IONOS

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 enables the 5/5 score for EU-region workloads. 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.