Once mostly relegating themselves to European audiences, 1&1 IONOS has set sights on making hosting inroads into the lucrative U.S. market. With affordable Windows and Linux shared hosting plans combined with such incentives as abundant SSD storage and free domains, they aim to undercut familiar American providers.
But can the company deliver a quality hosting experience capable of supporting popular platforms like WordPress at scale? Do they provide the features growing sites require as traffic expands? We thoroughly benchmarked 1&1 IONOS to determine how they truly compare for startups and SMBs against the likes of Bluehost, HostGator and InMotion.
Our unbiased hands-on evaluation of 1&1 reveals specifically who their services best serve, where they currently fall short for discerning users, and everything else American site owners must weight before migrating over to this European hosting juggernaut. Let’s dig in!
Table of Contents
Who are 1and1 Hosting?
1and1 hosting is a web hosting provider based in Germany. The company was founded in 1988, so a long time ago and has become one of the most known web hosting providers around the world. They are based in Montabaur, Germany the very place Ralph Dommermuth founded it. Since being established 1 and 1 have established a great customer base in many countries worldwide, including Germany, Spain, the US, Mexico and the UK. In 2006, 1 and 1 became the top web host provider within the UK. This just shows the extent of 1 and 1’s customer base.
In the many years of being a company, 1 and 1 have ventured into many different aspects of the web, including domains, web building, hosting, security and web marketing. For web hosting, 1 and 1 offer managed cloud hosting, WordPress hosting, cloud server, VPS and dedicated hosting. The price range for all the different types of hosting ranges from 99p a month up to nearly £200 a month. In this article, I will discuss 1 and 1’s WordPress Hosting.
Since 2018
From 2018, 1&1 has rebranded. But it was a rebrand not like many you’ve seen before. Instead, 1&1 has teamed up with German giant Ionos, which specialises in cloud infrastructure solutions. After both companies, 1&1 is now called the very creative ‘1&1 Ionos’.
They gave 1&1 an opportunity to completely rebrand the business, the services it offers, and much more. That means all the plans talked about below that existed before the rebrand don’t exist anymore. That means the basic, plus, and unlimited plans can no longer be bought on 1&1.
Check out the old plans below and compare them to the new plans.
Does 1and1 Hosting offer good hosting?
1and1 Hosting Plans
Since the new rebranding and teaming up with Ionos, 1&1 now offers an amazing six WordPress hosting plans, as opposed to only three before. Three of the six plans are more professional plans for agencies with more professional features. These plans offer more features for those needing a more varied plan, especially if they are working with a range of clients with different needs and wants.
The other three plans are plans for a single site or a freelancer who doesn’t work on a large number of sites. Check out the details of all the plans below. The Essential, Business and Pro plans are smaller plans whereas the One, Advanced and Agency plans are the pro plans for the likes of agencies with better features.
Starter
1 website
Unlimited monthly traffic
100 GB SSD storage
2 CPU cores
2 GB RAM
Free domain for 1 year
Pay $1/month (with 1 year plan)
Unlimited Plus
Unlimited websites
Unlimited monthly traffic
Unlimited SSD storage
4 CPU cores
4 GB RAM
Free domain for 1 year
Pay $4.99/month (with 1 year plan)
eCommerce Plus
Unlimited websites
Unlimited monthly traffic
Unlimited SSD storage
4 CPU cores
8 GB RAM
Free domain for 1 year
Pay $6.99/month (with 1 year plan)
Some key outstanding things are abundant SSD disk space, high bandwidth capacities to accommodate growth, and configurable processing power and RAM based on workload needs. Their cheapest plan allows limited sites but provides immense headroom before outgrowing capabilities.
The Essential Plan:
The first WordPress Hosting plan is the Essential Plan. With this plan, users get access to one Managed WordPress Website. Therefore, this plan would be ideal for anyone creating a single website, such as a blog. Along with one website, users also get extra features such as 25GB SSD Storage, two 1GB MySQL databases, 10 email accounts, and free domains from a range of top-level domains such as .com, .co.uk, and .uk.
The price of this plan is cheap. It is more expensive than the old Basic Plan, which they no longer offer, but it comes with very similar features. Overall, the price is £1/$1.25 a month for 6 months and then £6/$7.49 a month thereafter. This excludes VAT.
