It may seem trivial, but there’s nothing trivial about choosing a web host. It’s a strategic decision in which you must leave nothing to chance. Otherwise, you’ll be left with nothing but tears in your eyes.
At the very least, a quality provider should be efficient, reliable, secure, scalable, and have responsive customer support. And of course, a good hosting provider must meet your specific needs.
Unfortunately, not all hosting providers offer these essential qualities. Is this the case with the hosting solutions offered by IONOS by 1&1, one of the world leaders in the sector?
This is what you’ll find out by getting to know the strengths and advantages of IONOS, which we’ll detail point by point in this article.
At the end, you’ll know if you can count on this digital partner to host your next WordPress sites.
Transparency: This page is sponsored. Some links to IONOS are affiliate links. If you purchase hosting from them, WPMarmite will receive a commission.
Thanks to affiliation, WPMarmite is able to remunerate the research and writing work of the blog’s authors. But we remain impartial. If a product isn’t worth it, we’ll say so (or we don’t talk about it).
IONOS, a hosting leader renowned for its reliability
A tradition of cutting-edge technology
At IONOS, reliability is one of the key elements of the sales pitch. This word is repeatedly emphasized on the digital platform’s website.
Beyond words, this commitment is also reflected in concrete actions. At IONOS, reliability takes many forms:
- The company has its own network of some thirty self-built data centers.
In all, it has over 100,000 servers worldwide. - They build their own data centers.
- They assemble their tailor-made servers for cloud applications, with a constant drive to ensure that their users benefit from state-of-the-art infrastructure. In November 2024, for example, the IONOS Group expanded its dedicated server portfolio with four offerings featuring the new AMD EPYC™ 4004 processor.
- They provide their customers with local support teams, for rapid assistance in your native language.
Each customer can even benefit from a dedicated personal advisor, free of charge (more on this later).
A group that’s constantly growing
This desire to “carry on a tradition of cutting-edge technology” is not new. The German hosting company IONOS was launched in 1988 with “the main aim of making information technology easy for everyone to understand and use.”
As the company has evolved, and through strategic acquisitions, it has established itself as one of the world’s leading hosting companies.
It is also number 1 in Europe for domain names (22 million domain names managed worldwide).
Renamed IONOS in 2020, the hosting provider has almost 40 years’ experience. It is a group with very solid foundations, backed by a vast galaxy of hosting and cloud brands (Arsys, Fasthosts, Strato, etc.).
Listed on the stock exchange since February 2023, IONOS Group SE has been growing steadily. According to figures released by the group in November 2024:
- IONOS has 6.30 million customers worldwide, 110,000 more than in 2023.
- Sales rose by 7.8% in the first 9 months of 2024, compared with the same period in 2023.
Excellent uptime for optimum reliability of your IONOS hosting solution
As you read above, Ionos has full control over its network infrastructure. This guarantees maximum performance.
In the US, for example, the company has servers in Las Vegas, Lenexa, and Newark.
Server location is very important. The closer it is to the majority of your visitors or customers, the faster your site will be displayed.
With servers spaced across the United States, you can rest easy if most of your visitors come from North America.
And if you have an international audience, you can rely on servers in every corner of the globe.
Please note that the performance and availability of your WordPress site depend directly on the infrastructure and services provided by your hosting provider.
Unreliable web hosting can lead to frequent downtime, data loss, and a poor user experience (UX).
With IONOS, you can be sure of no nasty surprises.
The German hosting provider also claims an uptime of 99.98% for its WordPress hosting offers.
In technical terms, this corresponds to a Tier 3 data center.
This ensures a very high level of availability, with a maximum cumulative downtime of 1.6 hours per year.
Security, the other IONOS hosting priority
Data security and protection, a major concern
Beyond reliability, safety is an integral part of the products and services offered by IONOS.
Cyber attacks are becoming increasingly frequent. According to a survey of global ransomware attacks, 73% of organizations with 500+ employees suffered an attack in 2023, compared to 69% in 2021.
As the saying goes, hacking doesn’t just happen to other people. Your WordPress site can be the target of hackers, malware, or data breaches.
These incidents can have very negative repercussions on several levels:
- They damage your brand image and reputation.
