InMotion Hosting Review – My New Business Web Hosting Choice?

IntroductionIntroduction

InMotion is one of the oldest web hosting providers you can find. And this year, it’s undergoing some significant changes for the first time in many years. So in this InMotion Hosting review, I tried to piece together everything you need to know before buying them.

But first, let’s take the elephant out of the room.

Is InMotion Hosting the cheapest provider? No, it’s not. Is InMotion the fastest hosting provider? No, not really. So is it at least the most feature-rich provider? Not exactly.

So why even bother talking about them? 

Well, InMotion Hosting is not THE BEST in ONE particular category. What I found out is that they are offering a great service through and through, giving you a full-rounded web hosting package.

So let’s see what changes are brought to the company with the recent updates and if they are still worth your time. 

PricingInMotion Hosting Pricing

InMotion Hosting cannot be called cheap since their shared hosting packages start at $4.99 if you want to save and go for the longest billing period. This would equal to $119.76 for 2 years of hosting.

But that’s just the entry plan.

InMotion Hosting has a range of shared hosting options for different needs. All of these plans have unlimited bandwidth, free domain name, and SSL certificate in common.

Even the entry plan offers way more resources than your usual shared hosting provider. You imediately get an allowance of 2 websites with storage space to spare. That's not your regular entry option for a personal blog.

Apart from that, there's not much difference – with each plan you simply get the bigger piece of the server resource pie. Plus, Pro adds the 99.99% uptime guarantee. Oh, and don't be fooled by the same Launch and Power prices – once the renewal hits, Power will be way more expensive.

But wait a second. If all of these plans look too powerful and too expensive, there’s a way to get all of the great features for less.

If you’d click on any of the buttons in this review, it would unlock InMotion’s “hidden” Lite plan available to my viewers and readers. 

Lite is not impressive in terms of features but it is a nice entry option if you're just getting started.

At the same time, even Lite should be able to handle up to 15k visitors monthly with ease. So your need to scale can be postponed by a lot.

Of course, shared hosting is not all that InMotion Hosting offers. In fact, it has one of the best choices and values when it comes to scaling up. There are managed and unmanaged VPS, dedicated servers, and one of my favorites – WordPress hosting.

You see, I often get asked if a person should use WordPress hosting instead of simple shared hosting. And while the answer varies from provider to provider, I usually recommend getting just a simple shared plan as ‘WordPress’ is mainly used as a marketing buzzword.

But that’s not the case with InMotion.

For exactly the same price, you can get the WP-1000s WordPress hosting package that features a ton of great stuff: NGINX, server-side caching, PHP 7, unlimited emails, a premium website builder for WordPress, and the best of all – website staging.

These tools all work to make your WordPress website faster and more secure. Meanwhile, using staging, that’s not available with simple shared hosting, you’ll be able to test out the changes on the copy of your site. They won’t affect the live site – if anything breaks, it’s just a sandbox. Once the changes are ready – you can push them to the live site in just a click. 

So depending on what you need, InMotion Hosting can offer really great value for the business, and especially WordPress websites. 

InterfaceInterface and Features

While InMotion Hosting is undergoing some changes, it seems that the control panel and user area are yet to be touched by the upgrades. InMotion Hosting is using its own user interface called AMP (Account Management Panel) and classic cPanel for hosting management.

In my humble opinion, AMP could use some work to become even more intuitive than it is now. 

Right now, it features various tabs for billing, domain, and your account. It also has shortcuts to various cPanel features (e.g. Softaculous for WordPress installation) and to cPanel itself. It can take a little bit of time to find what you’re looking for but other than that – it’s a great tool.

cPanel gets a custom skin that matches AMP – it feels like you never left the main interface. Which is great although a tiny bit outdated.

Although I cannot be too harsh on InMotion here. cPanel is a standard in the hosting industry and they made it look even better using their own branding.

That being said, you won’t find any problems with cPanel locating your email accounts, installing WordPress via a one-click installation tool, or managing security settings. 

Extra Features

I’ve always said that InMotion Hosting is geared towards businesses and even enterprises rather than simple users creating personal sites. Why? It has a bundle of marketing and security tools that are great for businesses even in their base plans.

• Customer management tools
• Free marketing tools
• Free DDoS protection and SSL certificates

So without any further investments, you’ll be able to both protect and market your site with ease. 

Altogether, the control panel and the extra features included are definitely a strong side of InMotion hosting. And while the interface could use an update, it’s not a big deal as everything functions just fine.

PerformanceInMotion Hosting Performance

For this InMotion Hosting review, I bought the Power plan to test out how capable it is to handle all of the stress. To get a good picture of how InMotion performs, I did my 3 regular tests – speed, stress, and reliability. 

For the first test, I installed WordPress with its default theme and static pages. It’s as lightweight as it gets.

So, how fast can this site load? I’ve used GTMetrix to get the results. And my website fully loaded in just 0.7 seconds. Is this fast? Oh yeah, that’s an exceptional result and pretty much as fast as it gets on shared hosting.

Just keep in mind that I got these results while testing from the US. Since InMotion has servers only there, visitors from other locations, like Asia or Europe, will experience longer loading times than those from the US.

But the GTMetrix test cannot see how the website performs when it’s put under a lot of stress. For example, if 50 users visit it at the same time. To get that kind of a real-life scenario, I’m using K6 Cloud software.

I’ve sent 50 bots under 5 minutes to see if they will slow down or break my site. And... Nope. InMotion remained stable and did not show any signs of slowing down.

You can take a look at the grey line which shows the number of bots and the blue line that shows speed. There were just occasional “bumps” in terms of speed that did not affect the overall performance in any way.

Now, the last and probably the most important test. I’ve been monitoring InMotion for a month now to see how reliable it is. In other words, if it was online most of the time or if my website experienced lots of downtime. 

And the results are great. My website was online 99.98% of the time. That’s just 9 minutes of downtime during the month of monitoring.

Knowing that most hosting providers have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, this result is great. You cannot expect much better with shared hosting. 

So InMotion proves to be a truly performance and business-focused provider. With high reliability and fast page load times, it can handle lots of users and guarantee a great experience for your clients.

Customer SupportCustomer Support

InMotion has all the standard support channels like 24/7 live chat, email, and phone. However, you can also reach them via this ancient relic called Skype. Yep, it still exists. Last but not least, there are an extensive knowledge base and even forums, so you’ll definitely get help somewhere.

In all seriousness, I must appreciate InMotion support. During the pandemic and the 2020 spring lockdown, it remained open with live chat available to all users while other providers quickly switched to email-only support.

And while there might be longer wait times or a couple of agents that are not too accurate with their answers, you won’t be left out.

So combining the knowledge of mostly great agents, knowledge base, and in serious cases – forum, you’ll be able to quickly solve any issue that has come in your way. 

RecommendationInMotion Hosting Review – My Recommendation

So all things in this, and maybe all the other InMotion Hosting reviews you’ve read or watched considered… Should you buy their plan or go pack your bags and move to another provider? In my humble opinion, if you are a business owner, InMotion does have a lot to offer.

With great performance and a ton of valuable features, not to mention scalability options, InMotion Hosting serves best for businesses and enterprises. It is expensive but it does pack a lot of power in it.

The addition of the ‘hidden’ entry plan now allows small businesses to try out the benefits that InMotion has as well.

In the meantime, if you are planning a small personal website. Or your audience is based outside the United States, there are several better alternatives like the cheap and international Hostinger or scalable Cloudways that can take your business to any corner of the world.

So I really hope this InMotion Hosting review was helpful and allowed you to take a better look at what they offer. Let me know what you think in the comments down below!