IONOS domain prices: the first-year offers that jump at renewal

IONOS publishes prices for more than 400 domain extensions, and the vast majority come with a first-year discount: the welcome price looks like a bargain, and the regular renewal fee for the same name can be anywhere from two to thirty times higher once the first birthday passes. The headline offers dominate the marketing, so we pulled the whole live price table from ionos.co.uk and sorted it by the size of the jump.

The biggest first-year-to-renewal jumps (verified 8 October 2026)

All figures below are from IONOS's own domain price list as published on 8 October 2026. Prices are for registration and renewal of the name itself.

Extension	First year	Renewal	Multiple
.store	£1.32	£66.00	50×
.shop	£1.00	£45.00	45×
.global	£4.00	£99.00	24.75×
.digital	£2.83	£46.00	16.25×
.fun	£1.18	£47.00	~40×
.gmbh	£2.91	£51.00	17.5×
.tech	£5.04	£82.00	16.25×
.bio	£10.00	£80.00	8×
.energy	£19.04	£119.00	6.25×
.cafe	£7.25	£58.00	8×
.coach	£19.35	£86.00	4.4×
.online	£1.60	£40.00	25×
.movie	£248.50	£355.00	1.43×

The pattern is clear: the extensions pushed hardest in IONOS's marketing — .store, .shop, .online, .tech, .digital, .fun — are precisely the ones with the steepest renewal shock. A .store name that costs roughly £1.32 to register costs £66 every year afterwards, which is more than most people pay for their actual hosting.

The UK picks that hold flat

If you are registering for a UK site or business, the honest options are the ones where the renewal equals or nearly equals the welcome price:

• .co.uk: £1 first year, £10 renewal — a 10× jump, but the £10 renewal itself is fair-market and the first year costs about the same as a coffee.
• .com: £1 welcome offer, then £15 a year — again a steep ratio, but £15 renewal is a standard .com price, not a trap.
• .org: £8 first year (or £1 with the bundle offer), £16 renewal — a 2× multiplier at most.
• .cloud: £1 first year, then £30 (or £13 with the domain bundle offer) — the bundle price is the one that behaves.
• .app: £12 flat — no discount, no jump, and forced HTTPS via HSTS preloading built into the TLD.
• .club: £19 flat across years. No welcome offer, no shock.

How to read IONOS's price table

Each row of IONOS's list shows a special offer price, a bundle price, a welcome price, the regular renewal fee, and a transfer/restore fee. The number to budget for is the regular renewal fee, not the welcome offer — everything else is a one-off. The welcome offer also typically only applies to a single year, and it does not stack with every promotion. If a name is available at £1 but renews at £40, you are effectively signing up to a £399 ten-year commitment at first-year prices.

What we would actually do

For a serious long-term project, buy the extension you would be happy to pay the renewal for, and treat the first-year discount as trivia. For a short campaign or a test domain, the £1-class first years (.store, .shop, .fun, .cloud) are genuinely useful — as long as you diarise the renewal date or set the domain to expire rather than silently renew at 50× the registration price. IONOS does not auto-charge surprise add-ons; the shock is purely the year-two price.

Compare IONOS's full domain price list on the IONOS brand page, browse the wider market in our domain deals catalogue, or see how the competition prices the same names: NameSilo's first-year TLD deals vs renewals and our Porkbun vs Spaceship price comparison.