IONOS is the cloud and hosting arm of IONOS Group SE, a publicly-listed German company (Frankfurt Stock Exchange) descended from the 1&1 Internet / United Internet group, founded in 1988. The company operates from Karlsruhe and is one of the larger European hosting players, with millions of domains under management and a full product surface across web hosting, managed servers, cloud compute, cloud object storage (S3-compatible), Cloud Cubes, managed Kubernetes, and email. The cloud workload story is split between IONOS Inc. (Philadelphia, USA) for US customers and IONOS Group SE / IONOS SE (Germany) for EU customers. Buyers contracting through ionos.de / EU pricing pages contract with the German entity, which is what places EU-region workloads under German jurisdiction with no CLOUD Act exposure.
Compliance posture is among the strongest in the directory. IONOS Cloud was the first German cloud provider to demonstrate both the German government's BSI C5 attestation (Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalogue) for Compute Engine, Cloud Cubes, and S3 Object Storage (received November 2023) and the BSI IT-Grundschutz certification, the underlying baseline for the ISO/IEC 27001 attestation IONOS Cloud holds for its Frankfurt and Berlin data centres and co-located capacity. The company is an active Gaia-X member (the European data-sovereignty initiative), is available to the German public sector through the govdigital sovereign-cloud framework, and announced a January 2026 cooperation agreement with the BSI focused on building a sovereign-cloud platform for the federal administration and post-quantum protection.
Pricing for IONOS Cloud Compute starts at approximately €2/month for the smallest VPS-class instances, with hourly + monthly billing. The product surface, sales-locale, and EUR pricing on ionos.de make it a natural fit for German and broader-EU SMBs and public-sector buyers. Best fit: German public-sector procurement (govdigital path), regulated industries that need BSI C5 + IT-Grundschutz dual coverage, and any EU buyer wanting a Frankfurt-rooted hyperscaler-alternative with a public-listed German parent and a documented BSI cooperation roadmap. Note: customers who specifically use US-region services or sign up via ionos.com US pricing contract with IONOS Inc. (Philadelphia) and are subject to international data transfers under the IONOS Inc. privacy policy.