Short answer: IONOS is the cheapest way to start hosting a UK business website or mailbox, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The catch is what happens twelve months later. As at September 2026, IONOS advertises web hosting from £1 a month and email from £1 a month — and on their own pricing pages those same plans are listed as renewing at £9 a month and £2.50 a month. If that pattern is why you are looking for an IONOS alternative, this is an honest comparison of what both of us charge, where IONOS genuinely beats us, and where a flat, held price works out better.
Every figure below was read from IONOS's own UK pricing pages on 14 September 2026. Both of their pages state that prices exclude VAT, as ours do, so the numbers compare directly.
IONOS publishes both numbers on the same page, which is more transparent than several of their competitors manage. Here is the ladder as it stood when we last checked it.
| IONOS plan | Intro price | Intro lasts | Price after that | Storage | Email accounts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | £3/mo | 6 months | £6/mo | 100 GB | 1 |
| Plus | £1/mo | 12 months | £9/mo | 200 GB | 2 |
| Premium | £8/mo | 6 months | £16/mo | 350 GB | 4 |
| Ultimate | £12/mo | 6 months | £24/mo | 500 GB | 5 |
Worth noticing: the cheapest headline number is not on the entry plan. The £1 offer sits on Plus, the plan that afterwards costs £9 a month. Over a first year that is £12; over the second year it is £108. Nothing is hidden — it is printed on the page — but it is the number most people miss when comparing hosts.
IONOS Email is advertised at £1 a month for twelve months and renews at £2.50 a month. That price covers five email accounts with 2 GB of storage each, and a free domain is bundled in. Their Hosted Microsoft Exchange option starts at £1 for three months and then runs at £6 a month per user, with 50 GB per user. Outlook & Office is £1.50 for twelve months, then £5 a month for a single 12 GB account.
We have not found a lower advertised entry price from any mainstream UK provider. If your honest requirement is five mailboxes, light storage, and the smallest possible bill, IONOS at £2.50 a month is cheaper than anything we sell, and we would rather say that plainly than bury it.
Four things, and they are real ones.
They bundle 24/7 support on every plan listed above. We do not match that. Our team typically replies in around ten minutes between 8am and 5pm, staff are usually around from roughly 5am to midnight every day of the year, and we arrange out-of-hours cover for migrations — but it is not a guaranteed round-the-clock service and we will not describe it as one.
They include a free domain with most plans. We charge £8.95 a year for a .co.uk or .uk and £12.95 for a .com, which you can see on our domains page.
Their storage allowances on web hosting are generous — 100 GB on the entry plan rising to 500 GB — and they publish a 30-day money-back guarantee, which we do not advertise.
And they are enormous and long-established, which matters if you are weighing up who will still be here in five years. UKBox Ltd was incorporated in September 2023. We are profitable with positive net assets and our accounts are filed at Companies House under number 15154892, but we are not going to claim two decades of history we do not have.
Going from £1 to £9 a month is a nine-fold increase. It is disclosed and completely normal in this industry — but the price you compared on is not the price you will pay for most of your time as a customer. The only sensible way to compare hosts is over three years rather than one, which is why we built a three-year cost calculator that uses published renewal figures rather than intro prices.
One mailbox on Standard, two on Plus, four on Premium, five on Ultimate. For a sole trader that is fine. For a five-person firm that wants a shared inbox for accounts, one for enquiries and one each for the team, you are pushed up the ladder for mailbox count rather than for anything to do with your website.
This is the figure we would check first. Two gigabytes fills up quickly on an account that receives PDF invoices, photographs from site, or long quoted reply chains. Our Starter plan gives 10 GB per mailbox drawn from a 100 GB shared pool, so a heavy mailbox can borrow from the quiet ones instead of locking out at a fixed ceiling.
If your shortlist is IONOS and Fasthosts, those are not two independent companies. IONOS Group's own corporate site describes Fasthosts as "our hosting and reseller brand in the UK". Switching between them is a change of brand rather than a change of group. That is not a criticism of either, but it is worth knowing when you think you are getting a second opinion.
Our pricing is flat per business rather than per person, so a mailbox costs nothing extra until you outgrow the plan. Every figure below excludes VAT, as IONOS's do.
| Plan | Price after any intro | Mailboxes | Storage | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IONOS Email | £2.50/mo | 5 included | 2 GB each | Free domain, 24/7 support |
| IONOS Hosted Exchange | £6/mo per user | Per user | 50 GB per user | Microsoft Exchange |
| UKBox Starter Email | £4.99/mo flat | 10 | 10 GB each, 100 GB pooled | Price held 3 years |
| UKBox Secure Email | £8.99/mo flat | 20 | 20 GB each, 400 GB pooled | Our most popular plan |
| UKBox Email Pro | £19.99/mo flat | 50 | 30 GB each, 1.5 TB pooled | Priority support |
The honest reading of that table: at five mailboxes IONOS is cheaper than us and will stay cheaper. At ten mailboxes the comparison stops being like-for-like, because IONOS does not publish a price for extra accounts beyond the five included, so we cannot show you a fair ten-mailbox figure and will not invent one. What we can tell you is that ten mailboxes on our Starter plan is £4.99 a month in total, and still £4.99 in three years, because the price hold is written into what you sign.
We do not offer mailing lists or email archiving — if you need either, Krystal and Microsoft both do. Our 99.9% uptime figure is a target, not a credit-backed SLA. Backups are taken daily and kept for a rolling five days, copied off-site to a second UK data centre. If you need Teams, SharePoint or the Office apps, buy Microsoft 365; we will happily run your domain's mail routing alongside it.
We copy your mail across with IMAP synchronisation while your old mailboxes stay live, so nothing is in flight during the change. Once the copy matches, we move the DNS. Folder structure, read and unread status and calendar entries come across. Migration is free, there is no contract, and because everything is standard IMAP you can leave the same way you arrived. SPF, DKIM and DMARC are configured by default on domains we host — the detail is on our email deliverability page.
On headline price, yes, and at five mailboxes it stays cheaper even after renewal. On web hosting over three years the answer depends entirely on which plan you land on, because the intro prices and the renewal prices differ so widely. Run both through the calculator rather than trusting either of our marketing pages.
No. The price you start on is held for three years in writing, and we have never raised an existing customer's price. There is no introductory rate to fall off because we do not advertise one.
Yes. Your domain is yours. You can transfer it to us, or leave it registered with IONOS and simply point the DNS at our servers. We will do the DNS change for you either way.
No, and we would rather say so than quietly imply otherwise. Our support is UK-based and typically answers in about ten minutes between 8am and 5pm, with staff around most of the day beyond that. For business-critical sites we offer a separate Priority Support arrangement with emergency cover.
It is a genuine alternative in the sense that it is a different product with different pricing. It is not an independent second opinion: IONOS Group's own site lists Fasthosts as its UK hosting and reseller brand.
If the mailboxes are what is really driving this, our business email hosting plans start at £4.99 a month flat for ten mailboxes, with free migration and the price held for three years. If it is the website, our UK web hosting runs on our own hardware in London, Coventry and Maidenhead. Either way, put the renewal figures — ours and theirs — into the three-year calculator before you commit to anybody.
— The UKBox team
Prices correct as at September 2026, taken from IONOS UK web hosting and IONOS UK email hosting. All figures exclude VAT.
