Blog · 2026-06-21

An IONOS alternative without the two-catalog puzzle

IONOS is the biggest hosting brand in Germany: a Frankfurt-listed company majority-owned by United Internet, with a lineage running back to 1&1 and the ProfitBricks IaaS platform. It is also two products wearing one name - a retail VPS line with VAT-inclusive prices, promo rates and a €10 setup fee, and "IONOS Cloud", a separate per-minute-billed IaaS with its own console and price logic.

Neither catalog has a straightforward answer to the most common size in this series. The retail line skips 4 vCPU / 8 GB entirely (you jump from 4/4 to 6/8), and the Cloud line's Basic Cube M lands at about €17.28 per month - more than twice Unio's u33. Add three US data centers and US legal entities to the group, and the sovereignty picture gets complicated too.

IONOS at a glance

Jurisdiction: IONOS Group SE, Montabaur, Germany - Frankfurt-listed, 63.8% held by United Internet AG. Significant US presence: US headquarters in Philadelphia, IONOS Cloud Inc. in Delaware, and three US data centers.
Comparable plans: Retail VPS: no 4/8 size - VPS L+ (6 vCPU / 8 GB / 240 GB NVMe) is €18/mo incl. VAT with a €10 setup fee. IONOS Cloud: Basic Cube M (4 vCPU / 8 GB / 240 GB NVMe) at €0.024/h ≈ €17.28/30 days excl. VAT.
Traffic: Retail VPS: unlimited. IONOS Cloud Compute Engine: 2 TB egress free, then metered from €0.03/GB.
API: Proprietary Cloud API v6 with premier-tier Terraform provider; S3-compliant object storage. Retail VPS is panel-managed.
Billing: Retail VPS: fixed monthly, promo intro pricing, €10 setup fee. IONOS Cloud: per-minute, no term.

The closest 4 vCPU / 8 GB matches

	IONOS Basic Cube M	Unio u33
Monthly price (excl. VAT)	≈ €17.28 (per-minute billed)	€7.79
vCPU / RAM	4 / 8 GB	4 / 8 GB
NVMe storage	240 GB	80 GB
Traffic	2 TB free egress, then €0.03/GB	20 TB included
Setup fee	None (Cloud) / €10 (retail VPS)	None
API	Proprietary Cloud API v6	Standard OpenStack + S3
US entities / DCs	Yes - 3 US data centers	None
Jurisdiction	Germany, with US subsidiaries	EU only

IONOS prices from ionos.de and cloud.ionos.de as of July 2026. Retail VPS prices are incl. VAT, IONOS Cloud excl. VAT; the table uses the Cloud line as the closer product. IONOS Cube storage (240 GB) is larger than u33's 80 GB - noted honestly.

Why teams look for a IONOS alternative

Twice the price once the promos expire

IONOS retail pricing leans on intro offers (€5 for three months, then €18) plus a €10 setup fee, and the per-minute Cloud line lands around €17.28/month for the 4/8 Cube. Unio's €7.79 is the everyday price - no promo cliff, no setup fee.

Egress is metered on the cloud line

IONOS Cloud includes 2 TB of egress and then meters it from €0.03/GB - a 20 TB month would add roughly €540. Unio includes 20 TB with every instance.

A German brand with an American footprint

IONOS is a German listed company, but the group maintains US legal entities and three US data centers. For strict data-sovereignty postures that is the same structural question US providers raise, in milder form. Unio has no non-EU entities to reason about.

Two catalogs, two consoles, two price logics

Retail VPS (VAT-inclusive, setup fees, promos) and IONOS Cloud (per-minute, VAT-exclusive, DCD console) are effectively different products. Unio is one catalog: instances, storage, one billing model.

When IONOS is the right call

Per-minute billing and live vertical scaling (resizing a running VM) on IONOS Cloud are genuinely granular - useful for spiky enterprise workloads.
You want 240 GB of NVMe bundled cheaply and unlimited traffic on a simple retail VPS.
Your organization needs a large, exchange-listed German vendor with enterprise support contracts today.

Try the EU-sovereign way

Cloud servers from €4.99/mo with a full OpenStack API, billed hourly and capped monthly. EU-owned, EU-hosted.

Join the waitlist

Sources

Prices and facts last verified against the linked sources in July 2026. Spotted something outdated? Tell us and we'll fix it.