IONOS Cloud in 2026: an honest review for teams leaving AWS or Azure

IONOS Cloud is the infrastructure cloud of IONOS, the German hosting group listed in Frankfurt and 63.8% owned by United Internet; the platform began as ProfitBricks. IONOS sells several products called "cloud". This article is about the IaaS platform (Compute Engine, Managed Kubernetes, the managed databases, Object Storage) sold from cloud.ionos.com and cloud.ionos.de, not the VPS or cloud server products of its web hosting business.

On our production workload IONOS has the lowest total of any provider in this series that sells every part of it: EUR 436.79 a month in Frankfurt, 40% of the AWS price, with a highly available PostgreSQL, a free Kubernetes control plane with an SLA, 2 TB of free egress and 24/7 phone support. That total rests on one assumption about database cores, explained below. The weak points: an IONOS "zone" is another host in the same data centre, the database standby's location is undocumented, only businesses may sign up, and in May 2026 provisioning was slow or unavailable in every location for about 36 hours.

This article is one of a series comparing 24 European cloud providers with AWS and Azure; the overview puts them side by side. Everything below was checked on 15 and 16 October 2026 against IONOS's documentation, legal terms, price list and status page, IONOS Group's annual report and user reports, each at its source. We did not open an account or run workloads.

At a glance

What you can build

Everything below is in IONOS's service catalogue and price list; few services carry a lifecycle label.

Missing outright: functions, serverless containers, a managed queue other than Kafka, a search service, a KMS or secrets manager, a MySQL engine and any GPU VM but the H200. The API Gateway was discontinued on 31 December 2025. Object Storage lacks IAM, STS and bucket notifications; contract-owned buckets, the only type in de/fra/2, also lack access logging and cross-region replication ("will be available soon").

The console is the Data Center Designer (DCD): you draw servers, volumes and networks on a canvas and provision them as one change set. Behind it sit the Cloud API v6 with an OpenAPI 3.0.3 document, the ionosctl CLI and a Terraform provider in the registry's partner-premier tier (v6.7.39, published 13 October 2026), plus Pulumi, Ansible and Crossplane. There is no public price API.

Kubernetes releases arrive late: 1.35 came 254 days after upstream, on 28 August 2026, and over the last five versions the lag ran from 83 to 254 days. Version 1.36 was not offered on 15 October 2026.

What it costs

IONOS list prices in EUR, VAT excluded, from its EUR price list, checked 15 and 16 October 2026, in Frankfurt (de/fra/2) at 730 hours a month, the same in every location. Storage and IP addresses are priced per 30 days, which we scale to 730 hours, and IONOS counts 1 TB as 1,024 GB. A reader who lands on cloud.ionos.com/prices sees the US company's USD prices; the EUR list is in the documentation.

Workload A, a starter setup: one VM with 2 vCPU and 4 GB, a 40 GB disk, one IPv4 address, 1 TB of egress and 100 GB of object storage.

AWS charges EUR 112.37 and Azure EUR 116.15 for the same in Frankfurt, so IONOS costs 28% of either. With the free but dynamic first IPv4 address ("it can change while the Virtual Server is operational or when restarted") the total is EUR 26.91, and on a Basic Cube S EUR 15.27. Cubes, though, are meant for workloads "for which failover gets realized by the application and not the infrastructure", with a 99.9% SLA and a 6-hour support target.

Workload B, a small production system: three VMs of 4 vCPU and 16 GB with an IPv4 address each, 300 GB of SSD block storage, a load balancer, PostgreSQL with 2 vCPU, 8 GB and 100 GB as primary plus standby, 1 TB of object storage with 1 million PUT and 10 million GET requests, a Kubernetes control plane and 2 TB of egress.

AWS charges EUR 1,082.61 for workload B on m7i.xlarge and Azure EUR 1,091.88 on D4s_v5: IONOS costs 40% of either on shared vCPUs and 56% of AWS on dedicated cores. Most of the gap is the VMs (USD 528.89 on AWS), the egress (USD 171.00 on AWS), the HA database (USD 320.13 with storage, against EUR 183.55) and the EKS control plane (USD 73.00). Against AWS, only the reserved IPv4 address is dearer here: EUR 5.07 a month against USD 3.65, the same as on Azure.

Two assumptions sit in the total. The database is priced at one IONOS core per node for "2 vCPU", because IONOS's price page of October 2024 called the unit "Dedicated Core (2 Threads)"; today's PostgreSQL rows no longer say so. If a core now means one thread, workload B costs EUR 524.39, just above UpCloud's EUR 520.33. Database storage is priced once per node, which IONOS does not spell out. Backups and worker nodes are not included; worker nodes on vCPUs would cost 42% more per vCPU and 25% more per GB than the same VMs, under Kubernetes node prices in force since 1 April 2025.

