Most of the drama in leaving IONOS comes from one question nobody asks until it is too late: who is holding your DNS? Answer that on day one and the rest is ordinary work. Answer it on the day you switch and you get an afternoon of everybody asking why the site has gone.
The short version. Find out where the domain’s nameservers point. Copy every record in that zone before you touch a single one. Get the new server built and checked. Only then change anything. Cancel last, in writing, once the new setup has behaved for a fortnight.
IONOS was 1&1 for years, and a fair few UK businesses still have accounts opened under the old name, sometimes by somebody who has long since left the company. If that is you, budget an hour just for getting back into the account before you plan anything else.
Find out where your DNS actually lives
DNS is the phone book that turns your domain into an address for the website, the mail server, and anything else hanging off it. Whoever holds the phone book controls all of it, and that is not automatically whoever you pay for hosting.
If the domain was bought at IONOS, the odds are it is on their nameservers and the records are edited in their panel. But we have opened plenty of accounts where the nameservers point at Cloudflare, or at an agency’s account, or at a host the business stopped paying in 2019. Check rather than assume. On a Windows machine, nslookup -type=ns yourbusiness.co.uk tells you in one line, and reading what comes back is a short job in itself.
Then photograph the zone. Screenshot every page of it, or export it if the panel offers that. You want the A records, the MX records, the SPF and DKIM lines, the CNAMEs pointing at things like a booking system or a payment provider, and the odd stray verification record somebody added for Google years ago. Anything you do not copy is something that stops working later, and the person who added it will not remember.
The account is a stack of contracts
IONOS sells its products as contracts with terms and dates, rather than as a single rolling bill. That is a legitimate way to do business, and it is also why “I cancelled it” and “it stopped charging me” turn out to be different statements.
Before you do anything technical, go and read what you are actually signed up to. Which contract does each domain sit under. Which one includes the mailboxes, because bundled mailboxes are the ones people forget exist until they stop. When each term ends, and what the panel says about how to cancel and by when. We are not going to quote you notice periods, because they vary by product and by when you signed, and a made-up number in a blog post is how people miss deadlines. Read your own account, and if it is unclear, ask them in writing and keep the reply.
One rule regardless of the answer: do not cancel anything before the new setup is live and settled. The old server sitting there costing you one more month is the cheapest safety net in this entire job.
Their panel is their own
On their shared hosting the control panel is their own design rather than cPanel or Plesk, so the vocabulary is different and generic guides written for other hosts will not match what is on your screen. Nothing sinister in that, but it does mean two practical things.
One is that your database backups and file archives come out in whatever shape their tools produce, so check what you have actually downloaded before you trust it. Open the archive. Look inside the SQL file. An export that failed halfway through looks exactly like a successful one from the outside.
The other is that things configured at panel level do not appear in a file copy. Scheduled tasks, redirects, IP restrictions, a PHP setting somebody raised to get a large upload working. Walk the panel with a notepad and write down anything that has clearly been changed from its default.
Taking the domain with you
A domain transfer and a DNS change are not the same thing, and you can do either without the other. Repointing DNS moves where your services run. Transferring moves who bills you for the name itself and who can stop it expiring.
For a .com or .net, the sequence is the standard one: find the domain in the account, switch the transfer lock off, request the transfer code, hand it to the gaining registrar and approve the confirmation. For .co.uk and the rest of the .uk family there is no code, because Nominet runs it differently: your current registrar sets a tag naming the new one, and the receiving company then accepts it into its own account.
Two details save grief. Make sure the domain’s contact address is a mailbox you can still read on the day, because approvals arrive by email and nothing moves until somebody clicks. And check the expiry date before you start, since a transfer attempted in the last few days before expiry is a race you do not need to run. If yours are scattered across three different providers, there is more about tidying that up on our domain names page.
The website is usually the easy half
Once you can see the zone and get at the files, moving the site itself is routine. Files across, database across, rebuild it on the new server, look at it properly with the old one still serving the public, then change the record so the domain points at the new machine.
Two IONOS-shaped things to look at while you are in there. Note the exact PHP version the site runs on, since older sites are frequently pinned to something the wider world moved past. And find out how the site sends its mail, because a contact form that has relied on the machine’s own mail service for years will go silent on a server built differently, and it fails politely, with no error and no email.
Mailboxes, and the day the MX changes
If your mail lives there, treat it as its own project with its own date. Mailboxes get created on the new side first, the messages are copied across with the folder structure intact, and only then do the MX records change. Aliases and forwarders are rebuilt by hand, because they are configuration rather than content and no copy will bring them.
Test it from outside the building. Send a message in from a personal address on your phone with mobile data on, reply to it, and check that your answer does not land in their junk folder. That five-minute check catches SPF and DKIM records that were copied wrong, which is the single most common reason a business’s mail starts landing in spam a week after a move.
Leaving IONOS FAQs
Can I move my website away from IONOS but keep my domain there?
Yes. Registration and hosting are separate purchases, so the name can stay on their books while the site itself runs on somebody else’s server. All that changes is the DNS. Plenty of businesses sit like that for years, though we tend to consolidate eventually so there is one account to get into when something urgent comes up.
Do I have to cancel my IONOS contract before I move?
No, and you should not. Move first, run on the new setup for a couple of weeks, then cancel. IONOS products are sold as contracts with their own terms and dates, so check what your account says about cancelling and follow it exactly. Keeping the old service running a little longer is cheap insurance.
How do I find out who controls my DNS?
Check your domain’s nameservers, either through a public whois lookup or with the nslookup command on your own computer. The names that come back identify whoever holds the records deciding where your website and your email go. That is frequently not the company you pay for hosting, and it is the account you need first.
Being fair about it
IONOS is a large European provider with a lot of servers and a lot of customers, and for a simple site that rarely changes, it does the job at a price that is hard to argue with. If nothing has ever gone wrong for you there, this article is not trying to talk you out of anything.
What sends people looking is scale rather than misconduct. At the volume end of the market you are buying a standard product, which is exactly what makes it cheap: the introductory price and the renewal price are rarely the same number, and everything is designed to work the same way for the hundred-thousandth customer as for the first. That is a fair trade, and it holds right up until the morning your shop is down and you want somebody who already knows how it is put together.
If you would rather not do any of that
Give us the login and the domain and we will map the account, copy the zone, build the site on our servers, move the mail and give you a day’s notice before anything is switched. Moving in costs nothing on top of the hosting, your IONOS account carries on untouched while we work, and the managed hosting itself starts at £1 a day + VAT. Whole servers have been moved into this business and several merged down into one, so an account carrying a stack of overlapping contracts is familiar ground rather than a special project.
There is more detail about what managed actually covers on our best web hosting page, or ring 01623 650 333 and talk it through. We have untangled worse.
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