InMotion Hosting Review

InMotion was founded in 2001 and has grown to offer a wide variety of hosting services suitable for all website sizes. The company has headquarters in Virginia Beach, VA, and Marina del Rey, California.

Its hosting plans offer easy-to-use website building tools for beginners and full cPanel support for more experienced webmasters. You can even start reselling hosting services. Ultimately, if you’re looking for a fast, secure, reliable web host, InMotion is worth considering.

InMotion Hosting Infrastructure/Network

Like many other popular web hosting services, InMotion has a robust infrastructure. The company uses Linux-based servers and has scaled to be a top contender among a saturated web host market, boasting customers from over 175 countries. Its data centers are located in Los Angeles and Washington, close to the Internet Exchange Point (IXP).

InMotion’s network is connected to four Tier 1 Internet service providers that will take over if its data centers fail. At the very least, you can expect 99.99% uptime.

InMotion also uses Solid State Drives and has recently dived into the world of cloud hosting, providing extra data security and preventing crashing.

InMotion Web Hosting Features

This InMotion hosting review takes a closer look at all the fantastic features available on the different plans:

Free Domain Name

All InMotion hosting plans come with a free domain. If you decide to take your domain hosting services elsewhere, you can move it with ease.

Registering an additional domain name with InMotion is easy, but according to most domain hosting services reviews, the pricing is slightly more expensive than other registrars.

Website Creator

InMotion comes with a website creator tool to help beginners learn how to create impressive pages. It is best suited for splash pages, landing pages, and online portfolios, rather than content-heavy sites. That being said, it’s a good place to start for a first website.

The builder uses a simple drag-and-drop interface and will automatically tailor screens for mobile users. An easy start would be from one of the 200 fully customizable base templates.

The downside is that this tool comes at $4.99 monthly fee. Once built, you can take your site to another host, and you maintain all ownership. But you won’t be able to access the builder after canceling this subscription.

InMotion Hosting WordPress

InMotion supports WordPress, one of the most popular platforms for building and managing websites. Dedicated InMotion WordPress hosting plans include a free SSL certificate, speed optimization plugins, and a premium WordPress drag-and-drop Web Builder.

WordPress works on all hosting plans and servers. But if you plan on using WordPress for an extended time, we recommend the WordPress hosting plan to take advantage of the extra perks.

Ecommerce Apps

InMotion has all the tools available to start an online store, including access to leading ecommerce apps such as PrestaShop, Magento, OpenCart, and WooCommerce for WordPress. You’ll also be able to implement leading payment methods, such as PayPal, Google Pay, and Credit Card payments.

These features are available on all hosting plans. But if your store is already established, we recommend picking a VPS to ensure there are enough resources for your site to remain fast and responsive.

Custom Website Design

If web design is not your thing, you can hire one of InMotion’s experienced professionals to build a custom website for you. They’ll use WordPress as the CMS and WooCommerce if you require an online store.

Free Google Adwords Credits

InMotion has added many useful marketing tools, including $150 in free advertising credits for Google Adwords. While it’s nice to get this for free, we agree with other InMotion hosting reviews that would have liked any extra guidance on how to create ads.

SSL Security

All plans come with a free InMotion SSL certificate that verifies the security of your website. SSL has become the norm for any site. The company gets the certificates through Sectigo, offering 2048-bit encryption.

Being SSL compliant also improves your search engine rankings and avoids any security warnings for website visitors.

Extra Security

Other security features InMotion provides include:

• Hacking and malware protection, with regular scans running in the background to check whether any of your site’s pages or files are infected.
• Reminders to update your scripts and website platforms, with WordPress and ecommerce apps natively supported by the company updated automatically.
• DDoS protection detects floods of fake traffic, blocks the culprits, and prevents the attack from doing any damage.
• Creating automatic backups that are accessible via your control panel.

Unlimited Email

One major advantage InMotion has over its competition is that it gives you unlimited email storage on every plan. InMotion email setup is easy via cPanel or AMP. The basic shared hosting plans allow you to create up to 10 email addresses per domain, but more extensive plans give you unlimited email accounts.

Account Management Panel (AMP)

The InMotion web host is easy to navigate and gives you access to two different control panels: cPanel and InMotion AMP (Account Management Panel).

AMP includes your basic account information. You can also launch cPanel from here, install a new WordPress installation, and manage your email and domains.

cPanel

InMotion hosting cPanel is where users manage all aspects of its hosting plan and websites. You can access your web files, create and manage FTP accounts, create a backup, manage PHP settings and databases via MySQL, create addon domains, and much more.

