Hostinger vs IONOS – Which is Better Value for Money in 2025?

Hostinger and IONOS often appear together on lists of the best web hosts, but which one is the better choice overall? To find out, I set them head-to-head, testing their pricing, performance, security, and support. Surprisingly, it wasn’t a tight race. Hostinger was the clear winner, thanks to its predictable long-term pricing, its easy setup, and more.

In my tests, Hostinger consistently loaded pages faster right from the first byte. Plus, its intuitive hPanel dashboard, easy one-click WordPress installations, and straightforward tutorials meant I could launch a test site quickly. I never had any issues throughout the whole process.

IONOS isn’t without merit, though. Its flexible plans and advanced tools make it a strong choice for experienced developers, especially those based in Europe. But IONOS’ enticing first-term prices rose sharply upon renewal, while renewal costs with Hostinger weren’t nearly as harsh.

Because it offers better long-term value, quicker setup, and a smoother overall experience, Hostinger won this comparison comfortably. Read on to see why and to find out if IONOS might still be a better pick for you.

Plans and Pricing

Hostinger Saves You More in the Long Run, IONOS Costs Less Upfront

Hostinger offers two shared hosting plans while IONOS offers four. The most comparable options are Hostinger’s Business plan and IONOS’ Plus plan, as both sit in the mid-range for pricing and include daily backups and unlimited bandwidth. Hostinger also offers a free CDN and a number of other valuable freebies like a proprietary control panel (hPanel) and WordPress optimizations.

IONOS’ introductory discount makes the Plus plan cheaper than Hostinger’s Business plan at checkout. But while IONOS’ offers are certainly enticing in the short term, they only last for your first year – and your bill could rise by up to 900% on renewal. Meanwhile, Hostinger locks in the introductory discount for up to 4 years and the renewal spike is far less drastic. That makes Hostinger easily the better choice for long-term savings.

Both providers offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. However, IONOS’ cancellation process can be slow or delayed. Many people have also flagged billing issues like duplicate charges or difficulty terminating subscriptions, which isn’t something I’ve ever come across with Hostinger.

And the champion here? It’s a close one, but I have to say Hostinger for the simple reason that you get better value in the long run. Yet, you still have the option to pay monthly and not get bogged down with a long-term contract.

Features

Hostinger Packs in More Features for Less

That old saying “you get what you pay for” somewhat holds true for our two hosts, though not in the way one might think. Hostinger’s Premium plan is more feature-rich than IONOS’ Essential plan, which justifies its initially higher price. With IONOS, you’ll need to upgrade to a Plus or Ultimate plan to access features that Hostinger includes at a much lower cost in its Premium plan.

Both offer a free domain for a year, but Hostinger also throws in a free AI website builder. You also get up to 50 email accounts with Hostinger, while IONOS provides just one.

Hostinger’s Premium plan also gives you 25 GB of SSD storage. Meanwhile, IONOS’ Essential plan only gives you 10 GB of HDD storage, which is much slower than SSD. Hostinger’s higher plans switch to NVMe SSD, which is even faster – but that’s not the case with IONOS.

Another bonus with Hostinger is its unlimited free migrations. IONOS only transfers 1 site for free and charges for any extra, which feels restrictive. IONOS does have an edge when it comes to backups, as you get daily backups even on its Essential plan, while Hostinger only offers weekly backups on its equivalent basic plan. In addition, IONOS’ higher-tier plans do stand out thanks to their support for unlimited sites.

However, a huge feature suite doesn’t matter if it’s a pain to use. Hostinger’s hPanel took the win for me in terms of how easy it was to find the features I was looking for. That’s not to say I didn’t like IONOS’ control panel, but I found that setting up a site took a little longer compared to Hostinger.

Here’s a summary of what you get with Hostinger and IONOS:

Performance

The Difference Is in the Details

When we test hosting provider performance, we use GTmetrix, Sucuri Load Time Tester, and UptimeRobot. We also monitor each host for at least a week to get a realistic view, instead of just taking a one-off snapshot and calling it a day. Both Hostinger and IONOS-hosted sites returned solid results, but a closer look revealed that Hostinger had the edge.

Our Hostinger-hosted website scored an A, with a 99% for performance and an impressive 0.19 second for Time to First Byte (TTFB). Fully Loaded Time was 0.82 seconds. This is Hostinger’s LiteSpeed servers and built-in WordPress optimizations. It’s also worth noting that Hostinger has recently upgraded to AMD EPYC-powered infrastructure, which offers improved speed, stability, and energy efficiency.

Now, when you look at the GTmetrix report for our IONOS-hosted website with its perfect 100% performance score, you might think that IONOS somehow got the better of Hostinger in this round. However, you’ll see that Time to First Byte is nearly one and a half times that of Hostinger’s at 0.26 seconds. Its Fully Loaded Time is 0.78 seconds – IONOS’ old HDD storage is partly to blame for that (you can head over to our IONOS review for more details).

Next up, we compared each host on global loading speeds. A website will load faster for visitors near the data center location where your site is hosted. Hostinger and IONOS have data centers all over the globe. But Hostinger has a presence in South America and Asia, while IONOS is more EU-centric, which is evident in the test results. At least, it’s clear for Oceania and Asia test results, although IONOS did surprisingly well in Brazil.

It doesn’t take your IONOS site any longer to fully load than a Hostinger-hosted site, true. But it takes IONOS’ servers twice as long to start sending data downstream to the user’s browser, which can severely impact your site’s performance. Hostinger should deliver better speed and performance in either case because it’s faster from the start. You can read the full performance report in our Hostinger review.