- They generate financial losses. The average cost of a data breach for companies in the US, for example, is $9.3 million. Not all cyberattacks will cost that much, but you could easily be out $500,000 or more.
A secure web hosting provider like IONOS protects you from these threats by offering robust solutions tailored to your needs.
The company makes it a point of honor to uphold a tradition of “data security, personal data protection and respect for privacy.”
Certified, geo-redundant data centers
All of IONOS’s data centers are ISO/IEC 27001 certified. This is an international standard guaranteeing the secure processing of customer data, and ensuring that “a company has a system in place to manage the risks associated with the security of its data or the data it processes.”
In addition to this certification, which ensures the secure processing of customer data, IONOS protects your data in geo-redundant data centers.
This means that your data is securely stored at all times on multiple servers in different geographical locations.
In the event of an incident (power failure, cyber-attack, natural disaster), continuity of service is guaranteed, thanks to data replication.
Furthermore, IONOS complies with the guidelines of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), with regard to the processing of its customers’ personal data. They explain this in detail here.
What does IONOS have to offer in terms of WordPress hosting security?
On a day-to-day basis, IONOS also protects your WordPress site with various security measures:
- Antivirus software to automatically disable harmful files and malware
- Protecting your IONOS customer account against brute force attacks
- Free SSL certificates to switch your site to HTTPS and guarantee that all data exchanged between your site and its visitors (bank details, email addresses, etc.) is encrypted and protected against malicious interception
- DDoS protection to guard against denial-of-service attacks
- Daily vulnerability scans
- Daily backups stored for 7 days. Note that your data is backed up in two separate data centers, so that your site is always accessible online, even during maintenance.
A dedicated WordPress hosting package
Optimized servers for WordPress
While IONOS ensures reliability and security, it also goes to great lengths to pamper your WordPress site.
IONOS offers dedicated WordPress hosting, with servers specifically optimized for the world’s most widely used CMS (Content Management System).
This offer is available in three different ways:
- The “WordPress Hosting” package is ideal for creating a blog or showcase site. Here, unlike a managed package, you take care of technical administration (updates, etc.).
- The “Managed WordPress Hosting” package. This is a turnkey package designed for beginners. IONOS takes care of technical and server administration (security, updates, performance, etc.).
- The “WooCommerce Hosting” package. Compared with the two previous packages, the WooCommerce hosting package offers more storage (100 GB), higher file limits, and better performance.
To find out more about the content of IONOS’s WordPress hosting packages, read our IONOS review.
What are the strengths of WordPress hosting at IONOS?
Whichever WordPress hosting package you choose, there are several advantages:
- You can create your site (design) and its content using artificial intelligence (AI)
- You benefit from multiple security options (daily backups, DDoS protection, daily security analysis)
- You get a high-performance site, thanks to a 99.98% uptime guarantee and a caching plugin
- You benefit from a dedicated personal advisor
- You access a complete hosting management interface, where you can manage all your services and perform basic operations (sub-domain configuration, database management, PHP version modification, email address creation, etc.);
- You get a 30-day money-back guarantee, with contract flexibility (no minimum commitment period)
What are the advantages of a managed WordPress service?
If you’re just starting out and/or want to focus solely on content creation, the “Managed WordPress” offer has some serious advantages:
- IONOS handles technical and server administration
- The most important plugins are already preinstalled
- Numerous free WordPress themes to choose the look and feel of your site
- A step-by-step guide to help you through the installation process
- Click&Build automatic installer
A dedicated personal advisor (free of charge)
IONOS calls it a “tailor-made service, unique in the world of web hosting.”
This is clearly one of the strengths of IONOS hosting, if not THE number one strength: a dedicated personal advisor is available to every customer, free of charge.
In fact, IONOS users are very satisfied, judging by the very positive feedback compiled on the Trustpilot verified reviews site.
This single point of contact is qualified to deal with a wide range of requests on a personalized basis. He or she can help you with administrative matters, resolving problems concerning your contract, invoices, and products.
But its real added value lies in the technical aspect. You can rely on your advisor to provide you with:
- The solutions best suited to your needs
- Reports on your website’s performance and advice on how to improve your results
- Tips and clear instructions on how to use all your products’ functions
- Strategies for online success
To give you some more specific examples, this personal consultant can help you set up your domain name, manage your WordPress site, or even create your professional email address.
