Bluehost vs IONOS

Bluehost is strongest for beginners. IONOS is strongest for budget shared/VPS hosting. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Bluehost	IONOS
Starting price	$2.09/mo	$0.02/mo
Best for	Beginners Small business websites WordPress blogs WooCommerce stores	Budget shared/VPS hosting Windows workloads EU-based data residency Granular building-block cloud pricing
Stated uptime SLA	99.99%	99.99%
Storage	NVME	NVME
Regions	1	6
Managed Kubernetes	No	Yes
Support channels	24/7 Live Chat, Phone (Business+ plans), Ticket, Knowledge Base	24/7 Phone, Ticket, Docs, Live Chat
Compliance	PCI DSS (WooCommerce plans)	GDPR, ISO 27001
Hidden costs to watch for	Steep renewal price increases after the intro term (e.g. Starter $3.99/mo intro renews at $9.99-$15.99/mo) Free domain is only free for the first year, then charges standard domain renewal price Domain privacy is free only for the first year on Business+ plans, then billed annually SiteLock/backup/CodeGuard style add-ons and Pro Email upsells prompted during and after checkout Longer contract terms (36-month) required to get the lowest advertised intro price	Intro pricing on VPS+ and Web Hosting plans (e.g. $2/mo, $1/mo) is a 3-month or 1-year promotional rate on a 1-year contract; renewal pricing after the promo/contract period is 2-6x higher Additional static IPv4 addresses billed at $6.00 per 30 days each Outbound data transfer beyond the free 2TB pooled allowance is tiered: $0.036/GB (2-10TB), dropping to $0.018/GB beyond 150TB Windows Server and RedHat Enterprise Linux require separate per-vCPU/core license surcharges on top of Compute Engine/Cube pricing IONOS CLOUD Compute Engine building-block pricing (Cores + RAM + Storage priced independently) can be harder to estimate than fixed-tier competitors without using their price calculator
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18