It doesn’t matter how speedily your website loads if your server is offline and can’t answer the user’s request. That’s why we check reliability using UptimeRobot. The reports for both hosts in this case were exactly the same: 100% uptime. That’s better than either host’s guarantee of 99.9%.

Both of these bargain hosts returned some excellent results in our testing, but we have to let Hostinger squeak by on its TTFB score and global performance. It doesn’t get much faster than that. And at half the time of IONOS, it deserves the credit.

Security

IONOS Is Safe, but Hostinger Is Safer

Budget hosts often cut corners on security, but Hostinger bundles strong protections into its basic plan. You get a malware scanner, a custom DNS firewall, a web application firewall (WAF), and a secure access manager without paying extra. To match this, IONOS requires add-ons, like SiteLock for malware removal. You’d likely spend twice as much on IONOS to get the same security as Hostinger.

Hostinger also includes free SSL, but only for your main domain on shared hosting. IONOS has a Wildcard SSL on all plans, which secures unlimited subdomains in addition to the main domain. Both hosts also offer daily backups and DDoS protection to keep your site up and running.

That said, Hostinger has an edge with optional dark web monitoring as a paid add-on, which IONOS doesn’t offer at all. This scans for leaked databases on the dark web and alerts you if it finds any of your account credentials or personal information, which is really handy to have given the constant increase in cybercrime.

Support

Hostinger Offers More Responsive, Higher-Quality Support

Both Hostinger and IONOS have multilingual 24/7 customer support. You can access Hostinger’s website in over 40 languages and support is offered in English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. IONOS, on the other hand, offers English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Romanian versions of its site and support languages.

IONOS also offers a “personal consultant.” to provide one-on-one, individualized support to all its customers. However, based on my experience, the customer support quality leaves much to be desired, and unfortunately, the live chat support option is often unavailable.

Unlike Hostinger, you’re able to get support via phone with IONOS – either by calling directly or requesting a callback. Unfortunately, the support team fell flat during our testing, lacking the technical knowledge to solve our reviewer’s issue. The agent did send a follow-up email after a phone call, but again, the answer was unsatisfactory.

By contrast, Hostinger provides support via live chat, email, and an AI bot named Kodee.

To contact support through your hPanel account, you need to answer some questions about your issue. Your answers generate a list of knowledge base articles you have to go through first before you’re given the option to contact support. And in my experience, what that got me was more links to the knowledge center.

Receiving an answer from email support was almost as fast as live chat, but again support merely provided links. There were some extra above-and-beyond links thrown in, though, so that was an improvement.

Kodee is described as an “AI sales expert” and is available to both prospective and existing Hostinger customers. It can answer questions about plans, pricing, features – and even provide tech support. For example, I asked which plan I should choose to get the most out of the AI website builder and how to connect to a CDN. While its answers may seem a tad generic, they’re generated almost instantaneously and are generally helpful.

IONOS and Hostinger have excellent knowledge base articles, but Hostinger has the edge with a large range of tutorials that walk you through all kinds of topics, including WordPress, SSL, DNS management, and more. It’s not surprising, since even its support team relies on the articles so heavily.

Overall, though, we have to give this round to Hostinger. While both hosts could use improvements to their support teams, Hostinger’s team made more of an effort to provide solutions and was generally helpful, as was its AI support bot, Kodee. Even if you prefer phone support, IONOS falls short – answering the phone 24/7 is only meaningful if it leads to actual resolutions.

Hostinger Wins the Day

In all aspects, Hostinger wins, but especially for beginners and small-to- medium-size site owners. It offers better long-term pricing, faster initial load times, easier setup, and stronger built-in security. You also get free site migrations, making the switch low-risk and hassle-free. Even its somewhat mediocre support team manages to outperform IONOS’ team.

That doesn’t mean that IONOS isn’t a good host, however. It is, after all, our number two choice. It may not be able to topple Hostinger from its throne, but it has a lot to offer.

IONOS’ hosting options are flexible and feature an arsenal of advanced developer tools and versatile add-ons like PHP extended support and e-commerce plugins. It’s quite possible to scale your site without ever leaving IONOS. And while not as ideal as Hostinger for audiences in Asia and Oceania, IONOS fared well enough in the US and Europe, making it a strong contender for region-specific hosting needs.

FAQ

What are some cons of Hostinger?

Hostinger is primarily known for its shared hosting. While it does provide VPS and cloud hosting, these currently aren’t its main focus and there are only a handful of configurations to choose from. You can often find better features and prices elsewhere. It also lacks truly managed options and advanced tech support.

Which is better for beginners: Hostinger or IONOS?

Hostinger, without a doubt. Its beginner-friendly hPanel control panel and comprehensive knowledge base make it an excellent choice. While not perfect, Hostinger’s support team is generally more helpful than IONOS’ team. In contrast, IONOS is more suitable for tech-savvy users like developers, designers, engineers, and IT professionals due to its unmanaged plans and less beginner-friendly support.

Do IONOS or Hostinger have cheaper renewal rates?

IONOS is overall cheaper on renewal. Its Essential and Starter plans renew at a lower price than Hostinger’s Premium plan. The Plus plan also renews at a slightly lower price than Hostinger’s Business plan. That said, you’ll need to shell out extra to get the same level of security as Hostinger. Plus, Hostinger still saves you more in the long run as you can lock in the introductory discounts for four years.

Is Hostinger a good host?

While Hostinger did top our list of the top hosting providers in 2025, we can’t recommend it for everyone. If you own an e-commerce site that’s getting a heavy load of traffic, it’s not the host for you. Likewise, it’s not the most developer-friendly hosting platform, as it’s just not that flexible. However, if you have a fairly basic site that receives low to moderate traffic, Hostinger could be the best host for you.