Additionally, you can add HiDrive, SiteLock Basic and List Local Essential to your plan for additional costs. You can experience HiDrive for free for thirty days and SiteLock Basic. Afterwards, HiDrive costs an additional £1/$1.25 a month, whereas SiteLock will cost an extra £2/$2.50 a month. You can also test List Local Essential for 30 days, absolutely free. Then it will be £10/$12.49 a month for twelve months, then £20/$24.97 a month thereafter. This helps list your business on search engines and other websites.
The Business Plan;
The second WordPress plan created after the rebrand is the Business Plan. This plan is very similar to the first Essential Plan. This plan is ideal for larger websites that have a larger audience. With this plan, a user will receive access to two Managed WordPress Websites with domains included for both. Other features include 100 GB SSD storage, ten 1GB MySQL databases and 100 email accounts.
The price of this plan costs £1/$1.25 a month for the first twelve months and then £8 thereafter. This excludes VAT.
Additionally you can add HiDrive, SiteLock Basic and List Local Essential to your plan for additional costs. You can experience HiDrive for free for thirty days and SiteLock Basic. Afterwards, HiDrive costs an additional £1/$1.25 a month, whereas SiteLock will cost an extra £2/$2.50 a month. You can also test List Local Essential for 30 days, absolutely free. Then it will be £10/$12.49 a month for twelve months, then £20/$24.97 a month thereafter. This helps list your business on search engines and other websites.
The Pro Plan;
The last of the first three WordPress hosting plans is the Pro Plan. This plan costs £1 a month for the first six months and then £11 thereafter. This again excludes VAT. Similarly to the first two plans, a user will receive all the features as the others. These features are just amplified to suit this plan. That means a user will have access to up to five Managed WordPress websites, 200 GB SSD storage, fifty 1GB MySQL databases, 500 domains and also five free top-level domains.
Additionally, to the features outlined above, this plan also comes with SiteLock malware protection and a Railgun content delivery network. That means you will not need to add SiteLock to your website for an additional cost.
Additionally you can add HiDrive, SiteLock Premium and List Local Essential to your plan for additional costs. You can experience HiDrive for free for thirty days as well as SiteLock Premium. Afterwards, HiDrive costs an additional £1:$1.25 a month, whereas SiteLock Premium will cost an extra £5/$6.24 a month. You can also test List Local Essential for 30 days, absolutely free, then it will be £10 a month for twelve months, then £20 a month thereafter. This helps list your business on search engines and other websites.
One Plan;
The One plan is the first of the more advanced WordPress hosting plans. These plans are more targeted towards experts and agencies. Overall, the One plan is the smallest professional plan offering a range of features, including one WordPress project, 10 GB of storage, 1GB RAM, daily cloud backups, and AI-checked updates.
The price of this plan is also very cheap for a more professional plan. Overall, it costs £15/$18.73 a month, billed monthly, or £18/$22.47 a month, which you can cancel anytime. Both of these renew automatically, so it would be better to purchase a twelve-month contract as it’s a short-term contract, and you can experience all the features available to you at a discounted price.
VAT hasn’t been added to any of the pricing of the plans.
Advanced Plan;
The Advanced Plan is the second most professional WordPress plan offered by 1&1. This plan is an upgrade from the One Plan with many of the same features, including the one WordPress project, daily cloud backups and AI-checked updates. Users also get access to 40 GB of storage and 4GB RAM with this plan, which is an upgrade on the One Plan as it only has 10GB of storage and 1GB of RAM. Other features you will receive with this plan are Malware Protection, Varnish-based caching, and CDN.
Overall, this plan costs £40/$49.94 a month, excluding VAT. It is a plan ideal for a more significant site with plugins such as WooCommerce. This contract is a twelve-month contract, but you will be billed monthly. Alternatively, you can get a month-by-month contract, but the price of this plan is £48/$59.93 a month.
Agency Plan;
The final plan offered by 1&1 after their rebrand is the Agency plan. This is the largest out of any plan they offer, which means it will also be the most expensive. Overall, it has features similar to the other professional plans, such as the Daily Cloud Backups and AI-checked updates. It also includes the varnish-based caching and CDN and Malware Protection you receive with the Advanced Plan. Additionally, you will receive the SEO Toolkit and an upgrade on the SSD storage and RAM offered in the smaller plans, with this plan having 100GB of storage and 10GB of RAM.
