In this InMotion Hosting review, I will closely examine the provider and its pricing, performance, features, customer support, and more. My goal is to find out all the good and not-so-great stuff every user should know before choosing (or skipping on) InMotion Hosting.
InMotion Hosting is an established provider counting 20 years of service. However, it’s not one of the hosts that you’d often see heavily marketed on YouTube or other advertisement channels. That doesn’t mean it’s out of business though.
In the last year, I’ve noticed quite a few changes happening with InMotion Hosting. It introduced a new look to its website, changed some of its plans, and perhaps even branched out to the new audiences.
You see, InMotion Hosting was always more of an enterprise solution with many VPS and dedicated hosting options. It wasn’t cheap, but people chose it for reliability. Own-operated data centers are definitely what keep this provider in demand.
Specs
Price: Prices start at $2.29/month
Uptime: 99.98%
Hosting types: Shared, managed WordPress, VPS, reseller, and dedicated
Server locations: US (East and West coast)
Support: 24/7 live chat, email, ticket, phone support, and Skype
Pros
- Fast page loading time
- Very stable and reliable host
- 90-day money-back guarantee
- BoldGrid website builder for WordPress
Cons
- Servers are located in the US only
- Higher than average prices
- Automated backups are an extra charge
InMotion Hosting pricing
InMotion Hosting prices start at a very affordable $2.29/month for the cheapest shared hosting option. It also has WordPress plans, VPS, reseller hosting, and dedicated servers.
While InMotion Hosting has many types of hosting to offer, the most popular InMotion’s web hosting service remains shared hosting – especially the Core plan. Core is what makes InMotion competitive against brands like DreamHost or Bluehost. Without Core, InMotion Hosting would be slightly more premium-priced, like SiteGround or A2 Hosting.
Regardless, all InMotion Hosting has 4 shared plans that all come with a free SSL certificate, security suite, free email accounts, and unlimited bandwidth. All plans apart from Lite also include a free domain registration too.
Plan
Features
Price
Core
2 website, 100 GB SSD storage, and 10 email address.
Free domain, caching, unlimited disk space, websites, and email accounts.
$4.99/month
Pro
Free domain, caching, unlimited NVMe SSD storage, websites, and email accounts. Additionally, it includes an SLA uptime guarantee of 99.99%.
$12.99/month
Overall, InMotion Hosting offers very generous hosting packages. Yet, there are a few extras you’ll have to take care of, like purchasing a domain for the Core plan or paying extra for automated backup. So, while it offers a good amount of resources for a reasonable price, not all plans hold the same value.
As an example, the Core plan is targeted towards beginners starting a personal blog or portfolio, while Pro plan is meant to support larger sites or even eCommerce websites.
That leaves 2 other options: Launch and Power.
Now if you’re looking to run few small of a single medium-sized website, Launch is the one to consider. Both Launch and Power come at the same price and bring very similar resources to the table. However, be aware that the renewal price with Power is much higher.
Best Value
If you’re looking for the best value, consider the Launch plan. With a 3-year subscription, the monthly rate will come up to only $4.99/mo for the first 36 months.
Lastly, you’ll have 90-days to get your money back, which is a pretty long period when compared to the average 30-day money-back standard. Be aware, that the domain is not compensated unless canceled within 60 hours after the purchase.
All in all, InMotion Hosting prices are not the lowest in the market. However, it does offer quite good features for the price you pay. And it still is cheaper than some of its competitors that offer similar shared hosting plans to small businesses.
Hosting management – is it easy to use?
When it comes to ease of use, InMotion Hosting is great. It uses a combination of native Account Management Panel (AMP) and cPanel to make the user experience easier. However, these two sometimes may seem like they contradict each other. Moreso, for a better experience, a couple of UX choices could be improved.
Regardless, both control panels are well structured and easy to use. Just keep in mind, even if they look similar, they’re not entirely the same.
Now, every time you log into your account, you’ll be directed to the native AMP. This is what it looks like:
What does it remind me of?
