Hostinger vs IONOS – Which is Better Value for Money in 2024?

Good. Fast. Cheap. There’s an old saying in the business world that you can choose two of those, but seldom can you 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, we pitted our two front-runners against each other in a one-on-one match. Some of what we found was a bit surprising, especially since we were expecting a closer race than we got. There always has to be a winner, though, and it was pretty clear just which host that was by the time we were through.

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 Time Is a Big Factor in How Cheap

Hostinger comes with competitive prices, although the cheapest it offers per plan requires an upfront payment for two years. On the flip side, IONOS offers month-to-month, no-contract plans. Hostinger also allows you to pay monthly, but it could cost you significantly more than the upfront two-year payment. Investing in a longer-term plan with Hostinger gives you better value, while IONOS costs you less in the short term.

Hostinger offers three shared hosting plans: Premium, Business, and Cloud Startup. IONOS offers four: Essential, Starter, Plus, and Ultimate. The fairest comparison would be between IONOS’ Plus plan and Hostinger’s Business plan. Both offer daily backups, a free content delivery network (CDN), and unlimited bandwidth. Unless you can take advantage of one of IONOS’ many discounts, however, your Plus plan can cost you more than a Business plan would.
Both Hostinger and IONOS provide a 30-day money-back guarantee. However, canceling and completely deleting your account with IONOS is not a walk in the park. 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 IONOS for the simple reason that you have the option to pay monthly and not get bogged down with a long-term contract. If, on the other hand, you don’t mind the time commitment, Hostinger is such a close second. We can’t not recommend it for its prices, too.

Features

Hostinger Gives Much More for the Money

The 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. In this case, “You get what you pay for” means that you have to pay IONOS more to get most of the features Hostinger gives you for much less.

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 website builder, while with IONOS, you’ll need to shell out extra for that. Hostinger also offers 100 email accounts, compared to IONOS’ one.

Hostinger’s Premium also gives you 100 GB of SSD storage, while with IONOS’ Essential, you only get 10 GB of old, slow HDD storage. The only real advantages IONOS’ Essential plan has are its daily backups and the inclusion of free Cloudflare CDN. Hostinger’s Premium plan, on the other hand, only includes weekly backups and doesn’t provide access to a CDN.

It’s easy to see why we prefer Hostinger over IONOS when it comes to comparing 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 two main tools: GTmetrix and Uptime Robot. We monitor each host for at least a week, and then we look at the results. 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 0.1 second for Time to First Byte (TTFB). Fully Loaded Time was 0.79 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, if you look at the GTmetrix report for our IONOS-hosted website that received a 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 almost twice that of Hostinger’s, at 0.26 seconds. Its Fully Loaded Time is 0.78 seconds (see our IONOS review for more details).

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 low. Hostinger should deliver better speed and performance in either case because it’s faster from the start.

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. It doesn’t get much faster than that. And at half the time of IONOS, it deserves the credit. Read the full performance report in our Hostinger review.

Security

IONOS Is Good, But Hostinger Is Better

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.

Hostinger provides a custom firewall, designed in-house just for Hostinger’s servers. Shared hosting users are also treated to the Immunify360 security suite, providing a web application firewall, antivirus and anti-malware protection, and WebShield software to identify online attackers. Hostinger has also deployed advanced PHP security modules, adding another layer of security to your site. And let’s not forget the free SSL you get with all plans.

IONOS, by comparison, looks like pretty standard fare, offering DDoS protection, daily backups and site scanning. It does run its servers on the HTTP/2 network protocol, making it more secure than hosts still using the HTTP/1.1. Another plus in its favor is its SSL certificates feature 256-bit encryption instead of 128-bit. You can pay extra for SiteLock through your IONOS account, but overall,the free security measures IONOS offers just don’t hold up to Hostinger’s.

Support

Hostinger Offers Live Chat Support, While IONOS Uses Phone Support

Both Hostinger and IONOS have 24/7 customer support, but you’ll have very different experiences with each of them.

Ever since the merger of with IONOS, the company has introduced a service referred to as a “personal consultant.” This service aims to provide individualized, one-on-one customer support at your convenience. However, based on my experience, the customer support quality remains unchanged, and unfortunately, the live chat support option is still unavailable.

You’re able to get support via phone or live chat with IONOS – either by calling directly or requesting a callback. However, live chat is so often unavailable, we’ve never been able to test it. And unfortunately in our main review of IONOS, the support team fell flat, lacking in the technical knowledge to solve our reviewer’s issue. The agent did send a followup email after a phone call, but again, the answer was unsatisfactory.

By contrast, Hostinger provides support via live chat and email. It’s just getting there that can be an issue.

To contact support through your hPanel, you need to answer some questions about your issue. These questions generate a list of knowledge base articles you have to go through first, before being given the option to contact support. And in our experience, what that got us was more links to the knowledge center. Email support was answered almost as fast as live chat, but again merely provided links. There were some extra, above-and-beyond links thrown in, though, so that was an improvement.

Both 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 issues, including WordPress, SSL, DNS (Domain Name Systems), 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. At least the agents made attempts to find solutions to our issues. While both hosts could use improvements to their support teams, Hostinger’s team made more of an effort and actually did a bit extra in the email. They deserve credit for that.

Hostinger Wins the Day

In all but price, Hostinger wins. And it even wins there, too, unless you can snag yourself one of IONOS’ good discounts. Hostinger simply offers better features, faster performance, more security, and even its somewhat mediocre support team can outdo IONOS.

What surprised us was just how not close the competition really was between our two top hosts. We thought going in that surely IONOS would stand up better to Hostinger, but it just wasn’t so. 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 the website owner with a bit more in their wallet.

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 you can often find better features and prices from other hosts for these types of upgraded hosting.

Which is better for beginners: Hostinger or IONOS?

Oh, boy…Neither host has the kind of support a new website owner might need to rely on. Hostinger’s support team did score better than IONOS’s team did, though. And it has the beginner-friendly hPanel control panel. So, I suppose in all fairness, I’d have to say Hostinger is the better of the two for raw newbies.

Does 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 on the host once that first year is up.

So, is Hostinger the best host?

While Hostinger did top our list of the top ten shared hosting providers, we can’t recommend it for everyone. If you own an e-commerce site 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 getting small-to-medium traffic, Hostinger could be the best host for you.