IONOS raised prices on customers who had already signed up. The company published a 2026 price adjustment notice explaining the change, then published two more: one for VPS customers and one for Cloud Server customers. Affected customers found out by email, with a PDF listing their contracts and the new prices.
The reason IONOS gives is the same on all three pages: rising costs to operate and maintain infrastructure, plus higher security requirements, “even for older product generations.” The remedy IONOS offers is also the same. You can cancel. On the VPS and Cloud Server pages, that instruction carries a warning in the same article: “If you delete a server, all data stored on it will also be permanently deleted.”
That is the position this guide starts from. IONOS is the largest hosting company in Europe, with more than 6.2 million customer contracts, 22 million domains under management and 31 data centers. Scale is real. The question is what the bill looks like in year two, and how much of it you can predict on the day you sign up.
We compared IONOS against seven hosts on three things: the term the advertised price requires, what the plan renews at, and which charges sit outside the plan price entirely. Every figure was checked against the provider’s own pages in September 2026.
Table of Contents
Quick Comparison: 7 IONOS Alternatives in 2026
| Host | Best for | Entry price | Renews at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hostinger | Lowest entry cost | $2.99 per month on a 48 month term | $10.99 per month |
| DreamHost | Renewal price shown before checkout | $2.89 per month on a 1 year term | $10.99 per month |
| InMotion Hosting | The longest refund window | From about $2.99 per month | About $10.99 per month |
| SiteGround | Support quality | $2.99 per month on a 12 month term | $17.99 per month |
| GreenGeeks | Renewable energy matching | $2.95 per month on a 12 month term | $13.95 per month |
| Cloudways | No renewal increase at all | About $11 per month | The same price |
| Hetzner | Hourly billing with no minimum term | About 5.49 euros per month | The same price |
What Is the 2026 IONOS Price Adjustment?
The 2026 IONOS price adjustment raised prices on existing contracts, not just on new sign-ups. IONOS notified affected customers by email with a PDF listing each contract and its new price. The notices apply across product lines, and IONOS published separate explanations for VPS and Cloud Servers.
IONOS states the increase changes nothing technical. Features, add-ons and configurations stay exactly as they were. What changes is the number on the invoice.
The escape route deserves attention. IONOS confirms you can cancel any affected product “at any time with immediate effect.” For shared hosting, that is a clean exit. For a VPS or a Cloud Server it is not, because the same help article states that deleting a server permanently deletes the data on it. Cancelling and preserving your site are two separate jobs, and IONOS only automates the first.
IONOS also publishes advice on reducing your bill. One tip is revealing: extend your domain registration before the effective date and you keep the older price. That is IONOS confirming the increase lands at renewal, and that timing changes what you pay.
The Plesk charge set the pattern in 2025
This is not the first mid-contract change. In October 2025, The Register reported that IONOS emailed VPS customers to add “a monthly fee of 5 pounds (excluding VAT) per Plesk license,” effective October 30, 2025. Plesk had been bundled at no charge. IONOS blamed licence price rises from its partner WebPros International, writing that it could “only offset these costs to a limited extent.”
Customers had roughly one month to pay the new fee or delete their Plesk licence key. IONOS was within its contract. The Register quoted the clause directly: “We reserve the right to change the prices and/or nature of our services by giving you 30 days written notice of those changes.”
Thirty days is the number to remember. It is the amount of warning your hosting budget is contractually guaranteed. On the current US IONOS VPS page, Plesk Obsidian now appears as a priced line item at $6 per month, alongside additional IPv4 addresses at $5 per month each.
What Does IONOS Actually Cost in 2026?
IONOS shared hosting renews at roughly double its introductory price, and the VPS introductory price lasts only three months. The $1 per month offer that IONOS is known for applies to the Plus plan, which renews at $14 per month. That is the gap most comparisons miss.
Current US pricing from the IONOS web hosting page runs Essential at $4 introductory and $8 renewal, Starter at $6 and $10, Plus at $1 and $14, and Ultimate at $10 and $18. Managed WordPress plans follow the same shape: Start $5 to $8, Grow $1 to $12, Boost $12 to $17.
