As a website owner myself and a seasoned SEO marketer, I understand the importance of making the right decision when it comes to selecting a host for your online business.
In this review of InMotion Hosting, we will examine this widely-known web hosting platform to determine if it lives up to its esteemed reputation.
We will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using InMotion Hosting, explore the diverse hosting plans they offer, and guide you through setting up a website with them.
Table Of Contents
InMotion Hosting Overview
After using several web hosts for different businesses, I personally vouch that InMotion Hosting is commendable. They feature efficient and reliable hosting services, as well as impressive web security.
They’re a little more expensive than the average web hosting business, so let’s look at what makes them worth the added cost.
Types of web hosting: Shared hosting, VPS hosting, Dedicated hosting, WordPress hosting, Reseller hosting- Uptime: Highly reliable 99.9% uptime
- Support Score: Excellent customer service available 24/7/365
- Price Range: Cheapest plan starts at $2.49 per month for a 3-year commitment
- Disk Space: 100GB on the cheapest plan, unlimited for other plans
Types of web hosting: Shared hosting, VPS hosting, Dedicated hosting, WordPress hosting, Reseller hostingIf you’re looking for great web hosts for business websites or simple WordPress sites, InMotion Hosting is a good choice. In particular, the added security features are a must-have, especially if you’re using WordPress.
What We Like
1. Speed And Uptime
I personally appreciated InMotion’s excellent uptime rating of 99.9%, which could be attributed to two strategically located data centers – one on the East and another on the West Coast of the US [1].
The site speed is also quite respectable, even for the lowest-tier plans. To illustrate, our test site loaded in less than 1 second.
As a beginner affiliate site owner on a tight budget, you will probably want to opt for a cheaper shared plan or VPS plan. As long as that plan delivers good speed (which it does), it will do the job well enough.
Of course, you’ll get even faster load times (half a second or less) if you’re willing to spend more on a VPS or dedicated server.
2. Free Domain
Aside from the Core Plan, the lowest tier in their web hosting plans, every other tier (Launch, Power, and Pro) comes with a free domain.
However, the domain is only free for the first year. After that, you have to pay regular registration costs. For example, .com domains renew for about $14 per year, and .co domains renew for about $26.
3. Money-back Guarantee
Unlike most hosting services with a 30-day money-back guarantee, InMotion Hosting takes it one step further by providing an industry-leading 90-day money-back guarantee.
Few hosting providers other than InMotion Hosting offer such a long guarantee period, showing how confident they are in their offerings.
4. Customer Support
When configuring our test site, we had to get in touch with tech support to get SSL set up, and we started at queue position 7.
It took a good 20 minutes to get connected with tech support, but once we were connected, they were pretty quick to resolve the issue, and the site was up and running shortly.
In general, InMotion Hosting support has some of the best customer support we’ve seen compared to many hosting companies, right from email support to chat support.
5. Integrations
InMotion Hosting uses Softaculous to give you access to a wide variety of website builder tools like WordPress, Drupal, eCommerce systems like Magento and Woocommerce, forum software, image galleries for portfolio sites, wikis, and a lot more.
Softaculous is a library of open-source and commercial applications that you can deploy on your website. But, instead of pushing the code manually and setting up the databases yourself, Softaculous lets you do it with a few simple clicks.
You can easily set up and build many different types of websites on an InMotion hosting account.
6. Security
I was impressed by the compay’s free SSL certificates, which they offer on all plans. Most hosting services I’ve employed usually charge the security feature or do not offer it at all.
InMotion Hosting also offers ramped-up security that helps fend off many different types of cyberattacks such as brute force, DoS, and DDoS.
InMotion Hosting has partnered up with Corero Network Security, a family of apps that helps prevent and control these attacks.
Also, InMotion’s Cpanel also has an IP blocker option, where you can choose to filter out certain types of IP addresses. You can effectively use this to block out traffic from specific locations.
