1blu Alternatives

A contract, not a coupon

Most hosting pages I write start with a promo price and a renewal shock. 1blu is the opposite animal, and that's what makes it interesting. When I pulled up their Homepage-Pakete pricing table recently, the "Aktionspreis" row — the promotional price row — was empty across every tier. The standard monthly prices simply sit there: €5.99 a month for the entry package with 20 GB of SSD storage and one included domain, then €10.99, €14.99 and €17.99 for the larger tiers. There is a €4.90 one-time setup fee, a 12-month contract term, billing every three months, and one month's notice to cancel at the end of the term.

No fake discount, no renewal jump — because there's nothing to jump from. For a site owner in the German market who's tired of doing arithmetic on every hosting page, that's refreshing. It's also, in its own way, the reason some people eventually want out: what you gain in price honesty you pay for in contract rigidity and an aging product experience. Here's how I think about both sides.

When it makes sense to leave 1blu

When the contract terms stop fitting your life

Twelve-month terms with a one-month cancellation notice is standard German hosting practice, but it means the exit is a calendar problem. Miss the notice window and you're committed for another term, paid quarterly. If your projects are short-lived — campaign sites, client work with uncertain lifespans, experiments — a monthly-cancel host is structurally cheaper even at a higher sticker price. I've watched people pay for ten idle months of a second term because the cancellation date slipped past them. Set the reminder the day you sign up, whichever host you pick.

When performance is the complaint

German-language reviews of 1blu are consistent on this point: affordable, but slower than the competition, with weaknesses in consistency. The plans run on SSD-backed shared infrastructure with HTTP/2 and modern PHP available, which is fine on paper — but shared is shared, and if your site's load times are affecting conversions or search rankings, that's a measurable cost bigger than the hosting bill. A move to a performance-first host is justified the moment you can show the number.

When you need SSH or modern tooling

Look closely at the feature table before assuming a "Profi" label means a developer platform: on the two lower Homepage packages, SSH/SFTP access isn't included — you get FTP and the control panel. There's no staging workflow, no Git-based deployment, no per-site container isolation. For a static site or simple WordPress install none of that matters. For anyone who deploys with a CLI and a deploy script, the missing rows in that table are the reason to leave.

When you've outgrown the package grid

The tiers are fixed bundles: 20 / 80 / 140 / 160 GB of storage, 1 to 60 MySQL databases, 100 to 400 mailboxes, one to four included domains. If your needs cross those lines unevenly — lots of small sites needing many databases but little storage, or one huge site — you end up buying the wrong bundle twice over. Modern VPS and cloud pricing lets you scale one dimension; this grid doesn't.

When support needs to be in your language, or faster

1blu's support is German-language, which is exactly right for its market and exactly wrong if you're an English-speaking customer who signed up for the price. Even in German, review sentiment around response quality is mixed. When your site is broken, the support experience is most of the product; if it's not working for you, that alone justifies a move.

When you should stay

Stay if you want the opposite of the promo-price merry-go-round. The price you sign up at is the price, the setup fee is disclosed, the terms are plain — compared with hosts advertising €1.99 that renew five times higher, 1blu is honest almost to a fault. Stay if you want the extras it genuinely bundles: unmetered traffic on every package, free Let's Encrypt certificates for all your domains, a web-conference room built on BigBlueButton (a real feature in the German market), a site builder, and one-click installs for WordPress, Nextcloud, Joomla and PrestaShop. Stay if mail matters — 100 to 400 mailboxes with 10–50 GB of pooled storage is generous, and plenty of small businesses run their entire email here. Stay if you're a German-speaking customer who values invoices and contracts that behave like German contracts. And stay if you're two years in with no complaints: stable-and-boring is a feature, and migration weekends aren't free.

The alternatives

From the European hosts I track on HostingSpotter, weighted toward the German and GDPR-conscious market where 1blu competes. Where I'm not sure of current pricing, I've left numbers out rather than guess.

Hetzner Webhosting — the price-performance reference

Hetzner Webhosting is what I test 1blu against first. Hetzner's shared webhosting packages start at just a couple of euros a month at time of writing, run on serious infrastructure, and include the developer niceties 1blu withholds — SSH access, proper DNS management, modern tooling. The support model is ticket-based and efficient rather than chatty, and the whole thing leans "infrastructure company" over "hosting reseller." For anyone technical, this is usually the answer; the trade-off is that hand-holding is minimal.

ALL-INKL.COM — the German all-rounder

ALL-INKL.COM is the host German web agencies quietly like: long-established, stable pricing, generous mail and domain allowances, and support that speaks the customer's language well. Packages start around the mid-single-digit euros per month at time of writing. It's less flashy than the international brands and consistently well-run — the "no drama" pick in this market.

Host Europe — the established corporate option

Host Europe has been part of the German hosting landscape for decades and now sits inside a larger group, which cuts both ways: scale, data centers and product breadth, with the bureaucracy that size brings. If your business needs contracts, invoicing and a company that will still exist in ten years — or you want domains, mail and hosting billed from one desk — it's a natural landing spot after 1blu. Compare the current plan grid against 1blu's bundles directly; the segments line up closely.

