Heroku vs IONOS

Heroku is strongest for teams migrating away. IONOS is strongest for budget shared/VPS hosting. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Heroku	IONOS
Starting price	$3/mo	$0.02/mo
Best for	Teams migrating away Legacy Rails/Node apps Historical PaaS comparison	Budget shared/VPS hosting Windows workloads EU-based data residency Granular building-block cloud pricing
Stated uptime SLA	99.5% (Postgres Essential); higher SLAs on Standard/Premium/Private/Shield not separately published	99.99%
Storage	SSD	NVME
Regions	2	6
Managed Kubernetes	No	Yes
Support channels	Ticket, Docs (Dev Center), Community forum	24/7 Phone, Ticket, Docs, Live Chat
Compliance	SOC 2, HIPAA (Shield tier only), GDPR, PCI (Shield tier only)	GDPR, ISO 27001
Hidden costs to watch for	Eco dynos ($5/mo flat) are personal-account only and not available to Enterprise/Team customers Postgres Essential tier has no fork/follow, no HA, and only 99.5% uptime SLA -- a hidden reliability cliff vs. Standard Add-on overages (Postgres row/connection limits, Redis memory limits) can force an unplanned upgrade to the next tier Performance dynos require an established payment/billing history before they can be provisioned Private Spaces and Shield Private Spaces carry a substantial network-isolation premium (2-3x) over common-runtime equivalents Heroku Postgres Advanced tier pricing is not published; requires contacting sales	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