7. Good For eCommerce
One of my clients set up an online store and was pleased to discover that InMotion Hosting has an official partnership with Prestashop.
It features an open-source shopping cart with a massive community and many easy-to-use integrations. These include payment processors and email marketing apps.
Even if you’re not big on PrestaShop, because InMotion uses Softaculous’s library of web apps, you’ll get access to other eCommerce solutions, including:
- Magento
- OpenCart
- ZenCart
- ZeusCart
Realistically, you shouldn’t use a shared hosting plan for an eCommerce store. Shopping carts are rather resource-heavy, and you need a VPS at the least to have a store that performs as expected and is not laggy.
Another plus point that InMotion has for potential eCommerce store owners is PCI compliance. PCI compliance is an industry standard for secure card transactions and is an absolute must to accept payments online.
8. Free Transfers
InMotion Hosting offers free migrations from your old host to the new one.
You just have to give them access to your old host, and they can take care of the rest.
If you’re planning on switching hosts, the free transfer service makes InMotion Hosting a very appealing choice.
9. Eco-friendly
InMotion has been making a concerted effort since 2010 to cool its data centers more efficiently using outside air cooling. This reduces the dependence on air conditioning and, by extension, the amount of power they use.
According to InMotion Hosting, this has reduced their carbon footprint by 2000 tons per year.
They’ve also partnered up with Trees For The Future to promote tree planting all over the world, which makes InMotion an appealing choice if you want to work with a company that proactively works to better the environment.
What We Don’t Like
1. Pricing Is Only Reasonable for Long-term Commitments
The pricing on all of InMotion Hosting’s plans varies wildly depending on how long you commit to them.
One of the biggest gripes with InMotion is that the lower-level plan is only available if you commit to at least one year.
In InMotion, only the Pro plan, which is the most expensive, is available on a month-to-month basis, at $19.99 per month.
Alternatively, you could opt for the slightly lower-level Power plan at $6.99 per month for 12 months and pay $83.88, but you may be compromising on performance.
2. No Free Backups
InMotion has pretty decent features, but one thing that is missing is automated backups.
Even on the highest tier plan, backups are not included. Instead, they’re available as an add-on for around $2 per month.
That’s not too bad, but considering that you’re already paying $14.99 per month or $19.99 per month for the highest plan, it would have been nice to include backups.
SiteGround is a similarly-priced web host that does offer free daily backups on all of their plans.
Speed Test
We set up a standard WordPress website with a simple theme and some essential plugins to run the speed test.
Then, we set up a blog post with two images to test the loading times.
Here are the results:
1. PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights scores were ok, but nothing to rave about. However, the FCP and LCP scores were compromised because of the large image above the fold, which was delaying the content painting.
Compressing this image or moving the image below the fold would fix this issue.
2. Pingdom
Pingdom’s results were good: a load time of 467 ms and a performance grade of 83. According to Pingdom, the average load time of a website should be less than 2 seconds [3].
3. GTMetrix
GTMetrix was better, scoring an A right off the bat when tested from Vancouver, Canada.
When tested from Hong Kong, it scored a B, and the performance grade fell to 74%.
From Sao Paolo, the grade went back up to A, but the performance was still a little worse than Vancouver’s at 93%.
Since InMotion’s servers are based in the USA, areas that are closer to the USA will get faster speeds than areas that are further away.
If needed, you can always use a CDN that has servers worldwide to serve your website quickly to your visitors no matter where they’re coming from.
All things considered, these are promising results, especially on a shared and basic plan with no additional optimizations.
A regular website with a caching plugin, CDN, and the proper optimizations for Core Web Vitals should do very well.
InMotion Hosting Plans
No InMotion review would be complete without looking at the various hosting solutions they offer.
The most basic type of hosting service that InMotion Hosting offers is Shared Hosting.
The server has limited resources (speed, memory, bandwidth, etc.), and all websites on the server split these resources amongst themselves.
