Inmotion Hosting Review

Over the last ten years, Inmotion Hosting has grown exponentially to become one of the top hosting providers competing directly with the likes of GoDaddy and HostGator due to its award winning customer service and ease of deployment.

With its highly appreciated money back guarantee that competes head on with DreamHost and Arvixe, it runs a highly successful marketing campaign while providing a competing service that makes it one of the most recommended web hosting companies on the web.

Unlike other companies who focus on all kinds of customers, Inmotion focuses only on small and medium sized businesses and its plans reflect the necessary technologies expected by business owners.

Let’s dive deeper to peek into its services and explore how it can prove to be ideal for your business.

Inmotion Hosting Review

Plans And Features

Like all hosting companies, Inmotion provides plans for shared, VPS and Dedicated hosting to suit customer requirements.

But the shared plan in Inmotion is called business hosting as it is optimized for businesses.

There are 3 types of shared plans, each varying in power and features to suit business requirements. The 3 types of plans are:

  1. Launch: Ideal for beginners and business owners who just want a portfolio site. It comes with enough power and features to handle up to 1000 visitors a day. Each user can host up to 2 websites that can consume unlimited space and bandwidth subject to some conditions. Unfortunately the plan does not support ecommerce hosting due to the high traffic and disk usage that hurts the performance of other users on the same block. Fortunately it supports all major programming languages and provides up to 300 apps for quick install and deployment through its 1-Click deployment service. The plan also comes with pre-installed wordpress, Joomla and Prestashop content management systems that allow users to immediately start working on their website without any need for setup or technical know-how.
  2. Power: It is a value for money plan and is ideal for businesses that already have a website but want more power to manage their growing users. Users can host up to 6 websites on one account and also deploy ecommerce applications that can handle up to 2500-3000 users per day. If you are using another hosting company but are dissatisfied with their service or if your monthly expenses towards your website is exceeding your income, this is an ideal plan for your requirements. It can handle sudden bursts of traffic while preserving data and bandwidth during low usage periods.
  3. Pro: Meant for the tech savvy developers who like to try and test on the server, this is an ideal plan for all users who want to make the most out of their web hosting plan. As your business grows, the plan grows according to your rising requirements while providing all essential resources for consumption. You can host as many websites as you need and deploy any kind of application depending on your requirements. Moreover, as the plan is targeted towards developers, it support all necessary developer tools including SSH access to facilitate development. Surprisingly, the cPanel maintains the same ease of user even for non-technical users who just want better resources for their growing website. Unlimited subdomains and parked domains allow users to have full control of their web applications and therefore improve their web presence.

All the above plans include solid state drives (SSD) that significantly improve web application performance as compared to magnetic and spinning hard disk drives.

Users also get free advertising credits up to $300 to help them jump start their online presence.

If you have a coupon, you can easily get additional discounts on your first purchase or transfer.

Performance and Reliability

Since its inception in 2003, Inmotion has always remained among the top performance oriented web hosting companies with security measures that far outweighed its competitors.

Its inbuilt security layer allows users to deploy ecommerce website without the need for any additional SSL certificates.

Except for select instances, the hosting company has maintained its reputation for continuous server uptime and increased page speed over the years.

Let’s explore each of the parameters to understand the performance optimization offered by the company as compared to its customers.

PageSpeed

Page speed tests carried out over a span of 6-7 months reveal average performance as compared to its companies.

The average result was 3.33 seconds over the period while the best page speed was offered by BlueHost with average PageSpeed at 3.08s.

Although the difference is minuscule, the effect often compounds when high volume web pages are requested by hundreds of users at the same time.

The page speed remains stable without any spikes like HostGator or StableHost and therefore it is ideal for websites that have negligible or very less high volume pages.

The below statistics reveal the stats from benchmarks. inmotion hosting page speed review

Server Uptime and Downtime

In comparison with DreamHost and HostGator, Inmotion performs average in terms of server uptime.

Although the downtime is only for a minute or two, the frequency in downtime has significantly increased in recent times.

The rising number of customers and limited server equipment must be a major challenge for the organization but nevertheless, server uptime often affects the customer experience.