Egress and IPv4. The first 2 TB per contract per month are free, then EUR 0.030 per GB, falling in steps to 0.015 above 150 TB. The allowance is per contract, so workload B uses all of it; each further TB costs EUR 30.72, against EUR 80.30 on AWS and EUR 77.62 on Azure beyond their free 100 GB. Ingress, traffic between IONOS data centres in one country and Object Storage requests are free. A reserved IPv4 address costs EUR 5.00 per 30 days; IPv6 is free.

Billing. Compute is priced per hour and Cubes are billed per minute. Payment is by card or SEPA direct debit. Cost Alert emails at a threshold but "does not execute any other operation"; we found no hard spending cap. Savings Plans of 1 or 3 years cover dedicated cores and RAM.

GPUs. The only GPU VM is the NVIDIA H200 PCIe at EUR 3.00 per GPU-hour, in Frankfurt and Worcester, against USD 8.47 on AWS (in Stockholm; it is not sold in Frankfurt) and USD 13.78 on Azure in Frankfurt. The default is one H200-S per contract. GPU VMs carry no SLA and may restart for emergency maintenance "without advance notification", and from 18 June to 21 September 2026 the status page warned of provisioning errors from "exceptionally high demand for GPU servers". Other cards come only as dedicated servers.

Price changes. From October 2024 to October 2026 the prices of compute, storage, IPv4, egress, load balancers and database cores did not change. Three things did:

We could not tell whether the node prices raised existing clusters or opened a new price line. The General Terms allow price changes at most once a quarter, with at least a month's notice and a right to terminate.

Reliability

What a zone is. Inside one location you can pin servers and volumes to Zone 1, 2 or 3; a server or storage device in Zone 1 "resides on a different resource than a server or storage device assigned to Availability Zone 2". No IONOS page we found calls a zone a separate building, power feed or network, and the storage pages describe separate physical resources in one data centre, so that is how we read it (the glossary's "distinct locations within a region" is looser). On AWS and Azure a zone is one or more data centres with their own power, cooling and network.

A second building means a second location. Frankfurt has three: de/fra/1 at Equinix, de/fra/2 at Digital Realty and the older de/fra, whose operator is not named. Traffic between them is free, but each has its own virtual data centres, storage endpoints and IP addresses, so failover between them is yours to build. Berlin is the other German choice.

The database standby. A PostgreSQL cluster has a primary and warm standbys that "do not serve read requests". Replication is asynchronous by default, so "the cluster is allowed to lose some committed (not yet replicated) transactions during a failover"; strictly synchronous replication is available on request. Where the standby sits and how long failover takes are not stated. AWS and Azure put a synchronous standby in another zone and state 60 to 120 seconds for failover.

The SLA. IONOS's SLA (issued by IONOS Cloud GmbH, the company you sign with, version 08/2026, in German) promises "wirtschaftlich angemessene Anstrengungen" (commercially reasonable efforts) to reach each target:

• Compute availability is averaged over all your instances, so one failed VM among many barely moves it.
• Claims go in writing within two weeks after the billing month, with each resource's ID, outage timestamps and "Request Logs": your monitoring makes the case. Credits are set off against future invoices.
• Excluded: announced maintenance (up to 4 hours a quarter), emergency maintenance, manufacturer faults in software "und/oder Hardware" (and/or hardware), and attacks.
• IONOS may change the SLA at any time, on 10 working days' notice, or 90 days' for adverse material changes.

AWS commits to 99.99% for EC2 across two or more zones and 99.5% for a single instance, with credits up to 100% and claims until the end of the second billing cycle; Azure gives 99.99% across zones and 60 days to claim.

Status page and incidents. status.ionos.cloud has history back to at least mid-2024 and root cause analyses (RCA) for many larger incidents; it also lists maintenance and support notices, so its counts do not compare with other providers'.

Three patterns bear on design. Kubernetes control planes degraded again and again: one entry in July 2025 and eleven from March to September 2026, and automated maintenance was paused from 22 June to 25 August 2026 for lack of capacity. Frankfurt Object Storage logged error-rate entries seven times from November 2024 to September 2026. And the management plane is shared: the May and September outages hit every location at once, so a second location does not protect your ability to create or change resources.

