InMotion Hosting Review

InMotion Hosting was started in 2001.  The main office is in Los Angeles, California.  They have another headquarter in Virginia Beach, Virginia.  They were one of the first “green” hosting companies.  InMotion is employee owned.

Here we will look at their features and price.  Next, I will check their speed.  Then, I will look at uptime.  Next, their customer support.  Lastly, I will write a summary.

InMotion Hosting Features

InMotion Hosting offers lots of plans.  They have a ton of features.  No matter if you have a big or small site, they can support you.  Now, let’s look at the plans InMotion Hosting offers.

Shared Plans

Inmotion Hosting has three shared plans.  These are called “Business” plans.  Here are more details:

• Launch. ($7.99/per month).  Supports two sites.  Unlimited bandwidth.  Unlimited Space.
• Power. ($9.99/month).  Supports six sites.  Unlimited bandwidth.  Unlimited Space.
• Pro ($15.99/month).  Supports unlimited sites.  Unlimited bandwidth.  Unlimited Space.

Shared plans prices are on par with other hosts.  I have worked out a deal.  I can get you the Launch for $3.99/month.  Power plan for $5.99/month.  The Pro for $13.99/month.  Click here to get that special discount.

Resource Usage

They monitor their servers for high resource usage.  I asked Kenneth B. about this on live chat.  He told me this.

Those limits are constantly changing in a shared hosting environment.  They are not hard set.  So, I cannot provide the exact specifics.  Currently issues vary between users. Most shared customers that do upgrade do so because they require dedicated resources.  They no longer want a shared hosting environment. They want to improve their sites speed and responsiveness.

VPS Plans

InMotion does offer 3 VPS plans.  Here are the details:

• VPS-1000HA-S.  $29.99/month.  4 GB RAM.  60 GB disk space.  2 TB bandwidth.
• VPS-2000HA-S.  $49.99/month.  6 GB RAM.  130 GB disk space.  3 TB bandwidth.
• VPS-3000HA-S.  $74.99/month.  8 GB RAM.  200 GB disk space.  4 TB bandwidth.

cPanel does come free with each plan.  The hard drives are SSD.  Access your resource usage through their dashboard.  Free backups.  Unrestricted CPU core usage. 

Prices are right on par with GreenGeeks.

Reseller Plans

InMotion offers three reseller plans.  Here are the details:

• R-1000S.  $13.99/month.  80 GB disk space.  800/month GB bandwidth.
• R-1000S.  $19.99/month.  120 GB disk space.  1,200/month GB bandwidth.
• R-1000S.  $27.49/month.  160 GB disk space.  1,600 GB/month bandwidth.

Also, Inmotion gives you lots of reseller features.

• WHMCS.
• SSD Hard drives.
• Free eNome License.
• cPanel.
• Auto Installer (310+ Applications).
• Free Backups.
• White Labeling Branding.
• IMAP, POP, SMTP.
• Multi-Layer Defense.

Dedicated Plans

InMotion offers six dedicated Plans.

• Essentials.  $99.99/month.  1 TB 7.2K HDD.  8 GB RAM.  6 TB data transfer.  5 IP’s.
• Advanced.  $159.99/month.  2 TB 7.2K HDD or 250 GB SSD.  16 GB RAM.  6 TB data transfer.  10 IP’s.
• Elite.  $229.99/month.  2 2 TB 7.2K HDD pr 2 250 GB SSD.  32 GB RAM.  6 TB data transfer.  15 IP’s.

Picking Your Servers Location

Select your servers location.  All InMotion plans allow you to select your servers location.  Called “Max Speed Zone Enabled.”  They have two data centers in the United States.  One in Los Angeles.  One is Washington, DC.  This can help your website’s loading time because your server is closer.

Free Transfers

Moving sites over from host to host is a hassle.  They have a team that is experts in site migrations.  InMotion does do free transfers.  

cPanel

InMotion does use cPanel.  It is easy to use.  A lot of site owners prefer cPanel over an in-house control panel.  You can setup webmail, email settings, FTP login, DNS, logs, domains, and subdomains.  It is easy to install scripts with Softaculous like:

• WordPress.
• AbanteCart.
• PrestaShop.
• Joomla.
• phpBB.
• SMF.
• WHMCS.
• MyBB.
• Dolphin.
• Open Real Estate.
• YetiForce.
• CubeCart.

WordPress Theme

InMotion has developed a WordPress theme.  The name of the theme is BoldGrid.  See BoldGrid review.  The theme is easy to use. Even new site owners can use it.  The learning curve is little.  Do not have to know any HTML or coding to use it.   

Domain Names

InMotion does give you a free domain name.  Need to have a 12 or 24-month contract.  Domains are on the high end.  If you buy them with InMotion, they are $14.99/year.  Domain privacy is $9.99/year.  Cost $24.98/year.  I use NameCheap because they are cheaper than InMotion.