Hostinger EU — budget pricing with EU data residency

Hostinger EU is the aggressive pricer in this list, with entry plans that undercut almost everyone at sign-up and EU data center options for GDPR-conscious sites. Apply the HostingSpotter rule unfailingly here: check the renewal price before the intro price. If the renewal fits your budget, the modern control panel and LiteSpeed-based stack are pleasant; if it doesn't, the cheap first year was just a loan.

IONOS WordPress Hosting — big-brand WordPress with per-site framing

IONOS WordPress Hosting brings the resources of one of Europe's largest hosts to WordPress specifically: managed updates, staging on some tiers, and data centers in Europe. Introductory pricing is famously low and the renewal deserves the same scrutiny as anyone else's. Where it genuinely wins is scale-backed support and compliance paperwork — for a business that needs those, it's an easy yes.

Combell — the Benelux specialist

Combell is the reference host in Belgium and the Netherlands, with strong local support, solid uptime, and pricing that sits in the middle of the market rather than at the bottom. If your audience is in the Benelux and you care about being close to both your visitors and your support team, it beats a German host on latency and a US host on everything human. English and Dutch/French support are both part of the pitch.

Domeneshop — Nordic simplicity

Domeneshop is a Scandinavian host and registrar with a reputation for plain dealing: clear prices, competent hosting, and none of the upsell theater. It's small enough to care and old enough to be steady. For personal sites and small businesses in the Nordics, it's the local alternative I name first.

The German contract trap, and how I handle it

There's a pattern in German hosting contracts that catches international buyers out, and 1blu's terms are a textbook example: a 12-month term, one month's notice to the end of that term, and automatic extension if you miss the window. Read that sentence again and translate it into calendar terms: if your term ends on September 30th and you realize on September 5th, you've likely already missed the notice window and bought another year. This isn't a 1blu quirk — it's standard Vertragsrecht practice in this market, and every host in this section's alternatives list plays some version of the same game.

My handling is unglamorous and works: the day any annual contract starts, I put two events in the shared calendar — "check decision" three months before term end and "cancel deadline" six weeks before — and I set the reminder on the account owner's calendar, not mine. Two reminders beat one because the first one gets snoozed. When the check-in fires, the decision is a genuine fork: if the host has been fine, renew deliberately and sleep well; if not, there are still six weeks of runway to do a migration properly instead of in a panic.

The other contract detail worth reading before signing is the billing cadence. 1blu bills quarterly within that annual term and charges a small setup fee on activation — so the real first-year outlay is higher than the monthly number times twelve suggests. That's not a hidden fee; it's disclosed plainly in the same table where the empty promotional-price row sits. My complaint about this industry has never been that prices are high — it's that they're disguised. A host that shows you the boring truth in row one has earned a certain amount of goodwill, and I'd rather negotiate with a contract like this than with a coupon carousel that rewrites the price every twelve months.

How to switch without downtime

Moving off a host like 1blu is a classic shared-hosting migration, complicated mainly by mailboxes and the cancellation calendar:

1. Check your contract dates first. Before anything technical, find your term end date and the notice deadline. Plan the migration so the flip happens at least a week before the notice window closes — that way you can cancel cleanly whether or not the new host works out.
2. Take a full backup you control. Download the complete web space via FTP/SFTP or the panel's backup function, export every MySQL database, and export your mailboxes (or plan to leave mail where it is — see step 5).
3. Restore on the new host and test on a staging domain. Check PHP version compatibility, re-run any installers, and test every form and dynamic page. If you were missing SSH before, use it now to sanity-check file permissions and cron jobs.
4. Lower DNS TTLs 48 hours ahead. Drop them to 300 seconds while the old host still serves the site. Inventory every record in the zone — 1blu bundles domains and mail, so the zone is usually busier than it looks.
5. Decide about email deliberately. If mailboxes live on the hosting account, either provision matching mailboxes on the new host and migrate mail before the DNS flip, or move mail to a dedicated provider first and then change MX records. This is the step people skip and the step that generates the angry phone calls.
6. Flip DNS at a quiet hour, then hold the old contract through the term end. You've already paid the quarter. Keep 1blu as a rollback until the new host has served a clean week, then make sure the cancellation lands in writing within the notice window — an email confirmation, saved.

How we evaluate hosting providers

The first thing HostingSpotter does is separate the sticker price from the renewal price and from the contract, because those are three different promises. 1blu scores unusually well on that test — no promo theater, disclosed fees, plain terms — and we say so even though we also report what reviewers consistently say about speed. We read the provider's own pricing tables and terms first, cross-check with dated reviews and owner documentation, and when a number isn't published or we can't stand behind it, we leave it out or mark it "at time of writing." Beyond pricing honesty we weigh the resources actually bundled (mail, databases, SSH), support in practice, and how hard the exit is. We also give credit for pricing structure itself. A host that publishes one price and charges it is easier to trust than a host whose calculator needs a spreadsheet, and that trust shows up in the verdict — while still counting against the product when the same honest table reveals a missing feature like SSH on the lower tiers. Honesty in pricing and quality in product are separate axes, and we score both.