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If you are searching for a web host for personal or professional websites, check out InMotion Hosting. This web hosting service has several reasonably priced shared, dedicated, reseller, virtual private server (VPS), and WordPress plans, as well as numerous free e-commerce tools. InMotion’s lack of Windows servers can disable people who need them, but generally speaking, the web hosting service is a robust service worth the investment. Here is our InMotion Hosting review.
Getting started
InMotion has many hosting products on offer, but the website does better than average to present them to potential customers and clarify precisely what you get.
For example, the Business Shared Hosting page has a basic feature overview and a simple headline price. Scroll down, and you will find a comprehensive comparison table for the offer, an explanation of the most critical features, comparisons with competing hosts, and details about the starting prices and subscription duration. (If you’re tired of hosts telling you that a plan is ‘$5.99 per month’, but not the length of the contract, you’ll appreciate InMotion’s extra transparency).
We have chosen a plan, entered your details, handed over your money (a card, PayPal, U.S. purchase order, or check are supported), and our account is activated within minutes. InMotion then sent us a welcome email with details about the service. This was a more beginner-friendly approach than we usually see, without scary technical details like nameservers or FTP references. Instead, you get a primary link and login details for your account control panel, along with a few introductory PDFs titled ‘Start a new website’ and ‘Transfer your website.’
These guides also do their best to keep things simple, explaining the basics of what to do next and with links to more sources. Suppose you have an existing website, for example. In that case, the ‘Transferring Ring’ PDF contains some paragraphs about moving your site via cPanel or FTP, setting up email, updating your nameservers, and testing the results. It’s all effortless, and the links point you to useful supporting documents with more in-depth guidance.
InMotion Hosting review: Creating a website
Do you want to use WordPress? Good news – InMotion gives you more ways than most to get it working. For example, you can choose to pre-install it through the registration form. InMotion’s Account Management Panel (AMP) has an Install Popular Software feature with options to install WordPress or BoldGrid (a WordPress based website builder). Both AMP and cPanel provide access to Softaculous, a robust platform that automates the installation of WordPress, Magento, PrestaShop, Drupal, and hundreds of other web applications.
InMotion’s cPanel setup includes all the familiar tools you need to upload an existing website: FTP, SSH, a browser-based file manager, domain management tools, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, and more. However, if you want help, InMotion can transfer an existing site for you. This should be free of charge for simple sites, but it is more likely that costs will be charged for more complex projects. InMotion’s AMP has a Website Transfer Request form where you can give more information about your current website so that the company can provide you a quote.
InMotion Hosting review: Performance
Benchmarking the web host’s performance is tricky because there are so many factors involved, but we did a few tests to get a feel for the capabilities of InMotion Hosting. We started using UpTime.com to monitor a simple template site from multiple locations every five minutes for a week, checking uptime and recording response times.
The results were mixed. The uptime was 100%, as we would expect over a relatively short testing period. Uptime.com recorded two very high response times, the highest with 1.48 seconds. But that’s only two out of more than 2,000 samples, and the rest was much better, giving an average response time of 290 ms. Our most recent tests see basic shared hosting products manage average response times of 200-400ms, putting InMotion Hosting comfortably in the middle of the package.
Although these figures look a bit mundane, it is essential to put them into perspective: they are the results of a short term test on a single server that handles InMotion’s cheapest shared hosting plan. They may not represent long-term performance, and they say nothing about the speeds you see with VPS or shared plans.
To complete our tests, we also checked the site’s performance through Bitcatcha’s server speed test. This kind of one-time benchmark can’t compete with UpTime.com’s constant monitoring, but it was interesting to see that our server delivers much better results, with Bitcatcha’s highest possible A+ speed rating.
InMotion Hosting review: Pricing and plans
The low-end shared hosting plans have several significant limitations, especially with disk space, email accounts, and databases. For example, the Lite plan offers unlimited bandwidth, a free domain, free SSL, cPanel site management, and easy WordPress installation via Softaculous. But you are limited to 10GB of storage space, two databases, and a single email account with only a 100MB inbox, all for $2.49 per month over three years, $7.49 on renewal.
