InMotion Hosting Review – Is It Worth It?

When starting an online business, it is important to choose a good hosting service. However, with numerous options available, making a decision can be challenging. We have already discussed various web hosting providers (like Siteground, Hostinger) in detail on our blogs.

In this post, I will review another popular hosting provider – InMotion Hosting. The review will cover aspects such as price, performance, technical requirements, ease of use, and customer support options. Ultimately, you should consider your priorities and make an informed decision.

In general, InMotion Hosting is a trustworthy hosting company. Their special 90-day refund policy gives you plenty of time to get used to their services and use their hosting without worry.

Fast Storage
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InMotionHosting.com

+ Fast US-based Hosting
+ 90-day money-back
+ Detailed knowledge base
+ SSD storage on all plans

More info +
4.7
GOOD CHOICE
$4.79/mo$15.99
At inmotionhosting.com

Overview

InMotion Hosting is headquartered in the United States and has been in existence for several decades since its establishment in 2001.

It offers a wide range of services, including shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated servers, and even private cloud hosting.

However, like other web hosting companies, InMotion focuses on shared hosting services and support for WordPress websites. Its main customers are beginner website designers and small to medium-sized businesses. If you don’t need a dedicated data center and just want a well-designed and functional website, InMotion is a good choice.

The question is, can you expect more from it here? Can you accept some of its shortcomings? Let’s continue to find out!

InMotion Hosting Plans Pricing

Although the pricing of InMotion hosting plans is slightly higher than Hostinger, it is still very affordable compared to other hosts, and it also comes with a 90-day unconditional refund policy.

When you purchase an InMotion hosting plan, you can select billing period between monthly, annual, biennial, or triennial packages. The longer the duration of the plan, the lower the monthly price will be. InMotion accepts credit card payments, PayPal payments, and check payments. Your hosting plan will automatically renew upon expiration, and you will receive an email notification 30 days prior to the expiration date.

While checking out, InMotion may automatically add some items to your shopping cart that you have not previously added. These additional items usually come with an extra cost, so please remember to remove them from your shopping cart.

Shared Hosting Pricing

PlanFirst Year FeeRenewal FeeNumber of WebsitesBandwidthStorageFree Domain
Core$3.19/mo$9.99/mo2Unlimited100 GB SSD
Launch$4.99/mo$12.99/mo25UnlimitedUnlimited
Power$4.99/mo$16.99/moUnlimitedUnlimitedUnlimited
Pro$10.99/mo$23.99/moUnlimitedUnlimitedUnlimited

WordPress Hosting Pricing

PlanFirst Year FeeRenewal FeeNumber of WebsitesBandwidthStorageFree Domain
WP Core$3.69/mo$10.49/mo2Unlimited100 GB SSD
WP Launch$5.49/mo$13.49/mo25UnlimitedUnlimited
WP Power$5.49/mo$17.49/moUnlimitedUnlimitedUnlimited
WP Pro$11.49/mo$24.49/moUnlimitedUnlimitedUnlimited

VPS Hosting Pricing

PlanFirst Year FeeRenewal FeeCPURAMStorageBandwidth
VPS 4 vCPU$9.99/mo$16.99/mo4 vCPU Cores8 GB160 GB SSD5TB
VPS 8 vCPU$19.99/mo$46.99/mo8 vCPU Cores16 GB260 GB SSDUnlimited
VPS 12 vCPU$31.99/mo$76.99/mo12 vCPU Cores24 GB360 GB SSDUnlimited
VPS 16 vCPU$44.99/mo$111.99/mo16 vCPU Cores32 GB460 GB SSDUnlimited

Feature:Stable and Well-Balanced

InMotion Hosting stands out for its reliable hosting plans.

Unlike other hosts that reserve the best features for higher-priced plans, InMotion Hosting offers a good mix of features across all its plans. With a reasonable starting price and competitive features comparable to more expensive shared hosting services, InMotion is a great choice for business users seeking affordable and powerful web hosting.

Fig1. InMotion Hosting Features

Comprehensive Basic Features

The basic features of InMotion shared hosting include:

  • Reliable performance and uptime
  • SSD storage drives
  • Unlimited bandwidth
  • cPanel
  • WordPress integration
  • Free SSL
  • Security Suite
  • Advertising credits

Many other hosting providers only include all the mentioned features in their advanced plans, whereas InMotion offers a well-rounded service at a lower price.

The main difference between the different plans is the allocation of server resources. The higher-level plan you choose, the more storage, website quantity, and free domain you will have. In addition, the most expensive Pro plan offers additional resources such as a dedicated IP and advanced support.

However, when it comes to the enhanced speed claims made by InMotion for their higher level of hosting, such as 6 times, 12 times, or 20 times improvement, we cannot verify the accuracy of these numbers.

Fig2. Enhanced speed claims made by InMotion for their higher level of hosting

SSD Storage Drive

InMotion has fully embraced SSD technology for their data hosting services. SSD hosting generally offers up to 20 times faster transfer speeds compared to regular HDD hosting. This significantly improves website performance.

Automatic Backups Addon

You have the option to purchase automatic daily full website backups, but this will incur an additional cost. This is a default feature offered by some hosts like Kinsta, Hostinger, and SiteGround, and sometimes it is included for free. However, many basic shared hosts do not provide this feature.

One problem is that InMotion will not back up files larger than 10MB. Therefore, you will need to save high-definition movies elsewhere. However, it’s important to mention that InMotion does offer free daily backups, which is beneficial.

Quick WordPress Integration & Website Building Assistance

For small business owners looking to create a comprehensive website at an affordable price, WordPress is an excellent platform. It offers versatility, user-friendliness, and powerful web design capabilities.

InMotion offers one-click installation for WordPress and a wide range of WordPress tutorials specifically designed for WordPress users. This allows you to easily create a visually appealing WordPress website on their servers.