Its average uptime during the benchmarking period was 99.95% which is still pretty impressive in comparison to other major hosting solutions like Godaddy, BlueHost and Yahoo who fared even worse.

Glance on the below stats to better understand its uptime to downtime ratio.

inmotion hosting uptime review

User Experience and Customer Service

Inmotion has always been popular for its excellent customer service but the hosting service definitely needs to redesign its cPanel to make it easier for beginners.

Although the cPanel is deployed in its standard form, beginners can hardly understand the difference between the file system and the DNS server.

Instead, the company can turn it into a blog like service like WordPress where the app handled everything and the user is left only with the content that he has to manage.

The below stats reveal its customer service response history over time.

inmotion hosting customer support review

Upgrades and Migration

Unlike most hosting companies, Inmotion provides easy upgrades and downgrades to depending on customer requirements.

The powerful cPanel along with softaculous provides easy methods to upgrade ad downgrade.

You can also setup and migrate existing databases along with necessary configuration through phpmyadmin and other provided tools.

You can also change your content management system or host your custom application getting necessary permissions from their customer support to host and configure your own hosting application.

If you are migrating from an existing web host, you need to download the cPanel configuration from the existing host and request access to configure your cPanel with the configuration files.

The customer support will easily provide you the access and the necessary guides to help you migrate your website.

You can easily upload your configuration file to Inmotion cPanel to configure your existing website on the new hosting platform.

Additional features

Recently, Inmotion has upgraded major hardware configurations to include SSD storage that is offered at free of cost to all its customers.

SSD drives are faster in configuration and deliver content with much higher speed and reliability.

Inmotion also provides free domains with yearly plans. You can also host multiple websites with a single hosting plan.

This allows you to host and control all your website at a centralized console without having to manage multiple portals.

Inmotion also allows you to choose your hosting zone to maximize your speed and content delivery.

When you host your website at most hosting companies, you will have to pay extra for backups but Inmotion automatically backs up all your data allowing you to remain secure in case of software and hardware failures.

To provide even more features and abilities to core developers, Inmotion provides secure SSH access that can be levied on your hosting configuration to further manage your account at the core level.

You can also create custom applications that can run in the background without any external dependencies.

Along with the above, Inmotion has setup Google apps into its cPanel so that you can directly signup and use Google integrations through your webhosting panel.

As part of their recent offers, Inmotion provides a 90 day money back guarantee to all its new customers.

You can avail this offer on all business hosting plans and in case you are dissatisfied with their services, you can easily apply for to get your money back.

The returned money would always exclude the cost of your domain name as you will own the domain name for the year.

Personal Experience

I recently bought a power plan from Inmotion and transferred my domain name from Godaddy.

Although the plan offered a free domain name, it skipped the offer as I already had one.

The setup was quick and the presale support was definitely better than Godaddy.

It took around 4 days to transfer the domain name to Inmotion but I have had worse with Godaddy (which took more than 9 days to transfer).

After the transfer, I installed wordpress from the 1-Click apps and the site was deployed within seconds.

I went onto install plugins and one of the plugins damaged the wordpress database.

I filed a support ticket just then and waited for any possible backup that I may be able to retrieve.

Fortunately, the support team got back within 7 mins and guided me through the whole process of restoring the database.

The problem was resolved within the next 20 mins and without any expense whatsoever unlike in Godaddy and other hosting companies.

Therefore I am pretty satisfied with the company and the server is definitely faster than any shared hosting plan I have ever used due to the SSD drives that push data 65% faster than traditional magnetic drives.

Conclusion

Inmotion is ideal for business users who want anytime support and uptime along with faster websites to improve their user experience.

Although the prices are a bit higher than its competitors, the improved performance and support compensate for the extra dime.

If you are an experienced web administrator and want a perfect hosting company within your budget, Inmotion Hosting must be your first choice.

With the additional features and offers it provides in its recent marketing campaigns, it has come at par with most hosting companies.

If you are going to opt for VPS hosting, you can get up to 30 free cPanel configuration transfers that should be enough for most of your requirements.