Web Host Manager (WHM)

Web Host Manager is included with VPS and dedicated servers. It gives experienced users more control over how their server operates. It’s perfect for resellers, as it allows you to create multiple cPanel accounts under your master account.

You can install new SSL certificates, blacklist or whitelist IP addresses, and send out emails and newsletters to clients. Most importantly, you can view various metrics related to the status of the server.

Databases

You can easily create and access databases through MySQL in cPanel. If you are migrating a website from an old host, you can also import existing databases.

InMotion’s cheapest plan gives you up to two databases across two separate websites, but this increases depending on your subscription.

FTP Access

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) can be found via cPanel and allows you to manage files, folders, and scripts.

If you have multiple websites, you can explore their folders in InMotion hosting FTP. Members of your team can have their own FTP logins with different permissions for cPanel or WHM.

We didn’t find it very user-friendly when trying it on our web browser, and our session was timed-out while uploading large images. Luckily, you can get an FTP client like FileZilla. The connection is much faster, and you can upload multiple files simultaneously.

Green Hosting

The company also takes part in the growing green hosting industry, as the company follows several eco-friendly policies, from recycling to using outside air cooling at their data centers.

InMotion Hosting Uptime

The vendor is known for its robust network. Its main two data centers are based in Washington and Los Angeles, next to the IXP, ensuring high speeds and stability. During months of testing, we didn’t experience any extensive downtime. 

If any of its data centers fail, Tier 1 Internet service providers will take on the load to avoid downtime. An individual Pingdom test shows an uptime to be mostly above 99.9%. 

InMotion Hosting Speed

InMotion isn’t slow by any means, and your average website will get good results on Google’s PageSpeed insights tool. However, independent testing and other InMotion hosting reviews don’t rank it very high. Websitetooltester.com ranked it 13th for speed, with an average of 3.71, with the fastest one at 2.10.

It’s not necessarily a deal-breaker if you’re running a small site, but larger sites could experience speed issues.

Hosting Services

With so many different plans to choose from, InMotion has something for everybody. These are some of the most popular hosting services:

Shared Web Hosting

Hosting a website doesn’t have to be expensive for beginners or low-traffic sites. The most affordable option is a shared plan, which starts at $52.49/month. With this plan, you share resources with other websites.

Other hosts certainly are cheaper, but InMotion’s most affordable plan gives you up to two websites, 50GB of storage on a fast SSD drive, unlimited email storage with 10 custom email addresses, and a free domain and SSL certificate.

The InMotion Power plan gives you 100GB of space, 50 email addresses, and 50 separate sites. The most expensive shared plan gives you 100 websites, 100GB of space, unlimited email addresses, and extra support.

InMotion VPS Web Hosting

A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is the next step up, giving you all the features of your own dedicated server and a virtual environment. It draws resources from multiple servers and shared setups.

The main point is that you get resources specifically for you, perfect for sites with consistent traffic that need a good performance. InMotion lets you choose between 4-8GB of RAM, 75-260GB SSD storage, 4-6TB of bandwidth, and 3-5 dedicated IPs. 

On shared plans, you could be sharing IPs with a shady site and receive some of the negative attention in Google rankings. Dedicated IPs tell the online world that any content or data is yours and yours only. Multiple IPs also allow you to separate multiple sites you run on the same InMotion hosting VPS.

InMotion Dedicated Server Plans

Dedicated servers are for more experienced users who want to manage how their hardware functions. You are quite literally paying for the system that will house your websites and other files.

The company offers a fully managed plan, where the support staff carries out maintenance tasks. Alternatively, you can pick a more customizable option that gives you remote control over the server with full root access.

These plans include a minimum of 16GB of RAM, automated backups, up to 15 IP addresses, and the option to run on a 6-core/12-thread Intel Xeon E-2136 CPU. 

WordPress Hosting

While WordPress works well on any of InMotion’s hosting plans, a dedicated WordPress plan may be better suited.

The basic package guarantees suitability for up to 20,000 monthly visitors for one site. You get 50GB of space on a fast SSD drive, unlimited email, many security and marketing extras, and a special WordPress Web Builder. All plans also include free daily backups and automatic updates to WordPress and your installed plugins.

