If you’re reading this because your IONOS Mail Basic renewal just landed at three times what you signed up for, then welcome to the club!

IONOS leads with a heavily discounted first six months to a year. Just £1 a month on Mail Basic 5, then renews at £3, before the standard 20% VAT lands on top. That’s a legitimate reason to look elsewhere, and there are better-value alternatives worth pricing out properly.

Zoho Mail: The Cheapest Way Off IONOS

Zoho is the natural first stop, priced per person rather than in a fixed five-mailbox bundle, so you’re not paying for accounts you don’t need or scrambling for a second bundle once you hire past five. Mail Lite runs 80p a month for email alone

Workplace Standard adds a full office suite for £2.40, something IONOS doesn’t offer at any price on its Basic tiers. So you get productivity tools like word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation builders for less than the cost of an IONOS email plan.

Storage is a real gap too: IONOS Basic mailboxes get 2GB each, Zoho Mail Lite gives 5-10GB, and there’s no renewal cliff waiting a year from now.

It’s worth being straight about one thing: IONOS Mail Basic 5’s bundled rate technically undercuts Zoho on a strict per-mailbox basis if you have exactly five people and no plans to grow.

The bundle is rigid, though, and IONOS’s own help documentation describes mailing lists as available on “some packages” only, not guaranteed on Basic.

So if you want an address like sales@ or info@ that reliably fans out incoming emails to a team, and the flexibility to add or remove mailboxes as headcount changes, Zoho is the more dependable long-term choice even where the year-one maths looks close.

Google Workspace and Microsoft 365: If You Want the Full Ecosystem

Neither is cheap next to Zoho, but both are legitimate upgrades from a basic web-host mailbox if your team has outgrown “just email” entirely.

Google Workspace Business Starter, at £5.90 a month, brings Docs, Sheets, Slides and Meet alongside Gmail; Microsoft 365 Business Standard, at £10.80, adds full desktop Office apps. Both are considerably more capable than anything IONOS Mail sells, and considerably more expensive too, worth it only if your team will actually use the collaboration layer rather than just the inbox.

What About Fasthosts?

Worth knowing before you consider it a genuine alternative: Fasthosts sits inside IONOS Group SE, the same corporate parent as IONOS itself.

Switching from IONOS to Fasthosts is a change of logo, not a change of company, and its pricing follows an almost identical intro-then-renewal pattern. If you’re leaving IONOS because of the renewal shock specifically, Fasthosts won’t solve that problem.

Making the Switch

Moving off IONOS is a standard IMAP migration, mail, contacts and calendar pull across without anything exotic, plus an MX record change once you’re ready to cut over. The parts that need rebuilding by hand are anything specific to the old setup: forwarding rules, any mailing lists you managed to get working, and aliases. Budget a working day for a small team, and time it a few weeks ahead of your IONOS renewal so you’re not paying twice.

Our Zoho Mail setup service handles that migration properly, SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured correctly from day one, distribution groups that actually work, so you’re not trading one imperfect setup for another. For the full number-by-number breakdown, see our IONOS vs Zoho Mail comparison.

Common Questions

What’s a good alternative to IONOS Mail Basic?

Zoho Mail Lite for most small teams, per-person pricing, more storage, and a genuine distribution list feature rather than one gated behind an unclear package tier.

Why does IONOS email get more expensive after the first year?

It’s a standard promotional-pricing structure across the industry, not unique to IONOS. The intro rate is real, but it’s designed to expire, usually at two to three times the original price, and IONOS shows the renewal figure on its own pricing page if you know where to look.

Is Zoho Mail cheaper than IONOS?

It depends on the tier. IONOS Mail Basic 5’s fixed five-mailbox bundle can undercut Zoho per mailbox if your headcount matches exactly. At every other tier, and for any business that needs to scale headcount up or down, Zoho comes out ahead.

Can I switch from IONOS without losing my domain?

Yes. Domain registration and email hosting are separate services even when bought from the same provider, and moving your email doesn’t require moving or losing the domain itself.