You might have guessed that InMotion Hosting’s native AMP looks quite similar to cPanel. But this is not cPanel just yet, you can reach it by clicking that orange “cPanel” button:
As you can see, InMotion has put a custom skin on cPanel so it blends into the interface seamlessly. But this is exactly where the UX issues come into play.
AMP is supposed to be used for Account management. Usually, that’s things like billing, domains, account details, and so on.
However, InMotion Hosting decided to introduce a couple of Hosting management features in the AMP. So not only can you conveniently reach cPanel from it but also find some of the cPanel modules like Softaculous, Email, or SSL management.
You’d say convenient? It might be so, but some of the things that you’d normally go to cPanel for are now only available from the AMP. That threw me off when I wanted to activate my SSL.
Normally, SSLs are activated through cPanel automatically. But mine happened to be “self-signed”. So I was searching through cPanel but couldn’t find any SSL-related settings.
When I contacted the support, they redirected me to the AMP, as that’s where their SSLs tools were located. I had no issues activating it from there on.
In any case, a couple of UX glitches will not make InMotion Hosting much less intuitive. cPanel is still a standard control panel model in the hosting industry, and it really makes stuff like installing WordPress or creating an email account easy.
Talking of which…
Installing WordPress with InMotion Hosting
InMotion Hosting uses the standard Softaculous app installer for any installation, including WordPress. It’s really easy to use, no matter if it’s your first time or you’ve created countless websites before.
In any case, you’ll need to find the “Softaculous” icon. You can do that either in the AMP or in the cPanel. Alternatively, you can just click on the “WordPress” icon in the cPanel under the Top Applications section as well.
In all cases, you’ll end up in the Softaculous interface where you can choose to install WordPress or any other app that your website needs.
For the installation, you’ll need to create yourself a username, password and think of a website title. No worries, you can change all these later if needed.
After clicking the “Install” button, the software will do everything for you. It should take no more than a couple of minutes.
By the way, you can now reach your WordPress management panel either by going to yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ or in the Softaculous management area.
Adding a professional email with InMotion Hosting
Just like with the WordPress installation, setting up an email account is very straightforward. All you have to do is follow the prompts. However, set your expectations low because its email clients are pretty basic and archaic.
First things first, head to the cPanel and find the Email section and click on “Email Accounts.”
In there, simply click on “Create” and you’ll need to fill out some information. That is – create a mailbox name, password, and configure some settings if you’d like.
Once done, you’ll be able to reach your account through the same “Email Accounts” icon.
As for the webmail client choices… It’s RoundCube and Horde – both open-source. In this case I chose to go with RoundCube as it is a little bit better looking.
In any case, these two are very much outdated. Also, your email will be hosted on the same serveras your website. This means sharing the resources (and reputation) with other users on the server. That could translate into poor deliverability and quick use of your website’s resources. More so, if your neighbors are using their email for spam purposes, you could get blocked for spamming too.
So is InMotion Hosting email service any good? It is, if you’re looking to collect and answer contact form submissions or use it for casual emailing. But if you’re planning big email campaigns – look for paid options outside your server.
WordPress website builder aka BoldGrid
One great benefit I’ve found while preparing this InMotion Hosting review is that you get to use BoldGrid website builder. BoldGrid is a set of WordPress plugins that turn the content management system into a visual website builder. This makes WordPress so much easier to use if you want to give it that custom look.
I am super positive about BoldGrid, as I’ve used it before. And liked it too. Here are some of the best aspects to it:
The choice of templates is good + they are responsive.
The templates are not set in stone and can be customized easily.
There’s an array of tools to easily create good-looking pages, posts, and design elements.
Best of all, it’s easy to get used to. In very little time you’ll manage to create a professional-looking website. And I’m not sugar-coating it. All the tools seem to be designed with beginners in mind.
When you first start using it, you can select a template that looks best for you.
Don’t get too fussed about the category. You can fully customize each design so that’s more about the layouts than the images.