He or she will be available to you Monday to Friday by phone on a direct line, by email, or by chat.
Outside these hours, you can of course get in touch with a member of the technical team 24/7 (by phone or chat).
At the same time, IONOS offers a wealth of resources to help you find the answers to your questions on your own, if you wish. You can, for example, take a look at their comprehensive Help Center, their tutorial-filled blog, or their official YouTube channel.
A host that manages your online presence from A to Z
When we think of IONOS, we often automatically think of web hosting. But this is only one, albeit important, aspect of the company’s business.
More generally, IONOS offers a wide range of solutions for supporting their customers’ online presence, from A to Z.
One of their objectives is to help small and medium-sized businesses — their target audience — to “start up and develop their business on the Internet.”
To this end, they provide a number of key services:
- Domain names available under hundreds of different extensions (.com, .org, .info, .ai, etc.)
- A tailor-made website creation service by experts
- A tool (rankingCoach) to help you improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and Google ranking (no SEO or marketing knowledge required)
- A GDPR-compliant office suite
- Professional email addresses and secure online messaging
- AI-enabled email marketing software
- Virtual and dedicated servers
- Cloud computing, with a range of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) solutions for computing, storage and backup, as well as high-performance PaaS (Platform as a Service) services (Kubernetes, managed databases, etc.)
In parallel, IONOS has developed a suite of free in-house tools that anyone can use (no need to be an IONOS customer):
- Tools to analyze your website’s performance and conduct SEO audits
- Favicon, company name, and logo generators
- A test to verify the validity of your SSL certificate
- IP address and domain name checkers
IONOS by 1&1, an innovative and committed hosting provider
Total AI integration
When we talk about the strengths of IONOS hosting, we’re also talking about the German group’s ongoing research and development efforts.
One constant over the last few years has been the company’s determination to make a major impact in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). IONOS is at the forefront of innovation in this sector. It integrates multiple AI solutions into numerous products and services.
Its main selling point is its famous MyWebsite service. This is — among other things — a site generator that lets you create and customize a website using AI.
Using just a few pieces of information gathered about your company, the tool is able to set up your site’s page design (5 pages in all), including text and images.
This site editor also includes a text generator capable of suggesting relevant content and headlines thanks to AI.
In fact, at IONOS, AI is present… just about everywhere, to save you precious time. You’ll find it, for example:
- At the level of your WordPress hosting, which embeds various AI-based tools: a site generator in a few clicks (based on the same principle as MyWebsite, but natively integrated into your WordPress administration interface), an AI chatbot, a text generator in the Content Editor, etc.
- In the Ionos email marketing tool. AI can help you write your email content (and subject lines).
- On IONOS webmail, with an AI assistant for reading, summarizing, translating, writing, and creating professional emails.
- On a multimodal AI platform. Hosted on IONOS’s sovereign cloud infrastructure in European data centers, this platform enables companies to integrate text and image generation models into their applications via a standard API.
- On its Nextcloud Managed Storage solution, enabling you to generate text faster for your documents and emails (OpenAI key required).
With IONOS, eco-responsible hosting
At the same time, IONOS is committed to protecting the environment, using resources responsibly and reducing its ecological impact.
This can be seen in a number of concrete ways:
- All the company’s new servers “are based on the most modern energy-efficient technologies, then recycled or recovered at the end of their life through the implementation of appropriate waste disposal practices,” explains IONOS.
- To reduce its carbon footprint, IONOS uses renewable energy whenever possible, giving priority to local suppliers.
Conclusion
In short, IONOS offers a large portfolio of key products and services with a wide range of advantages:
- Reliability and security, thanks in particular to control of its own network of data centers
- A dedicated WordPress hosting offering, including a managed hosting package ideal for those who want to offload the technical side of things
- Responsive, efficient customer service, with a dedicated personal advisor available by phone to answer all your questions (technical and administrative)
- A wide range of services in addition to web hosting: domain names and SSL certificates, virtual and dedicated servers, cloud computing, email marketing, SEO tools, etc.
- Constant innovation, with numerous AI solutions on offer, whether for creating your next site or writing content, for example.
