IONOS alternative

IONOS Alternative: Without One Site Per Plan

If you are looking for an IONOS alternative, start with the line most people miss on the pricing table. Every IONOS WordPress plan covers one website, from Start at £5 a month to E-Commerce at £20. A second site means a second plan, and the introductory rates all step up sharply at renewal.

The short version

What Changes When One Plan Runs Everything

More than one site, on one plan

Your plan is bandwidth and NVMe storage, not a licence for a single install. Add a staging copy, a microsite or a client site without buying another subscription.

The renewal is the price you saw

IONOS Grow advertises £1 a month and renews at £10. We do not run an introductory rate, so there is nothing waiting for you in month thirteen.

Someone else runs the updates

Core, plugins and themes are ours to keep current and ours to fix. A personal consultant is a good thing to have, and it is not the same as someone doing the work.

Sites, terms and ownership

FastCow And IONOS, Plan For Plan

Read the site limit and the renewal line together. Two of these rows go to them.

How many websites you get FastCowSized to the plan, not to one install. Run the live site, a staging copy and the microsite you keep meaning to build, without another subscription. IONOSOne website per plan, across the whole WordPress range from Start to E-Commerce. A second site is a second plan at the second plan’s price.
Intro price against renewal FastCowOne rate. From $25 a month, renewing at $25, with no first-year discount to fall off the end of. IONOS£1 rising to £10 on Grow, £3 to £5 on Start, £7 to £15 on Boost. The introductory terms run six or twelve months.
Who owns the company FastCowNobody but us. Privately held since day one, with no listed parent and no quarterly report shaping what happens to your account. IONOSUnited Internet. IONOS is part of the German listed group, which also owns Fasthosts and 1&1. A large, stable parent with its own priorities.
Email on your domain FastCowIncluded, and not counted. Create the mailboxes you need from the panel, on any plan. IONOSOne to ten mailboxes, depending on the tier. Included, but rationed by how much you spend rather than by what you need.
Who does the WordPress work FastCowWe run it, not just advise on it. Updates, plugin conflicts, malware cleanup and any WordPress fault, inside the plan price. IONOSYou do, with help. IONOS gives every customer a personal consultant, which is genuinely useful. Advice and doing the work are different products.
Who answers when it breaks FastCowAn engineer who does the work, not just advises on it. 24/7/365, on every plan. IONOS24/7 support by phone, chat and email, plus a named personal consultant after you sign up. Strong on availability, and this row is not a real difference.
The web server and cache FastCowLiteSpeed with server-level caching and Redis object caching included on every plan. IONOSA containerised Linux platform with HTTP/2, gzip and PHP OPcache, sold in performance levels three to five by tier.
Where hosting support stops FastCowIt does not. A plugin conflict or a hacked install is ours, because WordPress is the only thing on the platform. IONOSAt advice. Your consultant will tell you what to do about a broken plugin. Doing it is still your afternoon.
Cloudflare and the CDN FastCowCloudflare integration in the panel, plus our own 119+ PoP edge network included. IONOSNot published on the WordPress plans. Their pages lead on Tier IV facilities and green energy rather than on an edge network.
How sites are separated FastCowA container per site, with its own CPU and RAM. Three sites means three containers on one plan, not three plans. IONOSContainerised managed hosting, sold in performance levels rather than a stated per-site allocation. The isolation model itself is comparable.
Uptime monitoring FastCow1,440 checks a day, one a minute, on every site you run. IONOSTier IV facilities and geo-redundant datacentres, which is a strong resilience story. No per-site check interval is published.
Backups FastCowDaily on every plan, with hourly at $20 a month per site. Restorable from the panel. IONOSDaily automatic backups, with twelve months of Jetpack Backup free on Grow and above. A solid inclusion.

How this was put together. The FastCow column is what we sell and can be held to. The IONOS column is taken from their UK WordPress hosting pages, plan limits and renewal terms included. Sources: ionos.co.uk and their WordPress hosting page. Last reviewed August 2026. Plans and terms move about, so tell us if a figure here is stale and we will amend it. The rest of our host comparisons are written the same way.

Advice against doing

A Consultant Tells You. We Do It.