Once you activate the template, it will import your chosen pages with their layouts and demo content. You can use it as a foundation.
I found this to be the easiest and quickest way – simply replacing the demo content with your own into the pre-organized layout. But that’s definitely not the limit to BoldGrid. You can also drag-and-drop each element around to create your unique design. That takes more time but the result will be much more personalized.
You can do all this directly on the page or a post that you want to edit.
There are also additional plugins like “Post and Page Builder” where you can create completely unique designs.
Overall, BoldGrid proves to be a pretty helpful and flexible tool. Especially for those who want to quickly get a professional site up or those who are new to web development.
All in all, InMotion Hosting is very straightforward. Managing the website and doing day-to-day tasks is easy. Even though InMotion has a couple of glitches, those are not deal breakers and with the help of support or intuition can be resolved quickly. Plus, BoldGrid is very easy to use, even for beginners.
InMotion Hosting for business
InMotion is well known as a business-oriented hosting provider. If shared hosting solutions are not enough, the provider comes forward with resource-rich and powerful VPS and dedicated hosting plans.
VPS hosting
If your website has outgrown the shared hosting phase, a slightly more advanced VPS is the next best step. InMotion Hosting offers both managed and unmanaged VPS options with the latter being as cheap as $5/mo. However, a much more popular and easier managed option is managed with prices starting at $19.99/mo.
Managed VPS means that you get perks such as server management, cPanel, free data and website migration options, and a free server or website setup already included in your plans.
All InMotion’s plans include such hosting features as free SSL certificate, unlimited sites, a dedicated IP, free website transfers, cPanel, Web Host Master, security configurations, and server setup.
Now the actual resources vary between 2 to 8 CPU, 2 to 8GB RAM, 45 to 140GB SSD storage, and 4 to 7TB bandwidth. Not a bad offer knowing that all the resources are dedicated just to you.
One more thing to note, since VPS packs more power than shared hosting, it’s only natural that the performance is noticeably better too. After testing InMotion’s VPS hosting plan for more than 2 weeks, my site kept a perfect 100% uptime and demonstrated a speedy average response time of 585ms. On an empty server! So just imagine how fast it can get with a few optimizations in place.
All in all, InMotion Hosting’s VPS plans are very powerful, easily manageable, and resource-rich. They surely land InMotion a place among the best VPS hosting providers. If you’re looking to run an online shop or a bigger site with medium-to-large traffic, this solution gives almost dedicated server level resources for less.
Dedicated hosting
If both shared and VPS hosting solutions are just not cutting, InMotion also offers dedicated server hosting options.
A private server is often needed if you have a big corporate website with high levels of traffic. By renting the whole server, you get dedicated resources and increased security as you are the only user on the given hardware.
You can choose either managed ($139.99/mo) or unmanaged ($99.99/mo) dedicated server hosting. This entirely depends on your preferences and the level of experience. One more thing to keep in mind, there are no increased renewal rates for dedicated hosting.
Naturally, managed and unmanaged plans come with different levels of responsibilities. Managed solution guarantees that InMotion will take care of your server’s security and automated updates, as well as provide you with a control panel. However, unmanaged means you are responsible for all your private-server-related matters.
Despite all that, both solutions come with resources that vary from 4 to 24 cores, 1 SSD to 2TB NVMe SSD storage, 16 to 192 GB RAM, and 15 to 20TB bandwidth. Some of the best dedicated server hosting offerings out there, especially the generous disk space.
Since you get a whole server to yourself, your site’s performance will be much better than with shared hosting too. In almost a month’s time of monitoring, my site on InMotion Hosting’s dedicated server plan has shown 99.93% uptime and a very fast average response time of 414ms. And keep in mind, This can be further optimized to perform even faster.
Overall, the provider has a large variety of dedicated hosting options. The prices are reasonable and the solutions are very powerful and packed with resources.
As a whole, InMotion Hosting’s focus on businesses is clearly visible. The host offers powerful VPS and dedicated hosting options for pretty reasonable prices. Especially for the resources it gives in return.
