Founded the Year Before the Web
IONOS began as 1&1 in 1988 — a year that predates HTTP, HTML, and the consumer internet entirely. The company started selling internet services in the early 1990s and grew through the dot-com era as Germany's dominant consumer internet provider, eventually becoming a United Internet AG subsidiary alongside other consumer brands. The longevity matters: customers who registered domains with 1&1 in 1995 are still registered with the same operating company today, just under a different brand name. Few competitors in this market have continuous operating history this long, and the institutional knowledge embedded in IONOS's support and operations teams reflects it.
Why 1&1 Became IONOS
In 2018, United Internet rebranded its consumer hosting business from 1&1 to IONOS — combining several previously-separate brand names (1&1, Profitbricks, others) into a single hosting and cloud identity. The rebrand was strategic positioning for the European cloud market, where IONOS now competes against OVHcloud and Infomaniak for European customers wary of US-based hyperscalers. The 1&1 name persisted in some markets for years after the rebrand; the consolidation under IONOS reflects an operational push toward a unified product experience across Germany, the UK, and other European markets where the company has substantial customer bases.
The Scale That Comes With United Internet Ownership
IONOS is one of the largest hosting companies in Europe and the world, with infrastructure operated alongside affiliated brands that serve millions of customers across consumer hosting, professional hosting, and cloud services. The scale produces real benefits: data centers in multiple European jurisdictions, GDPR-aligned operations, and customer support that operates in multiple languages during European business hours. The trade-off is the upsell pressure that comes with operating at this scale: the IONOS dashboard, like GoDaddy's, surfaces another product to upgrade to at most interactions, and the customer journey is structured to maximize lifetime value rather than minimize friction.
Bundling as Both Convenience and Friction
At $10.00 for a .com registration with $20.00 renewal, IONOS sits in the budget-tier on intro pricing and steps up at renewal — the standard hosting-bundled-with-domain model. Across the 441 TLDs supported, the breadth covers most of what European customers want, with the cheapest entry at $0.98 for .shop. For German and other European customers who want hosting + domain + email + cloud-services from a single vendor with European data residency, the bundle saves real coordination overhead. For domain-only customers comparing on per-domain pricing, Cloudflare, Porkbun, or our comparison tool's flat-pricing alternatives produce noticeably lower five-year totals.