InMotion Hosting shared plans come in four tiers: Core, Launch, Power, and Pro.
| Core | Launch | Power | Pro | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Domain | None | Free | Free | Free |
| SSL | Free | Free | Free | Free |
| Websites | 2 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Bandwith | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Performance | 2x | 6x | 12x | 20x |
| Email addresses | 10 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Advanced caching | No | No | No | Yes |
| Dedicated IP | No | No | No | Yes |
| 1 year price per month | $3.49 | $6.99 | $6.99 | $14.99 |
| 2 year price per month | $2.99 | $5.99 | $5.99 | $13.99 |
| 3 year price per month | $2.49 | $4.99 | $4.99 | $12.99 |
To sign up for the Core, Launch, and Power plans, you must commit to one year or more. The plans start at $3.49 per month for Core and $6.49 per month for Launch and Power when you sign up for one year.
If you commit to two years, you’ll get the Core plan for $2.99 a month and Launch and Power for $5.99 a month.
And, If you commit to three years, you’ll get the Core plan for $2.49 and Launch and Power for $4.99.
Core
The Core plan lets you set up just two websites with 100GB of storage and unlimited bandwidth.
You also get ten free email addresses, and a free SSL certificate, but no free domain.
The speed optimization offered at the basic plan is also quite limited.
Launch
The Launch plan gets you a domain for free and a free SSL certificate. You can also set up unlimited websites, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email addresses, and UltraStack speed optimization.
UltraStack is a suite of caching software that works to optimize your websites, so they’re delivered quickly from the server to the user’s browser [4].
Power
The Power plan gets you everything from the Launch plan, with more robust UltraStack speed and better caching for optimized performance.
Pro
Finally, the Pro plan gets you everything from the Power plan with even better UltraStack speed performance, caching, and an IP address. You’ll also receive a contract stating InMotion Hosting guarantees 99.9% uptime for your website.
The Pro plan is the most expensive at $14.99 per month for a one-year commitment. This is almost as much as other web hosting providers like WPX, who provide a better hosting plan at a similar price point.
2. VPS Hosting
A VPS creates a virtual server for your website on a single physical computer.
Your virtual server lives with many other virtual servers on the same physical computer, but you get your own specific amount of resources that other sites don’t compete with you on.
VPS Hosting is much more powerful than regular shared hosting but for an additional cost.
InMotion has several hosting plans for VPS servers, starting from $19.99 per month for a 3-year commitment.
This plan will get you 2 CPU cores, 2 GB of RAM, and 45 GB of disk space.
The highest tier plan is $83.99 per month, and that will get you 8 CPU cores, 8 GB of RAM, and 140 GB of disk space. Compared to Hostinger, this is considerably less: Hostinger’s $78 plan gets you eight cores, 16 GB of RAM, and 250 GB of disk space.
Using a VPS can be good for web apps or sites heavy on user interaction.
3. Dedicated Hosting
If you require serious power and control over every little detail of your server’s configuration, you need a dedicated server.
The InMotion Hosting plan for dedicated server hosting starts at $139.99 per month, going up to $539.99 per month.
InMotion’s dedicated hosting plans are much more robust than other providers like BlueHost. BlueHost’s highest-level plan has features similar to InMotion’s lowest-level plan, though both cost similar amounts.
Dedicated servers get you 16+ GB of RAM, 1+ TB of disk space, and multiple IPs.
Most smaller affiliate website owners won’t need a dedicated server in the early stages of their business. However, once you grow, start getting hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, and need the fastest website possible, you’ll need to invest in a dedicated server.
4. WordPress Hosting
InMotion Hosting has plans for WordPress hosting that are catered a bit more specifically to WordPress users.
To illustrate, the lowest tier WordPress plan allows for just a single website but has advanced caching enabled from the get-go, something only found on the Power shared plan.
The main advantage of using a WordPress plan instead of a regular shared hosting plan is that WordPress web hosting generally works seamlessly with the CMS and comes with some plugins pre-installed and ready-to-go.