The higher Launch, Power, and Pro plans are mainly about lifting the limits (databases, supported websites, subdomains), improving performance, adding extra e-commerce support, and (for the top-of-the-range Pro plan) a 99.9% SLA. Designed for small businesses, the 50 websites, 100GB storage, 50 email accounts Power plan cost $4.99 per month on the first term ($13.99 on renewal), and the Pro plan (100 websites, 200GB storage, unlimited email accounts) is priced at $12.99 per month on the three-year plan and renews at $22.99.
If you look at the limits and headline features, there may be better deals elsewhere. HostGator’s Baby Plan supports unlimited domains and email addresses, with unmeasured storage and bandwidth, priced from $3.95 per month for three years, and renews at $9.95.
InMotion has more performance-enhancing features than much of the shared hosting competition, though, including NGINX caching, PHP-FM support, and a choice of two data centers; one on the east coast of the US, one on the west. If speed is a priority and you can live with the limits of InMotion, perhaps these will tip the balance in its favor.
If you’re still a little insecure, InMotion’s exceptional 90-day money-back guarantee gives you plenty of time to confirm that the company is keeping its promises. As usual with hosting, there are some complications (dedicated servers and monthly billed hosting plans only have a 30-day warranty, domain registrations are not covered at all), but nothing you wouldn’t expect, and overall, InMotion’s warranty looks much more generous than most.
InMotion Hosting Review: Servers
The low-end shared hosting plans have several crucial limitations, especially with disk space, email accounts, and databases. For example, the Lite plan offers unlimited bandwidth, a free domain, free SSL, cPanel site management, and easy WordPress installation via Softaculous. But you are limited to 10GB of storage space, two databases, and a single email account with only a 100MB inbox, all for $2.49 per month over three years, $7.49 on renewal.
The higher Launch, Power, and Pro plans are mainly about lifting the limits (databases, supported websites, subdomains), improving performance, adding extra e-commerce support, and (for the top-of-the-range Pro plan) a 99.9% SLA. Designed for small businesses, the 50 websites, 100GB storage, 50 email accounts Power plan cost $4.99 per month on the first term ($13.99 on renewal), and the Pro plan (100 websites, 200GB storage, unlimited email accounts) is priced at $12.99 per month on the three-year plan and renews at $22.99.
If you look at the limits and headline features, there may be better deals elsewhere. HostGator’s Baby Plan supports unlimited domains and email addresses, with unmeasured storage and bandwidth, priced from $3.95 per month for three years, and renews at $9.95.
InMotion has more performance-enhancing features than much of the shared hosting competition, though, including NGINX caching, PHP-FM support, and a choice of two data centers; one on the east coast of the US, one on the west. If speed is a priority and you can live with the limits of InMotion, perhaps these will tip the balance in its favor.
If you’re still a little insecure, InMotion’s exceptional 90-day money-back guarantee gives you plenty of time to confirm that the company is keeping its promises. As usual with hosting, there are some complications (dedicated servers and monthly billed hosting plans only have a 30-day warranty, domain registrations are not covered at all), but nothing you wouldn’t expect, and overall, InMotion’s warranty looks much more generous than most.
InMotion Hosting review: Customer support
I turned on InMotion’s webchat on a weekday afternoon to learn how shared hosting differs from VPS hosting. A representative showed up a few seconds later, and I got the information I needed. Later I called InMotion’s customer service to find out more about reseller hosting. Someone quickly put my call into practice and carefully explained the differences in the daily language. I am pleased with InMotion’s customer service.
Final words
With many hosting types, excellent customer service, extended money-back guarantee, and excellent uptime, InMotion is a web hosting service that has the chops to meet your personal or business hosting needs, provided you don’t need a Windows-powered server. The other notable limitation is that if you need short-term hosting, Inmotion will only let you go the month-to-month route with selected plans. Still, if those are not dealbreakers, InMotion is a web host worthy of your time and money.