Money-Back Guarantee

InMotion does have a money-back guarantee.  It is for 90 days and after that it’s pro-rated.  Other companies like SiteGround (30 days).  1and1 (30 days).  And Fatcow (30 days) have much lower guarantees.  However, their dedicated plans are only for 30 days.

InMotion Uptime & Performance

Uptime

Uptime is solid with InMotion. Have a status update page on their site.  This shows the status of their servers. Problems can be seen here.

Research shows InMotion has high uptime. Various sites monitored their uptime. HostingFacts.com reported 99.96% uptime. Uptime has been tracked for over 12 months. HostBenchMarker.com has stated their average uptime is 99.96%. BestHostRatings.com has tracked them for 11 years. InMotion averages 99.906 % uptime.

Performance

InMotion does use SSD hard drives. These are 20X faster than standard hard drives. The industry has been moving this way for years. They do let you pick your servers locations. I pointed this out with “Max Speed Zone Enabled.” Their data centers are in the United States. Server locations are on either the west or each coast.

Speed is great. Research shows InMotion’s infrastructure is reliable. They have teamed with lots of ISPs and use peering exchanges to create fast connections.  Shivarweb.com shows that TTFB (time to first byte) was .694. They state that InMotion is one of the faster hosts. Hosting facts shows that average loading times were 525ms. They are 37% than other hosts. Other hosting review sites like WhoIsHostingThis.com and WebHostingGeeks.com state that speed is fast.

InMotion Customer Support

There are lots of ways to contact InMotion. 24/7 support always around. Live chat, telephone support, and support tickets are ways to get in touch. Support is in the United States.

InMotion Hosting Review Summary

Do I recommend them? Yes! InMotion Hosting is employee owned, and have an industry leading money-back guarantee. Their prices are fair and lots of features come with their plans. Since its opening in 2001, InMotion Hosting has been a leader in business class web hosting for both small and medium sized businesses. When you compare pricing among other web hosting companies, you’ll find that InMotion Hosting is quite competitive for its shared hosting services especially considering their high level of reliability, speed and performance.

InMotion Hosting research.

InMotion Awards

InMotion has built quite the resume over the years.  Their experts average four years of professional hosting experience.  All their techs go through rigorous training.  They have at least 160 hours of internal training on LAMP stack, email clients, CentOS, etc.

They have strong partnerships with Google, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Dell, Intel, Cisco, cPanel, CentOS, GTT, Level(3), and Parallels.  Over the years they have acquired nearly 100 awards from various sites.  Some of the awards they won were best customer service.  Best business hosting.  Most reliable.  Best dedicated hosting.  Best VPS hosting. Top uptime.

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WhoisHostingThis.com Reviews

WhoisHostingThis.com is a hosting site.  It is like tbwhs.com  They have more InMotion Web Hosting reviews.   There are 500+ reviews.

Site owners are happy with InMotion.  Overall score is a 4.1 out of 5. 

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Pcmag.com

PCmag.com published an article by Molly McLaughlin.  Lots of info on technology is on this site.  Tested out Inmotion.  She wrote about her experience.     

Tells about the plans InMotion offers.  Molly writes about InMotion’s shared, VPS, and dedicated plans.   InMotion does offer a reseller plan.  Doesn’t mention that in her article.  She did decide to sign up with the “Launch” plan.  There is no option to pay monthly.   Molly paid $67.12 for a year of service.

She set up a blog with InMotion.  Tested out their website builder.  She felt it was basic.  It came with a welcome packet, though.  It was very informative and gave clear instructions.  She did prefer them over other companies like iPower, Netfirms, and JustHost.

Molly dad questions for customer support.  To activate your account, you need to talk with InMotion.  The wait time was 1 minute.  The agent was very helpful.  She emailed all the documents that Molly needed to get started.

When Molly wanted to install the Premium Web Builder she did have to contact support.  At first, she was a little “put off” by the support.  They couldn’t resolve her problem.  Later fixed her problem in a matter of hours.  She states that customer support is “excellent.”

Here are the pros and cons.

InMotion Hosting Pros  

• Customer support is top-notch. 
• There are lots of web building tools. 
• Very easy to import your WordPress based sites. 
• They offer unlimited email. 
• There is a 90-day money back guarantee.

InMotion Hosting Cons

• Basic web builder creates “dated” looking websites. 
• You do need to create a separate login for all the add-ons. 

She does recommend InMotion and rates them four out 5.  Molly states that hey are “excellent.”   She does recommend them rather than other hosts.

Yelp.com

InMotion Hosting has rated 1.3 stars out of 5.  There are over 100 InMotion web hosting reviews.  People complain about:

• Downtime.
• InMotion does shut down servers once they reach storage quota.
• Billing issues.
• Asking to upgrade to a higher plan.
• Email issues.
• Data was lost.
• Site hacks.