Support

One tier, included. The support agreement promises phone and email 24/7 in German and English, a first response under 1 hour for a malfunction (6 hours for Cubes) and under 72 hours for other requests, and a named account manager. A response is "a qualified statement", an initial assessment at least; no resolution time is committed. Support "has no authorisation to log on to virtual resources ... nor to make any changes", but checks a new setup free of charge.

The phone line has been short of capacity: at least ten status notices between 13 June and 15 October 2026 called telephone support "temporarily unavailable" or at "reduced capacity" and sent customers to the contact form or email. On AWS a one-hour target for a production outage costs the greater of USD 29 or 9% of spend; on Azure, USD 100 a month.

Getting an account

Only businesses may sign up: "The offer for the IONOS CLOUD products is for commercial use only". The General Terms give no right to be accepted and let IONOS ask for legitimation documents. Signup takes company and credit card details, and a test account follows "within a few minutes"; if a card or phone check fails, sales calls within 24 hours on working days. No ID scan or selfie check is described.

The trial (30 days or EUR 500) is capped at 8 cores, 20 GB of RAM, 600 GB each of HDD and SSD and one static IP, then converts to a paid account. Documented contract limits include 5 Network and 5 Application Load Balancers and one H200-S, raised by support; we found no self-service quota form, and no limits for after the trial.

Workload B on day one: no. Its VMs need 48 GB of RAM and its database 16 GB more, against the trial's 20 GB, and the trial terms say only "If you need more test resources, contact your account manager", with no stated turnaround. On AWS the default of 5 vCPUs is also below workload B's 12; Azure's 20 cores per region fit on paper.

Two clauses in the General Terms (version 5.9) matter later. When a third party credibly alleges a rights violation, IONOS may block the service for as long as the dispute lasts, telling you in advance "soweit möglich" (where possible). And it may end an open-ended contract with three months' notice to the end of a month, without giving reasons.

Compliance and data protection

Read the scope: the IT-Grundschutz certificate leaves out the managed databases, GPU VMs and every location outside Germany, and the certificates we saw name IONOS SE or IONOS Holding SE, not IONOS Cloud GmbH, the company you sign with.

The data processing agreement is part of the General Terms and keeps processing in the EU or EEA unless the service needs a transfer to a third country. The only sub-processor listed (October 2026) is IONOS SE. You choose each data centre's location; AI Model Hub inference runs only in Berlin.

One clause in the General Terms is worth knowing: the customer knows that IONOS can technically view its virtual data centre, and possibly other data stored there, at any time. Confidential VMs are IONOS's offer for workloads that need isolation from the operator.

Who controls it

Customers in Germany and Austria contract with IONOS Cloud GmbH, Montabaur; IONOS has Spanish, French, UK and US companies for other markets. The contracting company changed in 2026: the EUR price list archived on 18 April 2026 still named IONOS SE. We found no notice of the transfer to existing customers; the General Terms allow it, with a right to terminate.

The parent, IONOS Group SE, is listed in Frankfurt (MDAX). At the end of 2025 United Internet AG of Montabaur held 63.8% and the Irish fund Helikon 5.0%; the rest was free float. Ralph Dommermuth, CEO of United Internet, chairs IONOS Group's Supervisory Board, and Warburg Pincus sold its last shares on 27 March 2025. Group revenue was EUR 1,316.9 million in 2025; cloud revenue is not reported separately.

The platform is IONOS's own, on KVM and libvirt; no IONOS page describes it as OpenStack. Most buildings are other companies': Equinix and Digital Realty in Frankfurt, TelemaxX in Karlsruhe, Virtus in London, Digital Realty in Paris, and Switch and QTS in the US. Berlin, Worcester and Lenexa are IONOS's own, and Logroño is run by Arsys, a group company.

Leaving

Egress is the only traffic charged: moving 10 TB out in one month costs EUR 245.76, and we found no waiver for customers who leave. Self Data Export returns only metadata; Bulk Data Export for Kubernetes, the Container Registry and Kafka goes through support. There is no self-service download of disk images: data leaves from inside the VM. PostgreSQL is standard, so pg_dump and logical replication are the ways out.

Mind the order. IONOS's own EU Data Act guidance says: "Do not carry out a regular cancellation: Once a regular cancellation has been finalized, data will no longer be available for export." A cancellation takes effect at the end of the next working day, and deletion is final within 30 days of the contract's end. Export first, cancel last.

Lock-in sits in the model. The virtual data centre drawn in the DCD has no hyperscaler equivalent, so Terraform written for IONOS does not port, and Kubernetes load balancers and volumes come through IONOS's own integrations. Free traffic between IONOS data centres makes a design spread across providers dearer than one kept at IONOS.

