INMOTION HOSTING

Inmotion Hosting review – 2021

As one of the older and more established names in the industry, InMotion also boasts grandiose claims of being #1 in transfers, support, and industry guarantee. The thing is, many times the largest companies are the worst offenders. Resting on their brand recognition or flashy ad campaigns while neglecting the things that made them successful in the first place. Are they keeping up the quality which made them successful in the first place?

InMotion undoubtedly performs well on three big areas of uptime, speed, and support. They also provide a few additional features which can make your experience more enjoyable.

Important Features, in a nutshell

• Free data backups: Backups are available on most other shared hosts, but you have to do them manually, or pay extra; they’re free and automatic with any of these plans.
• Free website transfer: While there are some conditions, InMotion Hosting’s support will transfer up to 3 websites from other hosts for you for free.
• 90-day money back guarantees: That’s about the longest trial you’ll ever find.
• Free SSL: Many hosts still charge significant fees to add SSL to your sites; it’s free on all shared hosting plans.
• Free domain name: A nice little bonus. it’s also cheaper when you need to renew it than on most other hosts that offer domain registering.

Let’s dig a little deeper and into more detail.

Average Uptime of 99.94%

Straight off the blocks, InMotion’s uptime clocked in at 99.938% (0.002% worse than the industry average of 99.94%). Shocking that these days that rating just about gets them a rating of average. This is mostly due to some major downtime in early 2018, which has affected the average but they have recovered and put an incredible average of 99.97% in the last 7 months, and that bumps them up the ladder.

Last 10-month’s average uptime:

• March 2018 average uptime: 99.99%
• April 2018 average uptime: 99.68%
• May 2018 average uptime: 99.91%
• June 2018 average uptime: 99.96%
• July 2018 average uptime: 99.99%
• August 2018 average uptime: 99.97%
• September 2018 average uptime: 99.93%
• October 2018 average uptime: 99.98%
• November 2018 average uptime: 99.98%
• December 2018 average uptime: 99.99%

Fast Server Speed

Loading speed is an important factor in Google’s algorithm for dictating where in the rankings you’ll show up (SEO). So you do want a fast loading service especially as how fast your page loads can be one of the biggest impacts on your bottom line. As you know, it is widely accepted that anything over 3 seconds means the user is likely to go elsewhere.

InMotion uses Solid-state drives (SSDs), which are about 20 times faster than standard HDDs for certain operations. In terms of hosting, SSD drives help servers to handle requests faster and more reliably than standard HDD. They particularly help under high visitor loads. All plans, even the cheapest shared business hosting plans, incorporate SSDs.

InMotion followed their strong uptime performance with an average page loading times of 808ms. In other words, 10% faster than the competition’s average of 890ms. This is not bad at all and we are certain it will continue to improve over the coming months.

Last 10-month’s average load time:

• March 2018 average speed: 617ms
• April 2018 average speed: 829ms
• May 2018 average speed: 1,088ms
• June 2018 average speed: 779ms
• July 2018 average speed: 656ms
• August 2018 average speed: 631ms
• September 2018 average speed: 669ms
• October 2018 average speed: 970ms
• November 2018 average speed: 901ms
• December 2018 average speed: 944ms

Customer Support

Testing InMotion Hosting customer support was pleasantly surprising. We presented the customer service representative with 3 simple but telling queries designed to gauge their product knowledge and general efficacy. Within 2 minutes of submitting my ticket, I was connected with a live agent who quickly and professionally answered all of my questions.

While I’m compelled to mention that their account activation is not instant when you are using InMotion outside the U.S., my overall experience with their customer support team was surprisingly pleasant.

90-Days Money Back Guarantee

InMotion’s money-back guarantee goes well beyond the standard 30-day most hosts provide. This is great because they are so confident in their service, that they are willing to back it up with a whopping 90 days business, VPS and reseller hosting plans.
Bear in mind though that for shared hosting options, they only offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Shared Hosting for Your Business

Without a doubt, shared hosting is the most popular type of hosting for small businesses. You share a server’s resources with other customers and split the price. Since most small businesses have small and relatively simple sites, they don’t need the full resources of a server themselves. InMotion Hosting offers three shared hosting plans, under their business hosting section. The highest-tier plan, the pro-business plan, comes with the most resources and features of the trio.