InMotion states that its servers are optimized for WordPress. Although we don’t exactly know what that entails in terms of NGINX stack and caching, our sites loaded fast and didn’t seem to have any issues.

Cloud Hosting

InMotion also offers unmanaged cloud hosting. Technically all InMotion cloud hosting is VPS hosting because it uses multiple servers’ resources to deliver resources to one customer.

Their plans are on a scalable model starting at just $5 per month, but you can also opt for a pay-as-you-go subscription. All plans give you full root access and a choice between Linux, CentOS, Ubuntu, or Debian.

If you are looking for regular cloud hosting or reselling, you will need to look at the VPS plans. But this isn’t something the service actively promotes. We’d recommend looking elsewhere for website cloud hosting since InMotion’s offers seem quite vague. 

Reseller Hosting

The company has dedicated InMotion hosting reseller plans that give you full control over managing your clients through the WHM panel. 

If you want to become an InMotion reseller, you can start a basic plan without a fixed contract that gives you unlimited email storage, 80GB SSD space, and a dedicated IP for up to 25 accounts.

The plans are respectable and certainly get the job done, but there are better options out there for resellers who want to scale this business model.

Customer Support

InMotion customer support is praised by many. The live chat team responded in a few minutes to our query, and the team seemed trained and knowledgeable.

There’s also the option to open a support ticket or email the team directly. Furthermore, for those who prefer a direct conversation, InMotion is one of the few hosts to have great telephone support.

InMotion Hosting vs. GoDaddy

While both are among top-rated web hosting services, GoDaddy is more popular. But it does slightly suffer a bit under its weight.

Pricewise, GoDaddy has the edge with its entry-level shared hosting plans. But when your site starts to grow, it’s more cost-effective to jump over VPS or dedicated solutions offered by InMotion.

GoDaddy’s dedicated hosting has Windows options and comes with great deals for new customers. However, InMotion takes VPS hosting lead, thanks to its premium hardware, SSD storage, WHM panel, and superior 90-day money-back guarantee. 

InMotion also dominates WordPress hosting with its dedicated plans, CDN caching and optimization, drag-and-drop page maker, and unlimited bandwidth.

Overall, while we think their site builders are comparable, InMotion wins.

InMotion Hosting vs. Bluehost

Both InMotion and Bluehost offer a comprehensive range of hosting options: from basic shared plans to VPS, cloud hosting, and dedicated machines. BlueHost is more well known, and we prefer it to InMotion. Here’s why:

• Better uptime: Your sites will stay undisrupted for longer on BlueHost without any noticeable downtimes. 
• Better value for money: Overall, BlueHost charges lower prices for similar plans, which is great if you’re on a budget.

While InMotion has a broader range of hosting types and customizable plans, we found BlueHost to be faster, more stable, and cheaper.

InMotion Hosting vs. SiteGround

A common comparison is InMotion vs. SiteGround, so we decided to test both and show you what we discovered. This time around, InMotion was the clear winner, offering:

• More varieties of hosting and plans.
• More features.
• A generous disk space. Even in the starter plan, InMotion gives you 50GB on a fast SSD drive, while SiteGround only offers 10GB on a traditional hard drive setup.
• Better value for money.

InMotion Pricing

InMotion has extensive options when it comes to hosting plans. The pricing stands out when you commit to six-month, yearly, or two-yearly contracts. 

While you can find any specific prices on the official website, this is an overview of your options:

• Shared Hosting - from $2.29/month
• WordPress Hosting - from $3.49/month
• Managed Virtual Private Servers (VPS) - from $17.99/month
• Unmanaged Cloud VPS - From $5/month
• Dedicated Web Servers - From $139.99/month
• Reseller Plans - From $21.39/ month

While InMotion doesn’t offer a free trial, the company offers a 90-day money-back guarantee.

InMotion Hosting Review - Verdict

Being one of the top website hosting companies, InMotion offers plans and services any size website could need. Its WordPress-centric options are plentiful, and their approach to reselling is cost-effective and easy to follow.

If you’re hunting for cheap web hosting - bingo. And with a generous 90-day money-back guarantee, there’s no harm in trying the service and its fantastic features.

Unfortunately, the company scores relatively low in speed tests than other big web hosts, despite having data centers near the IXP. While none of this is a deal-breaker, you may have to look elsewhere if you want the absolute best performance. 

Ultimately, InMotion will make any top-rated hosting rankings. We hope that our InMotion hosting review has given you all the insights you need.