The price of this plan is £100/$124.86 a month, excluding VAT. It has a plan length of twelve months. If you wish to have a month-by-month cancel anytime contract, it would cost £120/$149.83 a month.
What is 1and1 Hosting’s support like?
Like many of 1 and 1’s competitors, 1 and 1 also strives to give their customers the best support possible. It’s almost like a running theme that every host has excellent support facilities, and the real question is how well they execute these facilities.
To test 1 and 1’s live chat, I asked where their data centres are. The workers quickly replied and knew to answer my question. When I further asked whereabouts in the UK, expecting an answer of ‘London’ or ‘we can’t disclose this, sorry’, I was told a very aggressive “No and cannot be disclosed as that would breach security”. I was then unable to access this live chat feature. This was an inferior and unprofessional service, and I could not use their chat again to see if this was a one-off.
With every plan offered by 1 and 1, 24/7 WordPress expert support is included. This means you can contact 1 and 1 any time of day or night with any problems with your website or domain. I think most hosting providers should include this feature in their plans. The Expert WP support also means you should always be talking to a WordPress Expert if you have any problems with your WordPress sites.
1 and 1 also have a community page on their site. This page lets anyone find information and tutorials about problems and things they want to learn. There are hundreds of articles and tutorials, so the chances of finding one you need are substantial. You can also search the website for tutorials and information, and the chances of finding community tutorials and articles are very high.
There is also a feature within the 1 and 1 website called the 1 and 1 app centre. This centre compiles the best and most useful plugins and themes so you can quickly find the right ones.
Also, every plan offers a thirty-day money-back guarantee. This can ease people’s peace of mind with 1 and 1 as they can try them out and, if they don’t like them, receive a refund. You can also call 1 and 1 24/7 and request a callback service.
Does 1and1 Hosting have good security features?
A free SSL is part of every plan offered by 1 and 1. This means all data within your websites will be encrypted including all personal and credit card details. With the number of security breaches we see, an SSL is an essential part of any website nowadays. E-commerce sites need SSLs as many people will be inserting their card details, addresses and names into these sites, so encrypting this data is necessary.
1 and 1 also use a geo-redundancy feature to protect your website and data. This means your sites are stored in two separate locations, far away from one another. So, how does this help with the security of my website? Well, this means that your sites will always be running in the case of a system failure at one data centre or a national power outage in one location. Backups are also made within different data centre locations, ensuring 100% airtime almost every time. You can also recover these backups within the control panel.
Your sites are also protected from DDoS attacks. 1 and 1 try their hardest to detect these attacks, which have the potential to paralyze your websites and make them inaccessible for days on end. If the protection features detect any potential attacks on your websites, countermeasures will be put in place to stop the attacks.
SiteLock Basic is also included with the Plus and Unlimited plans. SiteLock scans all your site pages for harmful software and other threats that can potentially damage your sites. This is another excellent way to help prevent attacks on your sites.
Your sites’ security will also be automatically updated. This is essential because if your site isn’t updated, it can lead to loopholes within it, which can provide potential grounds for attacks.
1and1 Hosting’s performance. Is it good?
For WordPress sites, 1 and 1 guarantee an uptime of nearly 100%, which is vague. Realistically, they want you to see the 100% and be bought over immediately with no strings attached. Generally, 1 and 1 offer an uptime of 99.9%, but they have no guarantee. Saying nearly 100% uptime could even mean 51%, as it’s closer to 100% than to 1%, so don’t be expecting any commentaries if your site experiences downtime.
Unlimited storage is also a great performance feature. They use solid-state drives, known as SSDs, to store all your site data. These drives help speed up your website by sometimes up to 50%. The unlimited SSD also means you can have as many databases as you need for your sites. 1 and 1 also use PHP 7. This is the most recent PHP feature, so it helps secure your website even more and improves its performance.
The Plus and Unlimited plans also include a CDN. The CDN helps to cache data from your website in servers closest to you. This means your sites will load faster after a user has been on them once. The unlimited plan has a Railway CDN. This CDN helps to cache data that couldn’t be previously cached, leading to faster load speeds.
1 and 1 also update your sites regularly, meaning your sites will always be protected. This also helps the performance of your sites.
Does 1and1 Hosting have any other/unique features?
