IONOS

IONOS trades from Montabaur and Karlsruhe, descends from 1&1, went public on the Frankfurt exchange in 2023 and remains part of United Internet AG. It is one of the largest hosting groups in Europe, running its own geo-redundant data centres in Germany, elsewhere in Europe and the United States. STRATO, listed separately here, belongs to the same group.

For a mass-market host the shared line is unusually tolerant of developers: SSH, Git version management, WP-CLI and cron are on every tariff, with a choice of PHP release and MariaDB databases. Beyond shared hosting the portfolio runs to VPS, dedicated and bare-metal machines, GPU servers and a separate IaaS cloud with its own documented API and price calculator, so the shared category describes the entry product rather than the company.

Worth knowing

Advertised pricing is promotional, and IONOS prints both the introductory and the standing rate, which makes the size of the step visible. The multiple recorded here is the entry plan’s; the middle tiers step up more steeply than that, and every plan carries a one-off setup fee on top.