and the information is pushed out to the key local data services, including Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Waze and MyLocalServices.

1&1 IONOS Control Panel

The 1&1 IONOS Control Panel is one of the better web hosting control panels, and it has evolved a lot over the years. They clearly invest a lot of resources in to developing the control panel.

Navigating the control panel is relatively easy, and whilst there are attempts to cross-sell additional products, they never feel terribly intrusive.

1&1 IONOS customer service

1&1 IONOS offers 24/7 phone support 365 days a year, as well as a comprehensive knowledge base where you can find frequently asked questions and how-to guides. There’s also a live chat option.

You can also ask them to call you!

Simply arrange a date and time, and they will call you when it is most convenient. I’m surprised more web hosts don’t do this.

Money back guarantee

1&1 IONOS allow you to test their hosting products with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Another added bonus is their monthly contracts. This makes it easy to cancel anytime with out having to pay for a service you’re not using (unlike Fasthosts).

1&1 IONOS uptime and reliability

1&1 IONOS have one of the most comprehensive status websites which you can find here: https://www.ionos-status.co.uk/.

Here you can opt-in to subscribe to alerts when any of their services experiences an issue. You can choose to receive these via email or SMS.

A simple search for “1and1 downtime” will show 1&1 IONOS have occasional glitches and issues, but for such a large business with so many servers, these are nothing to blow out of proportion.

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