Ionos

Ionos

Type of site	Subsidiary
Headquarters	Montabaur, Germany
Area served	Worldwide
Owner	United Internet
Founder(s)	Ralph Dommermuth
Key people	Achim Weiss (CEO)
Revenue	$1.35 million (2019)
URL	www.ionos.com

1&1 IONOS (formerly 1&1 Internet), is a web hosting company that was founded in Germany in 1988. It is currently owned by United Internet. In addition to web hosting, 1&1 IONOS also provides domain registration, SSL certificates, email services, website builder packages, cloud hosting, as well as virtual private servers and dedicated servers. The company has two headquarters: one in Montabaur, Germany, and the other in Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania. 1&1 IONOS has approximately 2,000 employees from 40 countries, with 8 million customers, 10 data centers and over 90,000 servers. The company’s CEO is Achim Weiss.

History

1&1 IONOS was founded by Ralph Dommermuth in 1988 and began as a marketing company for clients like T-Online (formerly BTX) and IBM. In 1998, the company went public with an IPO, generating $60 million and using the proceeds to fund 1&1 IONOS’s first web hosting service called Puretec.

In 2000, the company changed its name to United Internet and moved its product business to 1&1 Internet AG. In the same year, 1&1 began operating in the United Kingdom, and three years later began serving US customers. One of the company’s biggest North American data centers is located in Lenexa, Kansas, which houses more than 40,000 servers. From 2011 onwards, 1&1 started expanding to other countries, including Canada and Mexico, among others.

One of the biggest changes happened in 2018, when 1&1 merged with cloud infrastructure specialists ProfitBricks (founded by Achim Weiss) and officially rebranded as 1&1 IONOS. The rebrand involved a name change and a slightly redesigned website, but the service offerings and prices initially stayed the same. However, 1&1 IONOS introduced some new services the following year, including a personal consultant service for customers. As of September 2019, 1&1 IONOS is placed second in a ranking of the market share of global webhosting providers.

Weiss described the reasons for the rebrand, stating: "As this new company is more than just a hosting provider, we have opted for a new name – and IONOS fits perfectly. It is inspired by the ionosphere; the upper part of the earth’s atmosphere that contains a high concentration of ions and free electrons. It is inspiring to look at, whether viewing from down on Earth, or up in outer space and is, of course, situated in the clouds."

Eco-friendly efforts

1&1 IONOS has many sustainable methods to reduce carbon emissions, including the use of 100% renewable energy in data centers and administrative buildings in the UK and Germany. The carbon is offset in other locations across the world with green certificates or by using local renewable sources.

Server outages

In April 2019, UK customers complained of long server outages, which resulted in websites being pulled offline. Call center staff were also unable to answer customer questions due to support tools not functioning properly. 1&1 IONOS eventually fixed and addressed the issue stating: "For when such cases occur, we have UPS systems and emergency power generators that ensure power supply is uninterrupted during an emergency. One of the five UPS systems in the affected data center suffered a technical malfunction, which meant several servers suffered a temporary loss of power and had to be restarted. As file systems had to be repaired after the power failure, some servers were not immediately available again. We're continuing to look into the cause of the error of the affected UPS system, however all UPS systems are working properly again."