InMotion Hosting Review

In this InMotion Hosting review, we’re going to detail our experience after launching a website with its business hosting. We’ll talk features, pricing, ease of use, hosting types, speed, security, privacy and support, then give our verdict.

The higher than average price tag may turn a few users away, but the value offered by each plan is immense. That’s ignoring the fact that it’s around the same price as other leading web hosts upon renewal, too. That said, its less than ideal speed is something to consider.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Alternatives for InMotion Hosting

Features

For newbies wanting to put up a website, there’s a struggle between WordPress and website builders. Though we recommend the best website builders, such as Wix (read our Wix review), for most people, sometimes WordPress is a necessary evil. That said, you can still get the flexibility of WordPress with a drag-and-drop interface.

With InMotion Hosting, that comes in the form of BoldGrid, which you can install with any hosting plan. BoldGrid is more complicated than a dedicated website builder, but the small trade-off in usability is worth the flexibility WordPress gives you.

You can have InMotion Hosting design your website for you, too. There are two ways to go about it. QuickStarter, which is only $99 at the time of writing, provides you with a single-page website within two business days, built on a platform that allows you to expand your website in the future. InMotion Hosting will set up a business email and lead generator form for you, too.

There’s also the white glove design service, which will pair you with a WordPress expert who’ll audit your website design. That could be as simple as modifying code for better search engine optimization or a complete overhaul of your design.

InMotion Hosting’s design features are the best of the bunch. Some of the other technical features, such as solid-state drive storage, aren’t as exciting, but still plusses. One such feature is daily backups. Across all plans, InMotion Hosting backs up your site daily, free of charge.

Between the daily backups, SSD storage, a free SSL certificate and the website design services, InMotion Hosting stands out with a more impressive range of features than most. Malware removal is missing, which is something we’ll touch on in the “security” section below, but we’re content overall.

InMotion Hosting Features Overview

Pricing

Business (shared) Price for longest term Details Unlimited GB Disk Space Unlimited GB Bandwidth Unlimited Domains 1 Free Domain	$ 5.99/ month
WordPress Price for longest term Details 40 GB Disk Space Unlimited GB Bandwidth 1 Domains 1 Free Domain	$ 4.99/ month
VPS Price for longest term Details 75 GB Disk Space 4000 GB Bandwidth Unlimited Domains	$ 27.99/ month
Dedicated 1000 GB Disk Space 6000 GB Bandwidth Unlimited Domains	$ 105.69/ month

Unless you’re talking about high-end, enterprise-focused hosting, such as Pagely (read our Pagely review), InMotion Hosting doesn’t look cheap. Shared, or business, plans are about twice the price of other top-shelf providers, as are WordPress plans. Reading the fine print on other websites will show that the numbers still work in InMotion Hosting’s favor, though.

Take Bluehost, for example. As you can read in our Bluehost review, you can purchase basic shared hosting for $3.95 per month, but that’s only if you get three years of hosting upfront. That’s not to single Bluehost out — nearly all web hosts do this — but it is to illustrate something unusual about InMotion Hosting.

InMotion Hosting has promotional pricing like any other web host, but it’s closer to the renewal rate. In fact, the basic shared package from it and Bluehost costs the same, but it’s clearer about what you’re buying upfront.

For us, that’s a pro. Transparency in pricing is seldom seen from web hosts, and we can appreciate InMotion Hosting’s effort to balance it with promotional rates. Even so, if you’re looking to save as much money as possible upfront, InMotion Hosting won’t get you there. Read our Hostinger review for a provider that will.

Out of InMotion Hosting’s lineup, the WordPress plans are most interesting. In most cases, WordPress plans are simply reskinned shared plans with a few extra features — read our SiteGround review to see an example. That said, InMotion Hosting provides six WordPress packages to accommodate varying levels of WordPress sites.

We’ll talk more about the technical differences in the “hosting types” section below. For pricing, though, the multiple tiers are excellent. If you’re planning on starting a WordPress website, you can buy in at a cheaper rate and upgrade to a higher tier once your traffic requires it.

Across the lineup, there’s one small issue, though, and that’s the ability to purchase one month of hosting. There isn’t a rhyme or reason to it. Inexpensive plans are only offered in one or two-year durations. For example, WP-3000S, a WordPress plan at around $15, can’t be purchased monthly, but a similar shared plan at the same price can be.

Overall, it’s a small issue, and one that’s overshadowed by the more annoying pricing schemes of some other hosts — looking at you, Bluehost.

Any downsides InMotion Hosting has in pricing are outweighed by the generous money-back guarantee. Part of the reason you can’t purchase a month of hosting on inexpensive plans is because InMotion Hosting gives you three months to change your mind. It’s an industry leader in that regard.

Ease of Use

Choosing a plan at InMotion Hosting is more difficult than it needs to be. Its website doesn’t suffer from a dated design like FatCow’s (read our FatCow review), but common sense design changes would make selecting a plan much easier.