The biggest plus of these shared hosting plans is that you benefit from InMotion Hosting’s other hosting services. They have invested a lot of money into creating servers and services to attract customers. You may not need managed dedicated servers, but you still get to benefit from some of that technology, even on these shared plans.

Shared Hosting: Their shared hosting, also stated as “business hosting,” comes with three plans:

• Launch plan: This plan supports 2 websites, 2 MySQL databases, 6 parked domains, and 25 subdomains.
• Power plan: This plan supports 6 websites, 50 MySQL databases, 26 parked domains, and 100 subdomains.
• Pro plan: This plan supports unlimited websites, unlimited MySQL databases, unlimited parked domains, and unlimited subdomains.
All shared hosting plans come with unlimited storage and bandwidth and are backed up by their generous 90-day money-back guarantee.
WordPress Hosting: Their WordPress hosting plan is similar to their shared hosting plans in every way, but it is fine-tuned for WordPress.
• Free Domain: Yes!
• Ease of Signup: Four-step signup process. A bit lengthy. Don’t forget about the security verification too.
• Payment Methods: Credit Card, Check, Purchase Order.
• Hidden Fees and Clauses: There’s a limit of 50,000 files per account for users.
• Upsells: A few upsells.
• Account Activation: Account activation can take a while. Usually, they verify orders by phone before activating accounts.
• Control Panel and Dashboard Experience: cPanel.
• Installation of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): Softaculous for one-click install of popular apps and CMSs.

There’s one aspect of these plans that are worth noting. These plans come with “unlimited” disk space and bandwidth. However, that doesn’t mean you truly get unlimited resources. What it really means is that you get unlimited resources as long as your sites don’t affect the performance of other sites on the shared server. If you find yourself in this conundrum, then it is time to upgrade your service to a more suitable fit, and InMotion has plenty of options for you and your business to keep growing.

Pros and Cons of Unlimited Resources

The good part of this is that InMotion Hosting cares about how customers are using their shared accounts. They won’t let other customers affect your sites if at all possible.

The bad part is that your site can run slower than expected at certain busy times of the day. If you’re using too many resources, it will affect the loading speed of your site and may cause it to not load at all in some cases. If this happens to you, you’ll have to upgrade to a more expensive plan. There is no way around it, you would have outgrown the service and its purpose.

Integrations WordPress & Apps

When InMotion claims that they are a leader in supporting Open Source projects, well, they back that up with a portfolio of over 310 applications. Just a handful of them. You can find everything from popular content management systems like WordPress and Drupal to shopping carts or eCommerce systems like Prestashop and Magento. Hard to make a complaint in this section.

For those using WordPress as their platform, InMotion provides some interesting features that are tailored specifically towards WordPress users. You can get access to a library of premium themes and plugins at no extra cost (built into the plan cost). They offer BoldGrid and other premium plugins. On top of that, you get a specifically configured NGINX server optimized for WordPress performance.

 

To make their offering even more appealing, they provide you with a proprietary cache manager tool that they created in order to speed up WordPress site performance. These features go a long way to minimizing those negative aspects of WordPress that made everyone think it is a slow platform.

Premium Sucuri Plugin for WordPress Users

InMotion’s WordPress hosting comes with the Sucuri security plugin that regularly scans your sites for exploits and security risks, in addition to ongoing remote backups, anti-spam, and anti-virus protection. InMotion provides 6 different hosting packages to choose from varying in storage and number of websites.

Super Secure Smartwall Threat Defense System (TDS)

InMotion Hosting spares no expense to ensure the security of their user’s private information. The recent Equifax security breaches illustrate just how immediate and dangerous cyber terrorism really is. With the continual rise of brute force, Dos, and DDoS attacks, it is now more important than ever that every website has good and strong security protocols provided by their web hosting provider.