The VPS line works differently, and the difference costs money. IONOS advertises VPS+ “starting at $4 per month.” That $4 covers three months. The term is one year. VPS M+ returns to its regular $11 per month for the remaining nine.
Run the arithmetic on a full year of VPS M+. Three months at $4 is $12. Nine months at $11 is $99. The year costs $111, which averages $9.25 per month. The advertised figure is $4. Neither number is wrong, and only one of them is what you pay.
Which IONOS Fees Sit Outside the Plan Price?
IONOS charges a monthly fee to keep older PHP versions patched, and on some versions that fee costs more than the hosting plan. The charge is called PHP Extended Support. It applies to Web Hosting and Managed Dedicated Server contracts, and it is opt-out rather than opt-in.
IONOS explains the mechanism plainly on its PHP Extended Support help page: “We do not automatically change your PHP version.” If a domain sits on a PHP version past its community end of life, IONOS keeps patching it, notifies you, allows a free transition period, then starts billing. Doing nothing is what triggers the charge.
The published rates scale with how old the version is. These come from the IONOS PHP Extended Support page.
| PHP version | Monthly fee | Compared to the Essential plan at $8 |
|---|---|---|
| PHP 8.1 | $7.81 | Roughly the same as the plan |
| PHP 7.4 and 8.0 | $15.62 | Nearly double the plan |
| PHP 7.0 to 7.3 | $18.28 | More than double the plan |
| PHP 5.2 to 5.6 | $23.58 | Nearly three times the plan |
| PHP 4 | $27.36 | More than three times the plan |
PHP 8.1 reached end of life on December 31, 2025. Any IONOS site still running it entered the paid tier during 2026. A customer on the Essential plan who never touched their PHP settings now pays $8 for hosting and $7.81 for the version of PHP they were already using.
This charge is defensible on its own terms. Patching dead PHP versions costs real engineering time, and most hosts simply force the upgrade and break your site instead. The problem is discoverability. The fee lives on a separate page from the pricing page, and it grows the longer you ignore it.
Best IONOS Alternatives for Predictable Billing
These three publish the renewal rate next to the introductory rate, so the second year is not a surprise.
1 Hostinger: Best for the lowest entry cost
Hostinger sells the cheapest credible shared hosting in this comparison and states its renewal rate on the plan card.
What it does well. The Hostinger web hosting page lists Premium at $2.99 per month with a regular rate of $11.99 and a renewal of $10.99. Both numbers appear before you reach checkout. Migrations are free and unlimited, which removes the main cost of leaving IONOS. The control panel is Hostinger’s own hPanel rather than cPanel, so expect a short learning curve if you are coming from a cPanel host.
Key features:
- Free unlimited website migrations
- Free SSL and a free domain for the first year
- 30 day money-back guarantee
- Built-in caching and staging on Premium and above
Pricing. Premium is $2.99 per month, which requires a 48 month prepayment of $143.52. It renews at $10.99 per month.
Best for: small sites where the lowest total cost over four years is the deciding factor.
Limitations. The $2.99 rate needs a four year commitment paid upfront. On shorter terms the price rises noticeably. Compare it directly against the field in our guide to Hostinger alternatives worth considering.
2 DreamHost: Best for transparent renewal pricing
DreamHost prints the renewal rate on the plan card and offers month-to-month billing on every plan.
What it does well. The DreamHost web hosting page shows the Launch plan at $2.89 per month on a one year term, renewing at $10.99, or $1.99 per month on a four year term, renewing at $7.99. Both renewal figures sit on the card itself. DreamHost is also employee-owned and describes itself as having no private equity owner and no corporate parent, which is unusual in a market this consolidated.
Key features:
- Renewal rate displayed before checkout on every plan
- Month-to-month billing available on all plans
- Free WordPress migration plugin
- 30 day money-back guarantee
Pricing. Launch is $2.89 per month on a one year term and renews at $10.99. The four year term drops to $1.99 and renews at $7.99.
Best for: anyone who wants to know the year-two price on the day they sign up.