For example, the homepage of the website shows all of InMotion Hosting’s hosting types, but the website creator and shared hosting are the furthest right. That sounds small, but considering most people read and write left to right, there’s less emphasis on the inexpensive plans that it seems most people would reach for.

None of that is backbreaking, but there are design decisions that we don’t agree with.

That’s splitting hairs, though. Once you find the service you’re looking for, selecting a plan is easy. InMotion Hosting shows what the hosting types are for, as well as the differences between tiers. There’s even a detailed comparison for each type of hosting that shows what you’ll get with your plan.

Once you checkout, InMotion will send you a series of emails detailing how to sign in. You’ll sign in to the Account Management Panel, which is where you manage your billing details, purchase new hosting and submit support tickets. It’s also where you can log in to cPanel, but you don’t necessarily need to go there.

InMotion Hosting includes many of the useful items from cPanel in AMP. For example, you can add email addresses at your domain and access the Softaculous app store without navigating away to cPanel.

That’s not to say you’ll want to avoid cPanel. InMotion Hosting’s implementation is worthy of our best web hosting with cPanel guide, with an attractive layout and simple navigation. One big change from a normal cPanel implementation is the addition of a top menu for accessing different categories.

Outside of issues when first finding the hosting you want, InMotion Hosting is streamlined and simple. The standout area is AMP, which incorporates not only your billing and domain information, but also many of the useful settings from cPanel. cPanel isn’t bad, either, but it’s mostly a stock build.

Hosting Types

InMotion Hosting offers a solid lineup of services, but it’s missing cloud hosting. Because of that, there isn’t as much to choose from as there is with, say, HostGator (read our HostGator review), but you should still be able to find a plan that works for you.

The bedrock is business hosting, which is the name InMotion Hosting gives to its shared plans. Shared hosting puts multiple users on a single server to, well, share the resources. The pooling effect is great for saving money, but not the best for speed or uptime. No restrictions are imposed on users, so if one website is hogging resources, you may have sluggish performance.

That’s true of any shared plan, though, and InMotion Hosting does a good job outfitting its shared plans with features. You’ll get free domain registration and data backups, as well as access to a website builder and unlimited email addresses at your domain.

InMotion Hosting includes multiple one-click installers for platforms such as WordPress, but you should buy a WordPress plan if that’s how you want to build your website. Though they’re slightly more expensive than business hosting, WordPress plans include many platform-specific features that you’d have to hunt down on your own otherwise.

A sign that you’re purchasing higher quality hosting is when things such as disk space move away from being unlimited, and such is the case with InMotion Hosting’s WordPress packages. You get some amount of dedicated resources, so though it’s likely your website is hosted on a server with others, you don’t have to worry about someone else poking around your data.

Plus, WordPress plans are managed, meaning InMotion Hosting deals with the technical aspects of the service. That includes preinstalling WordPress when you sign up, automatically backing up your website and automatically updating your website.

Outside of that, there are VPS and dedicated plans. The VPS plans come as a managed package with Linux and cPanel or as a bare-bones server that system administrators or developers can customize.

The dedicated plans are more impressive, though, mainly because InMotion Hosting lets you configure the server how you want. You can include up to 512GB of memory and 8TB of SSD storage, along with other features, such as your RAID configuration. The CPU is dictated by the tier of dedicated hosting you choose, going up to dual Intel Xeon Silver 4110s.

The only missing hosting type is cloud hosting, which spreads your website across a network of servers for redundancy and security. Unfortunately, that’s an omission we’ve seen from other independent web hosts, namely A2 Hosting.

Speed & Uptime

For testing website speed, we use Pingdom Speed Test and Load Impact. Pingdom Speed Test allows us to get into the details and see where potential problems are, while Load Impact measures how well the service performs under simulated load. We ran both tests on a blank WordPress website using InMotion Hosting’s Pro business plan.

InMotion Hosting returned decent results, but we’ve seen better (see our fastest web hosting guide). On Pingdom Speed Test, we had an average of 1.04 seconds for load time, but an overall grade of 84 out of 100. That’s likely because there doesn’t seem to be server-side caching on business plans, or, at least, nothing that can be controlled in cPanel.

Looking through the steps in the chain, everything was where it should be. DNS requests accounted for little time, as did connecting to the server. The “wait” metric, which measures how long it takes for the browser to begin receiving data, accounted for more time than usual, though.

The speed isn’t bad, but it could be improved. A2 Hosting, for example, earned a score of 96 out of 100, largely because of the multiple types of caching it uses on certain shared plans (read our A2 Hosting review).

Load Impact produced similarly disappointing results. During the five minutes we tested, Load Impact sent 50 virtual users to our website, but with a high level of variance in load times. Between the lowest and highest points, InMotion Hosting had a 300-millisecond gap, which is significant. You can see our graph below for the full results.