They offer a unique security measure called the Smartwall Threat Defense System or TDS. This is following a partnership with Corero Network Security. Corero’s TDS is a family of DDoS protection tools that detect, mitigate, and eliminate DDoS attacks in real-time. This is a pretty bold and impressive, and very efficient array of technical solutions. Corero’s TDS delivers the following to all customers:

• The SmartWall is a slimline DDoS protection appliance that delivers 10Gbps full-duplex or 20Gbps unidirectional performance in a ¼ wide, 1 RU form factor.
• 1 RU delivers up to 80Gbps, and 4 RU delivers up to 320Gbps.

We believe that the TDS (Threat Defence System) employed by InMotion Hosting and Corero is among the most impressive there is. It does go a long way to help you sleep with peace of mind knowing that you and your website are protected from even the most aggressive brute force and DDoS attacks.

Free Site Transfer

As other web hosts, InMotion Hosting offers to transfer your site for free from your current host. The not so good news is that they DO NOT promise zero downtime during the migration process (which other hosts regularly guarantee). For some, this might be ok and for others a price too high to pay. However long that time might/could be if at all, it shouldn’t be that long.

Great for E-commerce Support

eCommerce experience will be better than you have experienced before as they provide easy integrations with a range of payment gateways, helping you in every step of the way in an otherwise huge pain in the… neck. They are one of the few web hosts that we know of with active partnerships between Prestashop and other eCommerce services (SiteGround is also another one). This is quite handy as it alleviates a lot of headaches.

Free Data Backups

InMotion hosting is different (some might say unique) than most other hosts in the sense that they will regularly create a backup of your account (up to 10GB) as well as providing you with an easy-to-use tool to manually backup your site if that is what you choose to do.

A lot of other web hosts charge for doing backups for you and/ or they mask these chargeable services within obscure and hidden T&C clauses. InMotion is quite transparent about this and they just do it for you, which is a nice reassurance.

Google Apps Integration

Last but not least, InMotion also provides a handy little three-step wizard for connecting with Google Apps.
Some web hosts (GoDaddy comes to mind) force you to pay for their subpar email clients. While setting up a Google App integration to use your new domain with Gmail, Google Docs, Drive, and more isn’t exactly brain surgery, it can be a frustrating process if you’ve never edited MX records before.

Things we would like InMotion Hosting to improve on

To be frank, the service, in general, is pretty good with few flaws that stand out. Of course, there’s always gonna be a few drawbacks to providing good uptime or excellent customer service. Here are InMotion’s:

Low Advertised Pricing ONLY for 24 Month Signup.

You would think that InMotion’s pricing currently looks on par with much of the competition. Unfortunately, the only way you can get these low advertised rates is by signing up for 24 months. If you’d prefer a shorter timeline (like 12 months), that cost rises a little bit.

This is, however, a very common trick employed by many (if not most) web hosts, making the “too good to be true” price actually too good to be true. We wish they were transparent with this from the moment you land on the pricing page and not hide it for when you are in the purchasing stages.

Delayed Verification Process

You’ll be required, as all new customers are, to be verified by phone for security purposes. That means you don’t get instant account access after signup for many, especially if you are based outside the U.S. In some rare cases, they might even ask for a picture of your ID card. Their safety-first approach is commendable but it might turn off some potential customers, especially those outside the USA.

However, this is a one-off measure and you should be up and running in no time. Providing you don’t have a massive urgency to get your site up (if you follow proper planning you shouldn’t as you would have accounted for cushion days) then this is only a slight delay.

Some Plan Limitations

On the other hand, InMotion does make out for this by providing free backups and site restoration. Very useful! However, there are limitations to these services. For example, any sites exceeding 10BG won’t be backed up. And you can only restore files once every four months for the sites that do get backed up. If you need something more frequent, there’s a $49 fee. Fair point. You can’t just be asking and asking and expect it all for free.

InMotion Review Conclusion: Do We Recommend it?

We appreciate the scalability. If you work with sites of different sizes, or growing sites, you know that you can always find an appropriate plan for them on InMotion Hosting. Overall, we think InMotion Hosting offers a great amount of value for the cost of their plans.

The support you get is about as good as anybody else’s, and you don’t pay any extra for it. It’s reassuring that if you run into an issue, there will always be a guide or way to contact support immediately for help.

If you are still unsure, why not check our alternative options for web hosting companies? Full reviews available.