Limitations. Non-WordPress migrations are manual or paid. Moving a site from Wix, Weebly or Squarespace can carry additional fees. See our breakdown of how DreamHost compares on renewal cost.
3 GreenGeeks: Best for renewable energy matching
GreenGeeks buys renewable energy credits at three times the power its platform consumes.
What it does well. The hosting is conventional shared hosting on cPanel, and the differentiator is environmental rather than technical. GreenGeeks pricing lists Lite at $2.95 per month on a 12 month term. The company is founder-led and independently operated, founded in 2008. Website transfers are advertised as free.
Key features:
- Renewable energy matched at three times consumption
- cPanel, so migrations from another cPanel host are simple
- Free SSL, CDN and nightly backups
- 30 day money-back guarantee
Pricing. Lite is $2.95 per month on a 12 month term and renews at $13.95 per month.
Best for: organisations that report on supply chain emissions and need a hosting line they can defend.
Limitations. The renewal multiple is high. GreenGeeks states plainly in its own FAQ that plans renew at the regular rate after the discounted term, so budget $13.95 rather than $2.95.
Best IONOS Alternatives With Long Refund Windows
A refund window is insurance against a host that does not behave as advertised. These two offer the strongest terms in the group.
4 InMotion Hosting: Best for the longest money-back guarantee
InMotion gives 90 days to change your mind on six month terms and longer.
What it does well. Ninety days is three times the industry standard, and it is long enough to see a full billing cycle and a real traffic pattern before committing. InMotion is privately held and founder-led, and in July 2026 it marked 25 years of independent operation, stating that it answers “to the people who run their infrastructure on our network, not to outside investors.” Free website migration is included on most hosting types.
Key features:
- 90 day money-back guarantee on terms of six months or longer
- Free website migration, typically completed in 24 to 48 hours
- cPanel on shared plans
- US data centers on the east and west coasts
Pricing. The Core shared plan starts from roughly $2.99 per month on a longer term and renews at about $10.99 to $11.99. Monthly billing is $14.49 per month and carries the shorter 30 day guarantee.
Best for: businesses migrating a live site that need real time to validate performance before the refund window shuts.
Limitations. The 90 day window does not apply to monthly billing or dedicated servers, which get 30 days. InMotion’s pricing table renders its term columns without labels, so confirm which term you are buying in the cart.
5 SiteGround: Best for support quality
SiteGround has the steepest renewal in this comparison and the strongest support reputation.
What it does well. Support is the product. SiteGround runs its own platform on Google Cloud, publishes its rate card openly, and is still founder-owned rather than group-owned. The SiteGround rate card lists StartUp at $24.99 monthly, $17.99 on a 12 month term and $14.99 on a 24 month term. The first migration is handled free by their team.
Key features:
- Published rate card, so renewal pricing is not hidden
- First expert migration free, plus a free WordPress migration plugin
- Daily backups with free restores
- 30 day money-back guarantee
Pricing. StartUp is $2.99 per month on a prepaid 12 month term and renews at $17.99 per month.
Best for: sites where a fast, competent support reply is worth more than the monthly difference.
Limitations. The jump from $2.99 to $17.99 is the largest in this guide. Storage limits are firm rather than “unlimited,” which suits some workloads and frustrates others. Our SiteGround alternatives comparison covers the trade-off in detail.
Best IONOS Alternatives With No Commitment
These two remove the mechanism that makes a mid-contract price rise painful. There is no contract to be stuck inside.
6 Cloudways: Best for flat pricing with no renewal step
Cloudways charges the same rate in month one and month forty. There is no introductory price to expire.
What it does well. Cloudways sells managed hosting on top of DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, AWS and Google Cloud, billed by the hour with no term. The DigitalOcean plan page lists the entry server at $11 per month for 1 GB RAM, one core, 25 GB storage and 1 TB bandwidth. A three day trial runs without a credit card. One free migration is included per account.
Key features:
- Flat pricing with no promotional-to-renewal increase
- Hourly billing and no minimum term
- Free trial with no card required
- Choice of five underlying cloud providers
Pricing. The entry DigitalOcean server is $11 per month, billed at $0.0153 per hour.