IONOS gives every customer a named personal consultant, and that is a genuinely good idea that most hosts have not copied. It is also advice. When a plugin update takes the checkout down on a Friday, the gap between being told what to do and having it done is the whole afternoon.

The updates are ours to run

Core, plugins and themes, kept current by us, and put right by us if one of them breaks something. Nobody hands you a list.

A hacked install is our problem

Daily malware scanning with automatic cleanup, then an engineer who goes through the site with you so it does not recur.

LiteSpeed rather than performance levels

A cached page is answered by the web server without waking PHP, on every plan, instead of a performance tier you move up to.

Redis object caching, included

Repeated database queries answered from memory, on the entry plan, not as part of a higher package.

All of it on one plan that covers more than one website, which is where this comparison started. See what the platform includes or go straight to the plans.

Three Reasons To Stay With IONOS

They do things we do not, and one of them we could not match if we tried.

You want a named person to call

A personal consultant assigned to your account, on every plan, is something we do not offer and it suits plenty of businesses. If you would rather ring one person than a rota, that is a real reason to stay.

You have exactly one website

If you run one site and always will, the per-plan limit costs you nothing and their entry pricing is well below ours.

You want Tier IV facilities on green energy

IONOS publishes Tier IV uptime and 100% green energy across geo-redundant datacentres. That is a stronger environmental and resilience claim than we make.

However many sites you have

Bringing Every Site Over In One Go

If you are running three IONOS plans for three sites, all three move together and land on one plan here. We do the lot and you check the lot.

List What You Have

Send us the logins. We come back with an inventory of every site, database and mailbox across all your plans, so nothing gets left behind on an account you forgot about.

Check Them All At Once

Every site on its own private address, ready to test properly. Your live plans carry on serving while you go through them.

One DNS Change Per Domain

We hand you a single list. Certificates issue themselves and the old plans keep running until every record has moved.

Why FastCow

A Small Company Is Not A Weakness Here

United Internet is a listed group with thousands of staff and enormous resources, and there are real advantages to that. There is also a difference between a supplier you are one of millions to and one where the person who answers can change the thing you are complaining about.

Privately owned

No listed parent, no VC board and no outside shareholders. The people who run the platform decide what it does next.

Ask for something and get an answer

Not a feature request form. A short conversation with someone who can actually decide, which is a thing scale takes away.

Self-funded

We grow on revenue, so the roadmap answers to customers rather than to a quarterly report.

Not for sale

Built to keep. Nobody is being lined up to acquire us and reprice your renewal to pay for it.

All of it on one plan, at one rate, whatever the site count. FastCow Hosting Limited, 39 C/O FastCow Hosting, Jefferson Close, London, England, IG2 6RZ. Small enough to answer, big enough to run its own hardware. About FastCow and what we do differently.

Add Up What Your Sites Actually Cost

Tell us how many sites you actually run and what you are paying for them. If it is one site and you are still in your intro term, we will tell you to sit tight.

Before you buy a second plan

IONOS Alternatives, Answered Straight

Running more than one site and not sure what it is costing you? Send us the list.

Talk to us →

One. Every IONOS WordPress plan, from Start at 5 pounds a month up to E-Commerce at 20, covers a single website. Running three sites means three subscriptions. FastCow plans are sized on bandwidth and NVMe storage instead, so the number of installs is yours to decide.

It depends which plan and which offer you took. Grow advertises 1 pound a month for twelve months and renews at 10. Start runs 3 pounds for six months then 5, and Boost 7 then 15. The introductory rates are genuine, they just run out.

Not on the headline. IONOS entry pricing is well below ours and will stay that way. The comparison gets closer once you count renewals and multiple sites: three IONOS plans at the renewal rate is a different number from the one on the advert. Send us what you run and we will do the arithmetic honestly.

United Internet, the German listed group, which also owns Fasthosts and 1&1. That brings real scale and stability. It also means the roadmap for your host is set inside a much larger organisation. FastCow is privately owned and self-funded.

No. We rebuild the site on a private address while IONOS carries on serving it. You check the copy, and the only moment anything changes is when you update the DNS.

Yes, rationed by plan: one mailbox on the entry tier rising to ten at the top. FastCow includes email on your own domain on every plan without a per-tier count, set up from the panel in a couple of minutes.