Performance – is InMotion Hosting fast?
InMotion Hosting has always focused on business users promising them exceptional performance. To find out if that’s true, I ran extensive tests. Provider managed to prove to be both reliable and fast. It also easily handled pretty intense traffic on the site. InMotion’s shared plans seem to be pretty powerful and are best fit for popular blogs or small-to-medium business websites.
InMotion Hosting uptime and response time
At the time of writing this article, I have been monitoring InMotion Hosting for almost two months. During this time it had 3 outages which, in total, resulted in 16 minutes of downtime. That’s still a 99.98% uptime. Meanwhile, the average response time came up to 759ms, which, if you’d ask me, leaves some room for improvement.
Quite a few numbers to analyze, so what do they mean?
First of all, InMotion Hosting promises 99.9% uptime, which is the standard that most hosting companies offer. What you actually get, though, is much better. The 99.9% means your website is expected to be down for 43m 49s monthly. However, InMotion Hosting outperforms that with an expected monthly downtime of just 8m.
Talking about the response time, the average time among shared hosting providers is around 600ms. So while InMotion result is good, it’s a bit behind other highly performance-focused providers like Hostinger or SiteGround.
Overall, InMotion Hosting demonstrated great results in terms of reliability. There were almost no outages, and performance remained highly stable throughout the examination period. Although the response time wasn’t anything to go crazy over.
Next, let’s examine the website’s loading speed.
InMotion Hosting speed
My website is hosted in the US data center, so the best results are expected in the US – with the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) at only 425ms. To be honest, InMotion easily makes it among the fastest web hosting providers. In terms of LCP increase in other locations, well that’s absolutely expected. The further we go from the server location, the longer it’ll take for the website to load.
But why did I emphasize LCP so much?
Google has started using measures such as LCP when ranking web pages. Initially meaning your site has a better chance of appearing higher on the search results page if the number is low. As long as you keep in under 2.5s, you’ll be just fine.
You can tell InMotion Hosting stole the show with the lowest time being at 425ms. Even in India, the site manages to load fast enough to fit within Google’s standards.
Good To Know
InMotion Hosting is a green web hosting provider that runs green data centers exclusively in the US. The only variety you get is that the server can be located on the West or the East coast. Therefore, this provider is a great choice if your target audience is in the US too.
So far, so good, right? I wonder, will the results remain similarly good, if I’ll reexamine my site now as a fully built one?
The LCP did increase, however, only slightly. Now LCP load time is 663ms.
This leaves a lot of wiggle space, so you don’t have to worry about trying to squeeze into Google’s recommendations.
Also, keep in mind, your site visitors are the ones you should think about even more. Your visitors are most likely to have a good experience if the site’s loading time is under 3s. If we take that into account, this site perfectly fits into the fast website category, with Fully Loaded Time being just 0.8s.
InMotion Hosting stress testing
Okay, numbers upon numbers, but it’s not the end just yet. Let’s jump to the fun side of things with one more test to go. This might be just the most important test of them all.
Alright, and the drumroll please… we will see if InMotion Hosting can handle some traffic.
To begin with, I’ve sent 50 visitors to my website. Let me just clarify – that’s a big number. Having 50 visitors on your website every minute at all times could result in 10s of thousands of monthly visitors. Very much in demand, if you will.
And the drumroll intensifies… it seems like InMotion didn’t even bat an eye. As you can see, the increase of visitors on the site (grey line) had little to no impact on the site’s response time (blue line). Turns out this much traffic was a piece of cake for InMotion to handle, and it passed the test with flying colors.
50 visitors or 1 visitor – there seems to be almost no difference.
In the end, InMotion will be able to remain fast even if your website will get a big traffic spike.
All things considered, InMotion Hosting performance is reliable and fast with enough power to support small-to-medium websites. The website won’t have any issues regarding outages and the speed you’ll get will definitely help to keep your website competitive and pleasant to use.
Is InMotion Hosting secure?