As for uptime, InMotion Hosting says it guarantees 99.9 percent uptime, but the terms of service says 99.999 percent, which is a significant difference. If your service falls below that threshold, InMotion Hosting will credit your account for a month’s worth of service.

That said, the way you go about getting that credit is strange. InMotion Hosting says you can contact the support team no more than one time every 30 days about physical uptime. Then, if your service falls below the threshold, you can request the credit.

That’s a strange way to do it, and we imagine a lot of people will miss the process. Thankfully, it shouldn’t be an issue. We didn’t experience downtime during testing, and with InMotion Hosting’s guarantee, it’s unlikely you will.

Security

InMotion Hosting has a solid security package. It starts with an SSL/TLS certificate, which used to be a rarity but has become more common in recent months. An SSL certificate basically shows that your website is trusted and, as such, allows users to connect to it using an encrypted connection.

Though a free SSL/TLS certificate is common, free malware protection isn’t. Across all plans, InMotion Hosting includes malware protection, which is basically an antivirus for your website (read our best antivirus software guide).

InMotion Hosting’s malware protection will scan and patch your website daily for vulnerabilities. If anything is discovered, it’ll be quarantined, too. Though not malware removal per se, quarantining threats is a solid compromise given that InMotion Hosting includes malware protection for free with every plan.

In the unlikely event your website gets infected, InMotion still has you covered. Automatic website backup is also included across all plans for free. You can backup manually, too, but InMotion Hosting will create a copy of the shared environment automatically. Restoration is free, as well, so long as you don’t restore more than once in four months.

InMotion Hosting isn’t the only host to include those security features, but it’s among the few that do so across all plans. No matter which tier of hosting you purchase, you’ll get an SSL/TLS certificate, malware protection and pseudo-removal and automated backups of your website.

Privacy

Web hosting hasn’t gotten the privacy treatment our best VPNs have until now. With so much personal information tied to your website, it’s important to stay private, especially if your website takes a risky stance on certain issues.

Your domain name, for example, has all of your personal information tied to it. WHOIS records show your name, address, photo number, email address and more, and those records are publically available online. That said, you can register your domain privately, which replaces your information with the registrar’s.

InMotion Hosting offers private domain registration, but at a price. It’ll run you around $13 per domain per year. It’s not hard to purchase — InMotion Hosting provides a link in AMP — but it still costs. DreamHost, for example, offers domain privacy for free.

InMotion Hosting’s privacy policy is solid, though. Like most web hosts, it reserves the right to share some personally identifiable information with other companies or law enforcement. Its privacy policy says it can’t sell any of that information, though.

Section 4.6 of the privacy policy says “we do not sell or rent e-mail addresses to anyone outside of the Company. The Company will also not share e-mail addresses to unrelated third-parties or affiliates.”

The next sections also says you can access, view, update and delete your personal information by emailing [email protected].

No free private domain registration is a bummer, but InMotion Hosting’s privacy policy is sound — as far as web hosts go, anyway. That said, we hope to see more web hosts follow DreamHost’s lead and include private domain registration for free.

Support

Branded on the top of InMotion Hosting’s website are links to multiple forms of support. Customer service is important to web hosting given how complex the service is, and InMotion Hosting makes no bones about how to contact its team. Email, live chat, phone and Skype support are available, with excellent team members dispersed across them.

Your reviewer spoke with InMotion Hosting prior to the launch of its WordPress service around a year ago, and the rep not only provided accurate and complete detail, but also worked to get the price as low as possible. InMotion Hosting’s sales team makes it difficult to turn down purchasing a hosting plan.

Outside of direct contact, there’s a knowledgebase and forum. InMotion Hosting’s knowledgebase is accessible from the homepage without the need to log in by clicking the “support center” tab. The knowledgebase is separated into an FAQ, product guides and tutorials, and each piece is filled with detail.

When assessing a knowledgebase for web hosting, we like to see a good mix of tutorials, setup guides and troubleshooting pieces, and InMotion Hosting doesn’t disappoint. There’s an impressive amount of educational resources, as well as general troubleshooting guides that cover many potential issues.

We couldn’t access the forum, despite the multiple prompts to log in.

Below the support center is a link to community questions, though, which functions similarly. There isn’t much community interaction, but it’s clear that InMotion Hosting is monitoring community questions. Even without community interaction, the question archive is a good reference for potential issues not answered in the knowledgebase.

The Verdict

InMotion Hosting is a solid, independent web host that could work on its speed. It’s not slow, but there are hosts with better optimization. Even so, the long list of features and multiple hosting types make it a worthy contender. Most impressive is the support team and range of security features.

WordPress support is great, too. In fact, it’s so good that InMotion Hosting is up for our best web hosting for WordPress guide. If InMotion Hosting doesn’t sound like the host for you, though, check out our other web hosting reviews.

What do you think about InMotion Hosting? Have you used it? Let us know about your experience in the comments below and, as always, thanks for reading.