Fasthosts and IONOS are the same company. Not sister brands that happen to look alike, Fasthosts is a UK subsidiary sitting inside IONOS Group SE, both ultimately owned by the German parent United Internet AG. Once you know that, the pricing pages stop looking like a coincidence. Three tiers, a promotional price for the first term, a crossed-out renewal rate, a “RECOMMENDED” badge steering you toward the middle option. Fasthosts just runs its own version of the same playbook.

That’s not necessarily a problem. It does mean the questions worth asking are the same ones IONOS shoppers should ask, and worth running through properly rather than assuming a familiar UK brand name means a better deal. Here’s what Fasthosts actually costs once the promotional period ends, what it’s missing compared with Zoho Mail, and what its own customers say once the honeymoon period is over.

The Real Cost of Fasthosts Email

Mail Basic 5 bundles five 2GB mailboxes for £1 a month, but only for six months this time, the shortest intro period of any plan across either brand, renewing to £3 a month afterwards. Mail Basic 25, badged as the recommended option, holds its £1 intro rate for a full year before jumping to £4.50 for 25 mailboxes at the same 2GB each. Mail Business, sold per user through a dropdown, starts at £2 a month for six months and settles at £7 a month per mailbox with 50GB.

Do the per-mailbox maths and Mail Basic 25 comes out remarkably cheap: £4.50 for 25 mailboxes works out at 18p each. The catch is that almost no small business actually needs 25 mailboxes. A five-person team buying the “recommended” plan pays for twenty accounts it’ll never open, which erases the saving instantly. Mail Basic 5, sized for a business that size, renews at £3 a month for its five mailboxes, or 60p each, still cheaper than Zoho Mail Lite’s £0.80 per user on a like-for-like footing.

Mail Business is where Fasthosts loses the argument outright. £7 a month for one 50GB mailbox costs nearly three times Zoho Workplace Standard, and Workplace Standard throws in a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool and shared storage that Fasthosts doesn’t offer at any email price point.

Switching Away From Fasthosts

Moving from Fasthosts to Zoho doesn’t require touching your domain registration if that’s held separately, and even if it isn’t, the email side can move independently. Zoho’s migration tool pulls mail, contacts and calendar entries across over IMAP, standard on both platforms. What won’t move on its own: any forwarding you’ve set up, group addresses if you managed to get them working, and the MX record pointing your domain at Fasthosts’s mail servers. That last change can take up to 48 hours to fully propagate, so plan the switch for a quiet week rather than a Friday afternoon, and keep both inboxes checked in parallel for a day or two either side of the change.

What Fasthosts Reviewers Actually Say

Fasthosts holds an excellent Trustpilot score, rated 5 stars from roughly 15,000 to 20,000 reviews depending on when you check. As with IONOS, read past the star rating and the pattern is clear: reviewer after reviewer names an individual support agent and describes a billing or technical issue getting sorted quickly. That’s a real strength if things go wrong.

One review, buried a few pages in, sums up this whole piece better than we could. Paraphrased, the warning reads: read the fine print carefully, because Fasthosts locks you into twelve-month subscriptions and changes the price partway through, though the same reviewer adds that the service itself is otherwise good. That’s the exact renewal structure shown above, confirmed by a paying customer rather than a pricing page footnote.

Distribution Lists: Genuinely Unclear

Here’s where Fasthosts is harder to pin down than IONOS. IONOS at least documents, in its own help centre, that mailing lists exist as a feature on some packages. Searching Fasthosts’s public documentation for the same thing turns up almost nothing, no dedicated help article, no mention on the pricing page, no clear answer to whether a Mail Basic 5 customer can set up a working sales@ address that reaches five people at once. That’s not proof it’s unsupported. It’s proof that a business owner trying to plan around it before buying has to guess, or ring support and hope for a clear answer, and then hope the answer is written down somewhere for the next person who asks. Zoho documents email groups plainly on its own help site, screenshots included, and they work on every paid tier from Mail Lite upward.

Where Zoho Pulls Ahead

Storage tells the same story as it does elsewhere: Zoho Mail Lite’s 5-10GB per mailbox comfortably beats Fasthosts’s 2GB Basic tiers, and unlike Fasthosts, Zoho throws in a calendar, a to-do list and Cliq, its Slack-equivalent team chat, at no extra cost. Zoho’s admin console also supports genuine conditional routing rules, filtering by sender, subject or content, and applying that to any mailbox or the whole organisation, a level of control that isn’t documented anywhere for Fasthosts’s Mail plans. Step up to Workplace Standard and £2.40 a month plus VAT buys real office apps too, a genuinely different proposition to anything Fasthosts sells under the Mail banner.

Can You Hand This to a Third Party?

Fasthosts does let you add additional users to your control panel, through the Manage Users option in account settings. What isn’t clearly documented anywhere public is whether that access can be scoped down to email alone, separate from the same panel’s domain settings, hosting and billing. The control panel is one unified login covering everything Fasthosts sells you, so unless Fasthosts confirms otherwise directly, handing a third party access to manage your inbox likely means handing them the same login that manages your domain and your invoices too.

Zoho splits this cleanly. Custom administrator roles in the Zoho Mail admin console can be limited to just user or group management, nothing else, so a specialist gets exactly the access your email needs and no more. No shared password, no exposure to whatever else lives on your account.

Set Up Once, Properly

A cheap mailbox that’s missing a distribution list, or that quietly triples in price next spring, ends up costing more in admin time than it saved on paper. Our Zoho email maintenance service handles the setup properly the first time: Zoho Mail configuration with SPF, DKIM and DMARC in place, working group addresses, and ongoing support so nothing breaks quietly. Get in touch if you’re weighing Fasthosts against Zoho for your own business.

We’ve also compared IONOS against Zoho Mail directly, worth a look given the two companies share the same parent, and looked at GoDaddy against Zoho Mail too if Microsoft 365 is also on your list.