Tag Archives: Tested

Pros

• Excellent long-term pricing, especially for shared hosting

• Wide variety of plans, including VPS and dedicated hosting

• Excellent uptime

• Fast, reliable customer service

Cons

• Lots of upsells during the purchase process and initial site creation

• Mediocre site speed

Ionos, formerly 1&1 Ionos, is a web-hosting and data infrastructure company founded in Germany in 1988, with over 6.2 million customers around the globe. The numbers are impressive — but is the company? That’s what I set out to discover in my hands-on Ionos review.

I purchased an Ionos plan and spent a week testing Ionos’s account management, site creation, server management…

Pros

• Excellent long-term pricing, especially for shared hosting

• Wide variety of plans, including VPS and dedicated hosting

• Excellent uptime

• Fast, reliable customer service

Cons

• Lots of upsells during the purchase process and initial site creation

• Mediocre site speed

Ionos, formerly 1&1 Ionos, is a web-hosting and data infrastructure company founded in Germany in 1988, with over 6.2 million customers around the globe. The numbers are impressive — but is the company? That’s what I set out to discover in my hands-on Ionos review.

I purchased an Ionos plan and spent a week testing Ionos’s account management, site creation, server management…

When evaluating cloud hosting services, we focus on several key factors to ensure our recommendations are reliable and well-informed.

First, the hands-on testing. During my time working with several large, international IT companies in the US, Taiwan, and Japan, I have professional experience using six of the seven cloud hosting services in our list (DigitalOcean being the exclusion). My experience with DigitalOcean comes from running personal sites, including one in the US that previously saw over 500,000 visitors per month (until Google’s controversial Helpful Content Update)  and another recently launched in Japan.

This experience allows me, to the best of my ability, to access the user experience, ease of setup, costs, performance metrics (i.e. uptime, load times, etc.) and overall…

In business since 2007, ScalaHosting is not the most famous name in web hosting, but it provides excellent customer service, along with a variety of shared and managed VPS plans. The company’s offerings include shared hosting, WordPress Hosting and Managed VPS plans. 

Starting at $2.95 a month (with 12-month commitment), the Shared and WordPress plans (both are basically the same, just that WordPress plans have WordPress preloaded), offer solid performance for the money. In fact, in our tests, ScalaHosting’s WordPress Mini plan was one of the only shared plans that could handle 500 concurrent requests.

One of the most popular web hosting services, Bluehost, has been in business since 2003 and boasts more than 2 million users. It is currently owned by Newfold Digital, which also owns competitor HostGator, which offers a lot of the same services but with slightly different prices and configurations.

Bluehost offers a wide range of plans, from shared hosting (with WordPress preloaded) to VPS hosting to Cloud hosting and dedicated hosting. We had a chance to test a mid-range VPS plan, the Basic WordPress hosting shared plan and the Cloud 1 cloud plan. I have also been using Bluehost for a number of years, experiencing other levels of VPS and shared plans and relying on the company’s support to handle issues such as a migration and canceling a no-longer-needed plan.

Plans We Tested