Yes, but not necessarily by uploading the new site to IONOS. A site made with IONOS Website Builder lives inside the builder, not on ordinary web hosting you can upload files to, so a custom-built replacement needs a home of its own. On this job we hosted the new site separately, repointed only the domain's website records, and left the customer's IONOS email exactly as it was.
The situation
A local painter and decorator had a very basic single-page website, made with IONOS Website Builder. They wanted it modernised.
Their business email also ran through IONOS, on the same domain, and they were still within their contract for it.
The constraint
Our sites are built in code and published as files. With a lot of traditional hosting accounts, replacing a site is a matter of uploading the new files, over FTP or something like it, and nothing else about the domain changes.
A Website Builder plan is a different kind of product. The site exists inside the builder's own editor and platform, and there was no conventional hosting space on the account for a replacement site to be uploaded into.
That is not a criticism of IONOS. Site builders trade flexibility for convenience, and that is a fair trade for plenty of businesses. It is also specific to the product: IONOS sells several kinds of hosting, and some of them work the traditional way. The company name on the invoice did not tell us how the job would work. The product name did.
What we did
- Built the new site with our normal stack and hosted it on Vercel, separately from IONOS.
- Repointed only the DNS records that send visitors to the website, so the domain's web address now led to the new host.
- Checked the new site loaded securely, then checked that email was still arriving and sending as normal.
What we deliberately did not change
- The email service. It stayed with IONOS.
- The email DNS records. The MX records that route incoming mail, and the records that authenticate outgoing mail, were preserved exactly as they were.
- The customer's contract. Moving email has its own cost and its own risks, and nothing about the new website required it. Pushing a small business into an email migration in the middle of a contract, purely to tidy up our side of the job, would have been the wrong call.
Website and email can live with different providers indefinitely. Can I move my website without moving my email? explains why that works.
What we learned
The exact hosting product matters more than the hosting company. "The site is with IONOS" told us who to log into. "The site is on IONOS Website Builder" told us what the job actually involved.
We now identify the precise product a site runs on, not just the provider, before planning or quoting any website move. It is part of our discovery checklist, which you can see in What should be checked before moving a website?
Why it matters
If your current website was made with a site builder, replacing it with something better is routine. It usually means hosting the new site somewhere else and pointing the domain at it. It does not mean losing your email, provided the email records are left alone.
Before you cancel anything, check what the plan covers. Cancelling a builder plan that only runs the website is straightforward. Cancelling one that also provides your email or your domain is not, and that is worth knowing before anyone touches it.