Best for: anyone who wants the year-two price to equal the year-one price without reading fine print.
Limitations. Cloudways is not independent. DigitalOcean completed its acquisition of Cloudways on September 1, 2022. There is also no money-back guarantee, only the free trial, and no email hosting is included. Weigh it against the platform underneath in our Cloudways and DigitalOcean comparison.
7 Hetzner: Best for hourly billing with a monthly cap
Hetzner bills by the hour, caps the total at a monthly maximum, and asks for no commitment at all.
What it does well. The billing model is the cleanest in this group. You are charged hourly, the bill never exceeds the published monthly cap, and deleting a server before month end means you only pay the hours used. Traffic allowances are generous: 20 TB per month at the German and Finnish locations. Hetzner is owner-managed and states it is not dependent on investors.
Key features:
- Hourly billing with a monthly price cap
- No contract and no minimum term
- 20 TB monthly traffic included at EU locations
- NVMe storage on all cloud plans
Pricing. The CX23 cost-optimized instance is 5.49 euros per month for 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM and 40 GB NVMe, excluding VAT and excluding IPv4.
Best for: technical teams comfortable managing an unmanaged server in exchange for the lowest cost per gigabyte in the comparison.
Limitations. Hetzner adjusted cloud prices on June 15, 2026, and the widely quoted CX22 instance no longer exists. Any comparison still citing a 3.79 euro CX22 is out of date. US locations include 1 TB of traffic rather than 20 TB, and these are unmanaged servers with no cPanel and no hand-holding. Read our guide to the best VPS hosting before committing.
What Does the Advertised Price Actually Assume?
Six of the eight hosts here advertise a price that requires a term of 12 months or more, and only two charge the same rate forever. The table normalises the advertised figure against the commitment behind it, so the numbers become comparable.
| Host | Term the advertised price needs | Renews at | Refund window | Can you stop paying this month? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IONOS shared (Plus) | 1 year | $14 per month | Varies by product | Yes, cancellation is immediate |
| IONOS VPS M+ | 1 year, intro lasts 3 months | $11 per month | Varies by product | Yes, but deleting the server deletes the data |
| Hostinger | 48 months prepaid | $10.99 per month | 30 days | No, the term is prepaid |
| DreamHost | 12 months, or monthly billing | $10.99 per month | 30 days | Yes, on monthly billing |
| InMotion Hosting | 6 months or longer for the best rate | About $10.99 to $11.99 | 90 days | Yes, on monthly billing |
| SiteGround | 12 months prepaid | $17.99 per month | 30 days | No, the term is prepaid |
| GreenGeeks | 12 months prepaid | $13.95 per month | 30 days | No, the term is prepaid |
| Cloudways | None | The same price | 3 day trial, no refund policy | Yes |
| Hetzner | None | The same price | None advertised | Yes, billing stops on deletion |
Two patterns come out of this table. First, the cheapest advertised prices demand the longest prepayments, so the headline number and the flexibility are inversely related. Hostinger’s $2.99 needs $143.52 upfront. Second, the only hosts whose price survives year two unchanged are the ones that never offered an introductory discount in the first place.
There is a third point worth stating because it cuts against the framing of this article. A prepaid term protects you as well as the host. If you have paid for 12 months, a mid-term price adjustment cannot reach you until renewal. Month-to-month flexibility and price stability are not the same benefit, and you cannot have both at once.
How Should You Choose a Replacement Host?
Start from the renewal price, not the introductory price, and then add the fees that sit outside the plan. Multiply the renewal rate by 36 months. That figure is the real cost of the decision, and it reorders most shortlists immediately.
Work through these four checks in order.
- Find the renewal rate before you buy. If a host does not publish it on the plan card or a rate card, treat that as information about the host.
- Count the add-ons you actually need. Control panel licences, extra IP addresses, backups and legacy runtime support are billed separately by many providers. IONOS charges for all four.
- Check the PHP version your site runs. If it is past end of life, you are either paying a support fee somewhere or running unpatched code. Upgrading is usually cheaper than either.
