IONOS

IONOS (formerly 1&1) is a European hosting and domain provider owned by the German group United Internet. It's used to host your website, register domains, get professional email, and build web pages, with data centers in Europe.

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Very little to start. IONOS is one of the cheapest ways to get a site online: its entry Essential hosting plan starts at US$1/mo on an introductory offer, with a domain and SSL certificate included free for the first year. The number to plan around, though, is the renewal — after the intro term the plan rises to US$8/mo, and the bundled domain renews at its regular price after year one. If you use the IONOS website builder or need more resources for a bigger project, the monthly cost increases from there. For a small starter site the total first-year outlay is hard to beat — just budget on the renewal price, not the headline offer.

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IONOS belongs to United Internet, a German internet group founded by Ralph Dommermuth. IONOS (formerly 1&1 IONOS) is its hosting subsidiary and is publicly traded, although United Internet retains the majority stake.

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With an IONOS hosting plan, you often don't pay for the domain at first — it's included free for the first year. Registered on its own, the cost depends on the extension: popular endings like .com are usually cheap in the first year thanks to promotions, then renew at a higher regular rate from year two. That renewal price, not the promotional one, is the figure to budget around, and it varies by extension and current offers — IONOS publishes the live per-extension prices on its domain pages, so check your specific ending there. If you're planning a website anyway, bundling the domain with a hosting plan is usually the cheaper way in.

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Your customer ID appears in the welcome email IONOS sent you when you signed up and inside your customer area (Control Panel), usually at the top next to your account details. You can also use it (or your email) to log in.

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No — IONOS has no permanently free plan. What it does have are unusually low introductory offers: web hosting starts at US$1/mo for the first term, with a domain and SSL certificate included in the first year. The catch is the renewal — once the intro term ends, the entry plan rises to US$8/mo, so the headline price is a first-term deal rather than the long-term cost. Instead of a free tier, IONOS offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can try it and get a refund if it's not for you. If you need genuinely free, a builder like Wix has a free plan (with ads, on a subdomain) — but for proper hosting on your own domain, IONOS is paid.

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