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

Good. Fast. Cheap. There’s an old saying in the business world: you can choose two of these, but rarely receive all three. And yet, Hostinger and IONOS – our two top web hosting providers – both claim they can deliver all three easily and efficiently.

Now you know us here at Website Planet. We can’t ever let anyone simply make claims without having a look at them ourselves. To that end, I put our two front-runners head-to-head in a direct comparison.

Some of what I found was a bit surprising, especially since I was expecting a closer race. There always has to be a winner, though, and by the end of my analysis, it was clear which host came out on top.

Hostinger outperformed IONOS, but IONOS still has its benefits for certain customers. For example, while Hostinger is ideal for beginners, IONOS is great for more experienced developers and agencies.

Read on to find out just how close (or not) things were, as well as why and how Hostinger came out on top as the fastest, cheapest, “goodest” web host around.

Plans and Pricing

Hostinger’s and IONOS’ Plans Are Cheap, but What About Value for Money?

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 (and if you luck into one of its promotional sales, you could even get your first year free if you commit to a three-year term). However, Hostinger’s Business plan offers up to 4 years of first-term discounts – and lower renewal rates. Ultimately, investing in a longer-term plan with Hostinger gives you better value, while IONOS only costs you less in the short term.

Both Hostinger and IONOS provide a 30-day money-back guarantee. However, canceling and completely deleting your account with IONOS can be a hassle. You have to submit a written cancellation request at least three working days before your renewal date, and your cancellation won’t take effect until it’s confirmed in writing. Some users have even experienced lengthy delays in the confirmation process.

And the champion here? It’s a close one, but we 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 Gives Much More for the Money

That old saying “you get what you pay for” somewhat holds true for our two hosts, though not in the way one might think. When you compare the two cheapest plans, IONOS’ Essential plan can’t hold a candle to Hostinger’s Premium when it comes to features. 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.

Now, IONOS does have some appealing features like a free domain for a year and a Wildcard SSL certificate, but then so does Hostinger. Hostinger also throws in additional perks that IONOS lacks. For instance, Hostinger includes a free AI-powered website builder, while with IONOS, you’ll need to shell out extra for that. Hostinger also offers up to 50 email accounts free for one year (two per domain), compared to IONOS’ lone email per account.

Hostinger’s Premium plan also gives you 25 GB of SSD storage, while with IONOS’ Essential plan, you only get 10 GB of old, slow HDD storage. And if you upgrade with Hostinger, that changes to NVMe SSD, but not so with IONOS. The only real advantage with IONOS’ Essential plan is its daily backup feature – Hostinger’s Premium plan only includes weekly backups.

IONOS is one of the few hosts that offers unlimited plans (Plus and Ultimate) that are perfect for agencies and web developers. However, it’s easy to see why we prefer Hostinger over IONOS when it comes to features. You can see for yourself in the handy table below.

Performance

The Difference Is in the Details

When we test hosting provider performance, we use three main tools: GTmetrix, Sucuri Load Time Tester, and UptimeRobot. We also monitor each host for at least a week, which returns more accurate results than the one-off tests some sites publish. The results for both Hostinger- and IONOS-hosted websites were very good. At first glance, it may seem that IONOS did better than Hostinger. If you look at some important details, however, you’ll see that Hostinger did, in fact, outdo its competition.

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. That’s all due to the LiteSpeed servers and the optimizations Hostinger enabled when we installed WordPress. By contrast, many shared hosting providers can’t return anything faster than 0.5 seconds for TTFB.

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 (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 that IONOS lacks, 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. That can have a big impact on your site’s performance if the user is a good distance from the data center or if their own internet speed is slow. 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

When it comes to budget hosts, you often get the bargain-basement security features and little else. Hostinger breaks that mold by giving your site top-shelf security features, even on the entry-level plan. Again, this is another great feature for beginners who are likely unfamiliar with the security measures they need. If you purchase the Business plan or any of Hostinger’s cloud plans, you can also take advantage of the extra security provided by Hostinger’s CDN.

Hostinger provides a custom DNS firewall designed in-house just for Hostinger’s servers. Shared hosting users are also treated to a malware scanner, a web application firewall (WAF), 24/7 monitoring, and a secure access manager. Hostinger has also deployed advanced PHP security modules, adding another layer of security to your site. And let’s not forget the free SSL and automated backups you get with all plans.

IONOS, by comparison, looks like pretty standard fare, offering geo-redundancy, data recovery, DDoS protection, daily backups, and site scanning. But in IONOS’ favor is its Wildcard SSL certificates, which feature 256-bit encryption instead of the less secure 2048-bit found in Hostinger’s Let’s Encrypt SSLs.

You can pay extra for SiteLock through your IONOS account, but overall, IONOS’ free security measures just don’t hold up to what Hostinger offers.

Support

Hostinger Offers Live Chat Support, While IONOS Uses Phone 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.

Ever since the merger of 1&1 Internet and ProfitBricks to form IONOS, the host has introduced a service referred to as a “personal consultant.” This service aims to provide individualized, one-on-one customer support. However, based on my experience, the customer support quality remains unchanged (that is, bad), and unfortunately, the live chat support option is still 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 it 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 technical 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. Hostinger simply offers better pricing and renewal rates, features, performance, and security. 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?

Currently, Hostinger’s renewal fees are significantly lower than what IONOS is offering. So, while you may be able to snag a sweet discount for your first year with IONOS, you’ll likely end up paying a good bit more to keep your site up and running. That said, IONOS’ unlimited shared plans are a much better deal if you want to host multiple sites, even if they come with HDD storage instead of SSD.

Is Hostinger a good host?

While Hostinger did top our list of the top ten shared 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.