In addition to tutorials, InMotion also provides a website building service. Simply describe your website building needs, and they will create a website that meets your requirements within 2 days. While this service is not free, the cost is significantly lower than hiring a web developer individually. Moreover, they are capable of designing a quality website. However, it’s important to keep in mind that in the field of web design, the quality often corresponds to the price.

Complete Security Suite

InMotion Hosting offers a variety of security tools to protect hosted websites, even in their low-tier shared hosting plans.

All hosting plans include the following basic security suite:

  • Free SSL certificate: Keeps your website data encrypted during transmission;
  • Hacker & malware protection: Protects your website from hackers and malicious software;
  • Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection: Prevents website downtime caused by a surge in malicious traffic.

This is more than what some other web hosting providers offer. For example, GoDaddy‘s basic plan does not include DDoS protection.

Fig3. InMotion Hosting offers a variety of security tools to protect hosted websites

Performance

If your website is slow to load or frequently crashes, all the interesting features and useful content won’t be enough to keep customers engaged.

InMotion Hosting excels in these crucial areas, boasting a 99.9%+ uptime and impressive page loading speed. Considering its reliability alone, it is a highly recommended hosting provider.

Uptime:99.9%+

After a brief one-month test, my test site on InMotion has maintained a 100% uptime. This indicates the good stability of InMotion hosting.

Fig4. InMotion has maintained a 100% uptime

Although my own testing period was short, here are the uptime test results for InMotion hosting from other blogs:

Although InMotion does not offer a 99% uptime guarantee like other hosting providers, which means they are not liable for compensation if users cannot access your website, we can have some level of assurance based on the test results mentioned above.

Average Loading Time: 3.3s

After a year-long test on the InMotion test site using GTmetrix, we obtained positive data.

InMotion achieved an average load time of 3.3 seconds over the course of a year, which is considered a decent speed. It is generally recommended to maintain a load time below 4 seconds. If your load time exceeds 5 seconds, it is likely that you will lose your visitors.

Fig5. InMotion achieved an average load time of 3.3 seconds

Support

On their support center page, InMotion emphasizes the expertise of their customer support team. They mention that their team undergoes extensive training, totaling over 280 hours. Additionally, InMotion claims that their customer service team excels at communicating with customers of different levels, catering to both beginners who are purchasing a domain for the first time and experienced professionals. Therefore, when you seek assistance, there should be a shared understanding between both parties during the phone conversation.

Additionally, you can contact them through various mediums (24x7x365): phone support, live chat, email, ticketing, and a comprehensive user community. Some excellent hosting companies perform poorly in these areas. For example, Hostinger does not have a telephone support hotline.

InMotion offers different ways to get help, but based on what I’ve seen, their live chat support is not very quick, taking 2-10 minutes to respond. This suggests that there is room for improvement. Good customer service is important to have a good experience. If you want reliable and fast customer support, you might want to consider choosing SiteGround.

Cons of InMotion Hosting

No Asian Data Centers

Usually, we pick data centers based on where most users are to make sure that visitors can browse faster. But, InMotion Hosting only has data centers in the United States and Europe. They don’t have any in Asia. This can be a problem for entrepreneurs doing business in Asia.

However, with current CDN and caching technology, you can backup your website content to network servers located around the world. This effectively reduces the physical distance between visitors and servers, resulting in improved website speed. For most small to medium-sized websites, the free WordPress plugin – Super Page Cache for Cloudflare is sufficient to meet the caching acceleration requirements.

Excessive Upsells During Checkout

When you have selected your preferred hosting plan and clicked on the “Select” button, you will be surprised to find – what are these in my cart? Backup Manager for $2.50 per month? Google Workspace for $6 per user per month? Dedicated IP for $6/month? Just hang on a minute…

Yes, InMotion brings you a bunch of upsells at checkout. The problem with these additional offers is that the people they are aimed at may not know much about web hosting. At first glance, these features may appear necessary. After all, who wouldn’t want to have a backup of their website, right?

Therefore, it is important to not only consider the features that the web host provides, but also the ones it doesn’t. It is highly likely that they will offer those features as additional offers, but that is not good.

Average Ease of Use

In general, InMotion Hosting is user-friendly and facilitates the setup and smooth operation of your website. The sign-up process is simple and can be completed in just a few minutes.

The overall interface is generally well-organized, but there are some potential issues. The account management interface (AMP) looks too similar to cPanel, which can be confusing for users. It may take some time to determine whether you’re in cPanel or AMP.

In addition, InMotion uses the classic cPanel to manage hosted sites, which is beneficial because cPanel is feature-rich and stable. However, for beginners, it can take time and effort to learn and become proficient in cPanel. Nowadays, many hosting providers are moving away from cPanel and instead using their own custom site management panels, like SiteGround and Hostinger. These custom panels are designed to be user-friendly and are particularly suitable for beginners.

Fig6. InMotion Hosting’s Account Management Panel

Average customer service response time

InMotion’s live chat support response times are somewhat slow, typically ranging from 2 to 10 minutes.

Bottom Line

Honestly, while you can definitely give InMotion Hosting a try – they do offer a great 90-day money-back guarantee – it might not be the easiest hosting option for beginners. If you’re switching from a more expensive host, want a host with a good balance of features, and want plenty of time to get used to the new host, then InMotion is definitely a solid choice.

If you are interested in exploring better hosting options, we invite you to check out our list of recommended web hosting providers.

Fast Storage
imh-logo

InMotionHosting.com

+ Fast US-based Hosting
+ 90-day money-back
+ Detailed knowledge base
+ SSD storage on all plans

More info +
4.7
GOOD CHOICE
$3.19/mo$9.99
At inmotionhosting.com
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