- Confirm what leaving costs. Free migration in, free migration out, and a refund window long enough to test properly.
Match the host to the workload as well as the budget. A brochure site for a local business belongs on shared hosting. An application with a database and background jobs belongs on a VPS or a managed cloud platform, and our guide to the best cloud hosting providers covers that tier. A WordPress site with real traffic often costs less overall on a managed WordPress host once you price in the hours you stop spending on maintenance.
How We Evaluated These Hosts
Every price in this guide came from the provider’s own pricing page, help center or investor announcement, checked in September 2026. Where a figure could not be confirmed on a first-party page, it is described as approximate rather than quoted as exact.
Our evaluation weighted four criteria:
- Price transparency. Is the renewal rate published where a buyer will see it before paying?
- Contract mechanics. What term does the advertised price require, and what does cancelling actually do?
- Unbundled fees. Which costs appear on the invoice but not on the pricing page?
- Cost of leaving. Migration support, refund windows and data portability.
Two findings from this round changed what we published. Hetzner’s CX22 instance no longer exists after the June 15, 2026 price adjustment, so we removed it and used the current CX23. FastComet was considered and dropped: it no longer advertises a price lock, and it was acquired by World Host Group in April 2025, so it does not meet the independence criterion several readers are looking for.
We do not run synthetic uptime tests, and we do not claim to. This guide compares commercial terms, which are verifiable, rather than performance claims, which are not verifiable from the outside.
The Bottom Line
Choose Cloudways or Hetzner if a stable price matters more than a low first-year price. Choose DreamHost or InMotion if you want a discount and a printed renewal rate. Those four cover most cases that lead people to look past IONOS.
IONOS is not a bad host. It is Europe’s largest for reasons that include real infrastructure, 31 data centers and prices that are genuinely low in year one. The friction is that the total cost is assembled from several pages: a plan price, a renewal price, a control panel fee, an IP address fee and a PHP support fee that grows the longer you leave your runtime alone.
If you stay, do two things this week. Check which PHP version each of your domains runs, because that single setting can cost more than the hosting. Then confirm your renewal date and what the new rate will be.
If you leave, take a full backup before you cancel anything. On a VPS or Cloud Server this is not optional advice, because IONOS deletes the data when the server goes. Compare the field in our cloud hosting guide, and if you are weighing managed platforms against raw servers, our Cloudways alternatives breakdown covers the middle ground.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did IONOS raise prices for existing customers in 2026?
Yes. IONOS published a 2026 price adjustment notice, plus separate notices for VPS and Cloud Server customers. Affected customers were told by email, with a PDF listing each contract and its new price. IONOS says the change is due to higher infrastructure and security costs and does not affect features.
How much notice does IONOS give before changing a price?
Thirty days. IONOS contract terms state it may change prices or the nature of its services by giving 30 days written notice. That clause was applied in October 2025 when IONOS added a 5 pound monthly fee per Plesk licence to VPS accounts mid-contract.
What is IONOS PHP Extended Support and do I have to pay it?
It is a monthly fee to keep PHP versions patched past their end of life. It is opt-out, because IONOS does not upgrade your PHP for you. Rates run from $7.81 per month for PHP 8.1 to $27.36 for PHP 4. Upgrading to a supported version removes the charge.
Can I cancel IONOS immediately if I do not accept the price increase?
Yes. IONOS states you can cancel affected products at any time with immediate effect through your account. Take a backup first. On a VPS or Cloud Server, IONOS warns in the same article that deleting the server permanently deletes all data stored on it.
Which IONOS alternative is cheapest over three years?
Hostinger and DreamHost have the lowest renewal rates here at $10.99 per month, and DreamHost drops to $7.99 on a four year term. Cloudways costs more per month at $11 but never increases, so it wins on any horizon where a renewal jump would otherwise land.
David Austin is a technology writer and software analyst at DeployHyre, where he covers AI tools, SaaS platforms, cloud hosting, and business automation. He focuses on hands-on comparisons of pricing, features, and real-world performance so teams can pick the right software with confidence.