With all the features I have talked about above, 1 and 1 have some other features I would like to mention. One of the features I would like to say is that your control panel with 1 and 1 comes with pre-installed plugins. The plugins you will receive could be potential plugins you need and were originally going to use, so you won’t need to purchase them.
Users of any of the three WordPress plans also have access to an unlimited amount of email accounts with their free domain.
1and1 Hosting’s Positives;
1 and 1 have many positives to their service, some being their features, performance, and plans.
Three plans for WordPress are offered by 1 and 1. Every plan is different as it would be more suitable for different customers. This means choosing the best plan for you is quite simple, depending on what type of site/sites you want to host.
Overall, 1 and 1 are very cheap hosts for WordPress. Their plans start from less than a pound and go up to no lower than £10. You couldn’t ask for a better price unless you want free hosting. The renewal price after the initial twelve months is also very low. The plan costs 99p and only goes up to £4.99 a month.
With every plan, you also get access to a free domain, which is another benefit of 1 and 1. This domain is free for up to twelve months, and after that, you will need to renew it.
Many of the features offered by 1 and 1 are great, and they all try to help your website’s security and performance. All the features I’ve talked about previously, including the CDN, geo-redundancy, and security features, are all there to help your website perform at its best. There are also many ways to gain information and help from 1 and 1, including their live chat, tutorials, and hotline.
1 and 1’s uptime is also another positive, as it is generally closer to 100% than it is to 99%, although they do not provide a legitimate guarantee on their uptime like many competitors.
1and1 Hosting’s Negatives;
One of the biggest downfalls of 1 and 1 would be their customer service. I had a small experience with their live chat feature and have had a bad experience. The ‘expert’ was straightforward, blunt and aggressive in the way that they answered a small fundamental question. I’ve talked about this above. This was totally out of order and doesn’t seem to be a one-off. I looked at various other reviews, and it seems many people have had bad experiences with their customer service. Although there are many other opportunities to be had in terms of customer service, they may be very different experiences.
1 and 1 also don’t use cPanel, a control panel/dashboard many customers would be familiar with. 1 and 1’s own panel may get confusing if you’re a customer from hosting with cPanel. This is because you are used to the way things work on cPanel.
1and1 Hosting: My thoughts;
I wouldn’t use 1 and 1 hosting, mainly because of the customer service experience. I felt that the expert did not want to help me. I don’t do bad customer service. That said, all of their features make them look like a web hosting anyone should consider. 1 and 1 offer many ways to protect your WordPress sites and enhance their performance. They can also be vague with some of their features, especially their uptime, saying they offer ‘nearly 100% uptime’. What does that mean?
But realistically if I were to take away my experiences with 1 and 1 I would recommend using. Besides their customer service, every other feature makes them look like a great hosting provider. I have rated this company 2 out of 5 stars. The reason for this is customer service. Without my experience, the rating would have been at least a 3 stars, but probably a 4 star rating.
FAQ
Still evaluating 1&1 IONOS’ hosting services? Here are answers to some common questions:
Does 1&1 IONOS offer phone support?
Yes. 1&1 provides 24/7 phone, ticket, and live chat support.
Is 1&1 IONOS beginner friendly? The cPanel control panel is pretty intuitive for those used to standard interfaces. However, limited one-click installers may constrain ease of use.
Can 1&1 handle high-traffic sites well? Yes, their higher-tier plans can accommodate enterprise-level traffic loads and demand.
What is 1&1’s uptime SLA guarantee?
1&1 guarantees 99.9% uptime on their shared hosting services.
Conclusion
Capable, scalable hosting at affordable rates for what’s included makes 1&1 IONOS shared plans appeal to growing American SMBs and developers needing robust hosting foundations. Yet clunkier admin UIs than competitors and renewal sticker shock keep them from unseating current category leaders. But for venturing European businesses taking off stateside or startups prioritizing resources over conveniences, 1&1 deserves consideration balancing value against limitations.
This article was last updated on 25th September 2019
*ALL PRICING WITHIN THIS ARTICLE WERE ACCURATE AT THE TIME OF WRITING. ALL STERLING (GBP) AND EURO (EUR) WERE CONVERTED FROM DOLLARS (USD) USING GOOGLE’S OWN CONVERTER.
*ALL PLANS AND PACKAGES MADE BY THE FLYWHEEL ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE BY THE FLYWHEEL ITSELF.
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