In an increasingly competitive field, IONOS can claim to be one of the best email hosting providers on the market. This is primarily because of its support and customization options. The sheer number of payment plans and features also means this is one of the more flexible providers around.
There are some downside - especially when it comes to spam filtering - but this is certainly not an email hosting service to discount. It could be exactly what your business needs to enhance the credibility of its brand.
IONOS: Plans and pricing
The straight-up IONOS business email hosting is available in three flavors: Mail Basic 1, Mail Basic 1+, and Mail Business. They cost $1, $4, and $5 per account per month respectively. A domain extension is included, either .com, .us, .online, or .net with the cheaper two plans and .us, .ca, .com, .net, .org, .info, .me, .biz, .online for Mail Business customers. You also have the option of a 30-day free trial before you commit yourself financially.
However, these aren’t the only payment plans that IONOS offers. There are also three “Email & Office” plans that combine email hosting with the kind of collaboration apps used by modern office workers. If these plans look a better fit for your needs, there’s a Microsoft Exchange 2019 plan you can sign up to for $4.50 per month for the first six months of a one-year term. There’s also Microsoft 365 Business Basic for $1 a month for the first month of a one-year plan, and Microsoft 365 Business Standard for $1 a month for the first three months on a one-year term. And if you’re a hardcore Gmail fan, IONOS also offers Google Workspace Business Starter and Google Workspace Business Standard plans for
So, there are a lot of different pricing options available if you’ve decided to go with IONOS as your business email hosting provider. We see that as a good thing. While some other email hosting providers come with their own productivity suite that’s been developed in-house, like IceWarp, many users will already be familiar with alternatives developed by either Microsoft or Google, so it’s nice to have pricing plans that allow you to stay within your usual digital ecosystem.
Features
With the Mail Basic 1 plan, you get a single email account with 2GB of storage. Although this may not seem like a lot, it equates to roughly 10,000 ecan be mails and both the number of account and your cloud storage can be increasedat any time. Plus, in addition to the spam filter we mentioned earlier, the Mail Basic 1 plan also comes with ad-free email, webmail, and device synchronization.
Looking at the Mail Basic 1+ plan, here you see storage increased to 12GB (or roughly 60,000 email) but you still only receive a single email account. Mail Business ramps things up again. You can choose between a single email account or five and storage goes up to 50GB for each user. It also comes with various team collaboration tools, including a calendar, contacts and task management features.
If you select one of the Email & Office plans instead, you’ll find that there are further productivity tools included as well as the use of the popular video conferencing tools Microsoft Teams or Google Meet, depending on what plan you opt for.
Although IONOS’ email hosting plans don’t come with a huge range of features, selecting one of the plans that integrates with Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 means you suddenly gain access to a large number of apps. Of course, if all you really are about is improving the credibility of your brand, then IONOS’ custom ad-free email address should be enough.
Support
In terms of customer support, it would be difficult to find an email hosting provider that does a better job than IONOS. This is because all IONOS customers, regardless of pricing tier, received direct access to their own personal consultant. This is a dedicated contact person for personalized advice and technical support that can be reached at any time via telephone, live chat and email, at no additional cost. If your personal consultant is unavailable when you reach out, a suitably informed colleagues will fill in.
In our experience, your personal customer support contact was helpful and well-informed, able to assist regarding much more than troubleshooting. In fact, our personal contact was happy to offer tips and guidelines on how we could get more from our email hosting. This advice wan’t just regurgitated generic tips that could be found in the IONOS help center either. On the contrary, performance reports were used to backup any advice given.
Security
The security around IONOS email hosting isn’t bad and the company champions its advanced mailbox security, alongside its ISO-certified data centers. All emails are also automatically protected with SSL/TLS encryption, .
The only real negative concerning IONOS’ email security is that we’ve noticed that its anti-spam filtering can be a bit hit or miss sometimes. Letting spam email through isn’t the only issue that businesses face when filtering fails either. False positives an also mean that important messages are more likely to be missed.
As with most facets of IONOS’ email hosting, there is some level of customization with the security provided, however. You can create your own blacklists and whitelists to give yourself a bit more control over what countries as spam and what doesn’t.
The competition
IONOS is another of those email hosting providers that also offers several other hosting services, including shared hosting, WordPress hosting, and a website builder. Compared to other providers in this space IONOS performs pretty well. It’s affordable and comes with an impressive range of features. The fact that you only receive a single email account with the shared hosting lan is disappointing, however, and represents a disappointing comparison with its rivals.
Looking at just its email hosting, however, IONOS score highly. There are a lot of different payment plans on offer - many more than, say, A2 Hosting. This flexibility is on show throughout the service and means you can really create an email hosting plan that suits your needs.
IONOS: Final verdict
IONOS email hosting ticks a lot of boxes. It’s affordable and comes with a lot of customization options. And if customer support is deal-breaker for you, this service can’t really be topped.
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