What users report

We read Hacker News (October 2023 to October 2026), part of Reddit and one security blog, leaving out posts about IONOS's web hosting.

Outages, especially in Kubernetes. Users report "a few unexpected outages and silent CPU-type changes on nodes" (r/devops, December 2025) and "Regular outages, outdated software bad configs, uneducated support" (a reply, December 2025). The status record above bears them out.

Slow provisioning. One user reports that other customers' load slows API calls and that creating network interfaces "can take minutes" (42485876, December 2024; again in 45666825, October 2025). IONOS's RCA for May 2026 describes the same congestion "under concentrated load".

Support: uneven. Users report "Out of 3 encounters, I had a competent person once" (42290596, December 2024), "useless support" (45666825, October 2025) and a service that was poor the last time one user tried it (r/hetzner, June 2026). In the same thread, a consultant whose client has run its whole infrastructure on IONOS for two years says it works very well.

The console. Two users report that the DCD breaks browser tabs and the back button (42290596, 42485876, December 2024). IONOS redesigned the DCD in April 2025, after both.

A Kubernetes credential exposure. A security researcher reports that worker nodes exposed a credential through cloud-init and that "Communication during the disclosure process was slow, and follow-up was limited" (Henrik Gerdes, September 2026). IONOS's advisory confirms "an internal administrative credential" exposed on 1.33 and later, CVSS 6.5, reported 16 July and fixed on 27 August 2026.

Capacity. A user posted an IONOS email, "Customer Advisory: Capacity Constraints in FRA (de/fra) Datacenter", saying the "Support Team cannot bypass capacity limits" and suggesting Berlin (48641819, June 2026). The status page's Kubernetes and GPU capacity notices from the same month match it.

Cancelling takes a call or an email. Users report needing a phone call to cancel (43319628, March 2025; r/hetzner, June 2026, about a hosting VPS). For the cloud, the FAQ sends account closure to the account manager, phone or email; we found no self-service button.

Who it suits, and who should look elsewhere

IONOS Cloud suits European companies, German ones and public-sector suppliers above all, that want a German contract with BSI certificates, managed Kubernetes and PostgreSQL at about 40% of the AWS price and 24/7 German-language support included, and that will build their own redundancy across two locations, such as Frankfurt and Berlin.

Look elsewhere if you are an individual or a hobby project; if you need zones in separate buildings inside one region, or a documented database standby; if you depend on functions, serverless containers, queues or a KMS; or if you need new Kubernetes releases quickly, GPUs under an SLA, or a production-sized account on the day you sign up.

Sources

Checked on 15 and 16 October 2026.

Pricing

• IONOS Cloud EUR price list, v2026-10-15, German price page and US price page, in USD
• Archived: German price page, 7 October 2024 and EUR price list, 18 April 2026
• GPU servers and Bare Metal Cloud
• FAQs on costs and billing and payment options; Cost Alert
• AWS and Azure figures: AWS Price List bulk API and Azure Retail Prices API, converted at the ECB rate of 15 October 2026

Terms and SLA

• General Terms of IONOS Cloud GmbH, version 5.9
• Service Level Agreement of IONOS Cloud GmbH, version 08/2026
• Data protection package and sub-processor list, October 2026
• Support agreement

Documentation

• Service catalogue and glossary
• Block storage overview, S3 API compatibility and IP addresses
• PostgreSQL: overview and high availability
• Managed Kubernetes release schedule and limitations
• FAQs on trial conditions and account settings
• Data export: bulk, self-service and EU Data Act guidance
• Tooling: Cloud API v6, Terraform provider and CNCF Kubernetes conformance, v1.35
• Release notes: previous releases and December 2025

Status and incidents

• Status page
• Incidents: qd4q4v0xf9md, gbwl986s8ssy, c745lwj5bm9x, 4y4f2kgqhkgk, p6pjqxzgkh1g, v38v2cq6ynjg, fpdt04ng3rvm, t7t03ygds59g and 0dv04n68ysxq

Compliance

• Certificates page, ISO 27001 on IT-Grundschutz and ISO/IEC 27001:2022, TÜV NORD
• Managed Kubernetes vulnerability advisory, 2026

Company and ownership

• Imprint of IONOS Cloud GmbH
• IONOS Group SE, Annual Report 2025

User reports

• Hacker News: 42290596 and 42485876 (December 2024), 43319628 (March 2025), 45666825 (October 2025), 48641819 (June 2026)
• Reddit: r/devops thread and reply (December 2025); r/hetzner thread (June 2026)
• Henrik Gerdes, "How to Not Join Kubernetes Nodes", September 2026