When it comes to safety, InMotion has taken numerous steps to make the website as secure as possible. It includes a “Security Suite” in all of its plans. The suite comes with free SSL, Hack & Malware Protection, and DDoS Protection. Automatic backups, unfortunately, cost an extra.
You can find all the security-related tools in the cPanel Security section.
Now, let’s analyze the security suite and what it does:
Free SSL is essential and most web hosting providers give it for free now. Nothing special here.It encrypts all visitor-server communication so no third party can access sensitive data. It also gives your website that security lock by the domain name.
InMotion’s Hack and & Malware protection cannot be seen from cPanel. It’s an internal server security measure that we have no control over, therefore we have to take the provider’s word for it.
The ModSecurity module can be enabled and disabled from the cPanel. It’s a web application firewall that filters the traffic, as well as detects and prevents malicious attacks on your website. It’s pretty much a standard to have it activated.
DDoS protection is provided by Corero, which cannot be found in the cPanel. However, it is a real-time automatic DDoS attack protection that detects and prevents your server from being overwhelmed by the number of malicious requests. It is automatically activated and always on. You don’t have to do anything to enable it yourself.
While InMotion Hosting does not emphasize it, Two-Factor authentication is also available in cPanel, and I highly recommend using it. It will protect your hosting account from being hacked by adding a second layer of security – a code that’s only available to you. Logging in with just a password is not enough anymore.
InMotion has Automatic Backups available. However, this feature is for an extra charge of $24 per year. So if you’d like to have your site backed up and secure in case of a malfunction or a bug, this will be an additional cost to consider.
In Motion Hosting has all the basic tools needed to run a secure website. However, quite useful features like website backups are for an extra charge, which is slightly disappointing. Overall, InMotion is not the strongest in the field in regard to security, but what it offers is quite enough to guarantee protection from the most common threats.
Will InMotion Hosting support help me?
InMotion Hosting offers quite a few customer support options. This includes 24/7 live chat, email, ticket, phone support, and even Skype. Besides that, the provider has a huge collection of articles in its knowledge base and blog. Plus, there’s a rather active community forum too.
For this InMotion Hosting review, I have contacted live chat a couple of times. The responses were almost always immediate. Which is great. On the other hand, once already connected to the agent, there can be some wait times in between the answers.
The first time I used live chat was to contact the sales team before making my purchase, and ask if my choice of plan was okay for what I have envisioned for my website. I now regret this decision to the max. The chat itself went okay, nothing unusual. I got a follow up email and that’s the end of it.
Not quite. The emails just kept coming.
You see, I provided my personal email in the chat box. And because I did not continue to purchase the plan through the agent, he started bombarding me with emails.
Special discount for this. Personal offer for that… And there’s no unsubscribe button.
I get it, the agent gets a commission for a sale. But annoying emails several times a month will only get you in my junk folder.
So let this be a warning for you. If you need sales advice, use a fake email.
Contacting the tech support was an entirely different story though.
The tech support agent I talked to was very nice and eventually got my problem solved. I couldn’t find where to activate the free SSL certificate. Although, the chat did start with a little bit of miscommunication.
The agent explained how to add a paid certificate and I got a little confused with all the abbreviations at first. But once I specified that I’m talking about the free certificate, I quickly got the step-by-step instructions on how to do it.
Disregarding the initial confusion, all was great. Plus, I want to praise InMotion Hosting a little for not sending the SSL guide from the knowledge base for me first but actually writing the instructions. Brownie points to you, sir.
Despite all, I still think InMotion customer support is good. But the experience can vary greatly. When the human factor is involved, there’s no way to ensure that all agents are 100% experienced in all areas equally. There’s also a possibility they may just be having a bad day. There’s no training for that.
So if you need something that’s guaranteed to be true, a knowledge base is the way to go.
Speaking of the knowledge base, I’m quite impressed by InMotion’s one. The interface is slightly outdated, but the selection of articles and guides is outstanding. Plus, the quality of them is great.