There are also added security features that make your WordPress site less vulnerable to attacks.
5. Reseller Hosting
If you own an agency and would like to sell your own white-label hosting, you can build your infrastructure on top of InMotion Hosting.
Reseller web hosting is usually meant for agencies that provide a 100% turnkey solution for their clients.
Basic Website Setup Using InMotion Hosting
When you first sign up for InMotion on the basic plan, you’ll get a few upsells during checkout:
- A Backup Manager for $24/year: as mentioned above, this should be included by default, but it’s not. The Backup Manager will help you make regular backups of your site to protect your online assets.
- Google Workspace for $6/month: Google Workspace lets you use Google services like Drive and Gmail on your own domain.
- An IP for $72/year: most users don’t need an IP unless you’re setting up an eCommerce store or plan to use your domain for sending lots of transactional emails.
- QuickStarter one-page website for $249 one time: This is very expensive for something you can do yourself or have a designer do.
A Backup Manager for $24/year: as mentioned above, this should be included by default, but it’s not. The Backup Manager will help you make regular backups of your site to protect your online assets.Once you sign up, the dashboard is pretty basic:
To install WordPress, you’ll need to head into Softaculous and follow the steps to get WordPress up and running.
It took less than 2 minutes to get a basic website set up.
Once you set up your hosting, you have to point your domain to the host, so your website shows up when people navigate to your domain name. This is usually done by changing your domain’s nameservers to match those of your hosting provider.
In the InMotion dashboard, it was not very intuitive to find their nameservers. Many hosting providers show the nameservers in a very prominent location.
Here, you actually have to navigate to the page called “Account Technical Details” and find them there.
How Secure Is InMotion for eCommerce?
InMotion may not be the most secure web hosting service for eCommerce due to restricted payment alternatives, limited disk space and par server management.
Nevertheless, the company offers a variety of eCommerce features such as OpenCart and PrestaShop for free. Our experience with OpenCart demonstrated that it excelled in managing transactions and monitoring consumers across numerous shipping and payment gateways.
Inasmuchas eCommerce tools are exclusive to Power and Pro subscriptions only, InMotion provides free remote backups for accounts under 10GB and security options, including free Sucuri Security malware scans for WordPress.
Additionally, e-mail accounts can get McAfee spam and virus protection (for as little as $1.39 per month). SSL certificates, which have a dedicated IP address, may be purchased for $99.99 per year (plus $25 for installation).
Customer Support
I logged into InMotion’s 24/7 online chat to ask about the distinction between shared and WordPress hosting. Within seconds, an InMotion customer service employee showed up and provided the data we need.
To learn more about InMotion’s dedicated hosting options, I contacted its round-the-clock phone support team.
When I called, the support team answered promptly and patiently walked me through the subtle but significant differences in everyday language.
The support I’ve received from InMotion has been excellent.
With a 90-day money-back promise, InMotion outweighs the standard 30-day guarantee offered by most web providers. Dreamhost, on the other hand, gives a longer money-back guarantee—97 days.
FAQs
What is InMotion Hosting Best Used For?
InMotion Hosting is best used for businesses looking for online presence, requiring different hosting options and US-based customer support.
Where are InMotion Hosting Servers Located?
InMotion Hosting servers are located in Los Angeles, Washington and Amsterdam, making it ideal for US-based businesses.
Our Verdict on InMotion Hosting Review
So do I recommend InMotion Hosting? If you’re looking to set up simple WordPress websites, InMotion will do the job well, but many other web hosts in the web hosting industry streamline the process better.
In my business experience, InMotion is adequate if you are deploying an eCommerce store, a forum, a back-end management system for your business, or other similar applications and want something that can get set up and running very quickly.
The pricing may be higher than most hosting providers, but the 24/7 customer support justifies the higher price and the 90-day money-back guarantee makes your website with InMotion risk-free.
Our #1 Recommendation: InMotion
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