A long-term web hosting deal is currently floating around that offers excellent value for small businesses, creatives, and agencies who need to manage multiple websites. You can lock in three years of the IONOS shared hosting plan starting at $99.99, working out to about $2.78 a month for unlimited websites and databases with unmetered bandwidth, a free domain for the first year, and a 99.99% uptime guarantee.
The service leans on georedundant infrastructure, enhancing resilience with live copies of your site held in two different data centers. Toss in one-click installs of popular CMS packages and developer stacks, plus 24/7 support, and a free Wildcard SSL cert for your primary domain and all subdomains, and the entire thing makes an excellent opening or consolidation play.
Why this long-term IONOS hosting price point matters
Regular shared hosting promotional prices typically hit anywhere from $2 to $6 each month, and those are temporary prices that will renew at a rate of between $10 and $15 per month or higher. A three-year price less than a C-note decreases the “renewal surprise” exposure that so many new website owners experience. With a claimed MSRP of $288, the discount is about 65% over all of those full value years.
For freelancers or agencies who are hosting client microsites, that pricing can turn into meaningful margin improvement. Even users who start out as single site owners but plan to expand down the road by adding a store, a subdomain for docs, or a separate portfolio can do so without needing to juggle multiple providers, let alone service plans.
What the three-year IONOS shared hosting plan includes
The headline specs are unlimited websites and databases, unmetered bandwidth and (in some cases) storage, one-click installers for apps including WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal running on a 64-bit Linux platform with PHP 7 (upgraded from PHP 5.6 in November 2018). W3Techs calculates that WordPress powers significantly more than 40% of the web, so simple, quick provisioning for that stack is table stakes; IONOS has it covered and also supports other CMS and frameworks to suit a range of use cases.
You’ll also receive a free domain for the first year, further reducing startup costs, and one Wildcard SSL certificate allowing subdomains such as blog.yourdomain.com or shop.yourdomain.com to inherit HTTPS automatically. The plan offers 24-hour support, which comes in handy when you’re deploying sites around the clock or pushing a big update after hours.
(It’s worth noting that “unlimited” in the shared environment world generally tastes good, but still lives behind fair-use policies.) Anticipate fair limits on inodes, CPU minutes, and the number of concurrent processes per account — being “reasonable” is an industry-standard practice in order to prevent any one tenant from hogging resources. Capacity plan if you expect there will be burst traffic or if there’s going to be heavy compute, and make sure the upgrade path is reserved.
Performance expectations and uptime guarantee explained
IONOS’s 99.99% uptime guarantee is featured in its advertising, and it’s impressive. In other words, you’re limited to about 52 minutes of downtime per year, or roughly four to five minutes per month. For local small businesses whose leads come in through web forms or search, cutting downtime by a percentage point can lead to dollars on the line. The georedundant deployment — maintaining synchronized deployments in two different facilities — gives them the ability to fail over if one site goes down.
The platform is HTTP/2-friendly, allowing browsers to fetch resources across a single connection in parallel. That accelerates the delivery of images, stylesheets, and scripts without elaborate tuning. For years Google has studied how slow pages lead to higher abandonment; one of its most cited analyses finds that the likelihood of bounce increases 32 percent as page load time decreases from one to three seconds. Faster protocol support alone is not a cure-all, but it puts sites in a better place to hit performance benchmarks.
Security features and backup options in the plan
The plan comes with daily backups, including restorations for up to six days — a great cushion in case an update blows up your theme or a plugin goes off the rails. Malware scanning and DDoS protection are included out of the box, aimed at the typical threats small sites encounter. The included Wildcard SSL certificate frees you from a costly annual renewal fee that’s regularly as much as $50 to $100 (and the combined rate isn’t always less than what Joomla, 1&1, and Squarespace charge).
While shared hosting is not a substitute for an enterprise security stack, having these protections activated out of the box means the chances of making some common misconfigurations are reduced. Many providers already run data centers aligned with ISO/IEC 27001 and are subject to independent audit — an up-to-date attestation or security whitepaper provides good due diligence for any business managing customer data.
Who should consider this plan and what to watch for
This deal is best for portfolios, brochure sites, blogs, landing-page suites; agency clients who don’t need custom server tuning. It’s also a sandpit for developers who want to stage prototypes, or keep many domains under one roof without the added friction.
Before you jump on it, be sure to read the fine print:
- Fair-use limits on CPU, inodes, and concurrent processes
- Email account limits and quotas
- Domain renewal fee after the first year
- Renewal price of the hosting plan after three years
Just because it says unmetered bandwidth doesn’t mean unthrottled throughput, so make sure you follow guidelines on simultaneous connections and resource sharing. If you expect that you’re going to be growing, look at and map out the upgrade path for VPS or managed WordPress offerings.
In short, for just $99.99 you get three years of IONOS hosting — that’s a straightforward, bargain-priced way to land some reliable site real estate with reasonable performance and security defaults. For many web endeavors, it’s precisely that combination of low cost and utility.