From what I’ve checked, most articles feature the latest up-to-date information.
An alternative way to get help is a community forum. It’s not super active but moderators join in on every topic to guide you in the right direction. Which is more than you can expect from any hosting provider.
All things considered, I’d say that InMotion Hosting’s customer support is good. Sure, the human factor is involved but you can avoid that by going to a very comprehensive knowledge base.
InMotion Hosting review – the final verdict
Most InMotion reviews conclude that this web host is the nice guy on a block. And I must agree. It’s reliable and easy to get along with. However, in this article I’ve dived deeper than the surface level. What I found is that the prices are not the cheapest, with many competitors offering better value. The performance, however, did not disappoint and demonstrated really good speed and stability. Alongside that there’s also one quite an outstanding feature though – BoldGrid website builder.
So how does this all come along in the verdict of my InMotion Hosting review?
Feature
4.3★★★★☆
Fast, reliable, and beginner-friendly hosting
Pricing
★★★★☆
InMotion Hosting has quite a high pricing in comparison to the industry average. However, you can get access to the Lite plan priced at $2.29/month which is affordable. On the other hand, plans are quite inclusive and offer all that’s needed to start a successful website.
Ease of Use
★★★★☆
The combination of Account Management Panel and cPanel make InMotion Hosting very easy to use. There are a couple of glitches but no big deal. But the most impressive thing out there is the premium BoldGrid website builder for WordPress.
Performance
★★★★★
InMotion Hosting performance is reliable with an expected 99.98% uptime. The loading speed was impressive, and even high traffic was handled with no problem at all.
Security
★★★★☆
InMotion Hosting covers all security basics that will be more than enough for small to medium websites. That includes free SSL, malware, hack, and DDoS protection. However, more advanced tools are paid.
Support
★★★★☆
The customer support department is quite good. Live chat wait times are minimal and agents seem to be knowledgeable. However, sales agents can get overly pushy. Meanwhile, the knowledge base is a quality option if you want to do some reading on your own.
It’s a great option if you’re looking for no-fuss classic web hosting. Ease of use, speed, and high reliability make it perfect for hosting small-to-medium business websites. It’s a great choice even if you have little website development experience. That can be compensated with the intuitive BoldGrid website builder.
Alternatives to InMotion
Indeed, InMotion has passed my extremely high standards but it isn’t necessarily the best choice for everyone. If you’re looking for alternatives, Hostinger and WP Engine are both great options.
Hostinger
One of the cheapest providers around, Hostinger has made a name for itself with its good deals for cheap prices. Its shared hosting plans start at just $2.99/month. But, the provider’s performance and customer support aren’t easily dismissed, too.
Its performance is incredible in terms of speed and reliability. Plus, customer support is absolutely impressive.
While the WordPress-only WP Engine is more on the pricier side, don’t underestimate the value of managed hosting. WP Engine uses the powerful Google Cloud servers for its managed WordPress hosting plans.
With 24/7 support and additional features like daily backups and staging, and a user-friendly platform, WP Engine is one of the top providers around. Just keep in mind, the plans do start at $22.50/month.
Does InMotion Hosting offer a money-back guarantee?
Yes, InMotion Hosting does offer a money-back guarantee. Any plan with a 6-month billing term or longer qualifies for its 90-day money-back guarantee. The guarantee doesn’t cover add-ons and domain name fees.
What forms of payment InMotion Hosting accept?
InMotion Hosting accepts multiple forms of payment. This includes Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and Paypal. Payments by checks and money orders are allowed but must be mailed to its mailing address and the sum must be in US dollars.
Does InMotion Hosting allow adult content on its servers?
No, InMotion Hosting doesn’t allow adult content (pornographic, gambling, smoking, or alcohol material) on its servers. It does allow certain types of artistic material – to double check you can contact its support team for better clarification.
Is InMotion Hosting a green web hosting provider?
InMotion Hosting implements a few good green web hosting practices. The provider runs green data centers, contributes to the environment by planting trees and promoting greener office tactics.
