InMotion Hosting

I’ve been studying InMotion Hosting for a while as a part of my ongoing search for the best website hosting company. I want to improve the world of hosting as a whole through honest, unbiased reviews and to-the-point feedback.

For that reason, I purchased an InMotion shared hosting plan and set up a default WordPress installation. Then I measured its performance to see the basic response time and the behavior under load of the InMotion servers.

I also talked a few times with the support team, went through the terms of service, checked the pricing structure of this independent hosting provider to deliver an honest and detailed web hosting review.

Read through it and see whether InMotion Hosting is the best possible hosting provider for your site.

What Is InMotion Hosting?

InMotion Hosting is one of the biggest independent web hosting providers.

Independent in the world of web hosting means that the company is not owned by either GoDaddy or EIG. It is generally a good thing.

That’s not the only thing InMotion has going for it, though. Since its founding back in 2001, the host has exhibited an aura of true nerdiness and a strong focus on technical perfection – very admirable qualities in the business of hosting sites. Apparently, many thousand people think the same, given that InMotion hosts some 350,000 domains in its two data centers.

As a result, InMotion Hosting is an appealing choice for technically-savvy users, but my careful examination of the backend and the control panel showed a very intuitive and easy-to-use interface.

Additionally, the company touts its own horn big time, claiming to have the best technical support out there.

Here’s a bit of foreshadowing for you: the claim is not totally unfounded.

But the support is not everything. One might argue that if you have excellent infrastructure, the support might not even come into play.

Does InMotion deliver where it matters the most?

Does it have the speed and reliability it advertises so heavily?

I will let the numbers speak.

The Essentials – InMotion Uptime, Speed, Support

Uptime, speed, and a reliable support team are the foundations of a seamless online presence.

1. Reasonable Uptime – 99.93%

Without a sliver of doubt, uptime is the deciding factor when it comes to web hosting. That’s the very essence of the service you pay for: to have your website online.

InMotion Hosting used to promise 99.999% uptime across the board and backed up the promise with free hosting for Business plan users. I was very curious to test whether the Business plan is really as reliable as advertised, which is why I produced my credit card and purchased it.

Normally, for these unbiased in-depth reviews, I go for the medium plan offered as I feel it is more relevant to the majority of people searching for a new host but made an exception here.

After a few weeks of monitoring (which is a short period of time, indeed), I noticed that my site had not been online the promised time.

Just like over at HostGator, the only valid proof of a site being down are the server logs and not any third-party monitoring tools, like the StatusCake reporting I am using to craft my objective website hosting reviews.

Unlike HostGator, though, InMotion doesn’t provide a way to check for yourself the uptime of your site and must contact support instead.

Which is what I duly did.

After over three years of constant real-time monitoring, the uptime remains excellent. It averages 99.93%, which is great news, but it doesn't quite hit the heights once promised.

In any case, InMotion doesn't extend any uptime guarantee for shared hosting right now. That's a bit odd, but the fact that it is a powerful and reliable host remains.

Average Uptime 2018 – 99.94%

Average Uptime 2019 - 99.90%

Average Uptime 2020 - 99.93%

Average Uptime 2021 - 99.97%

Verdict: Excellent uptime with the occasional hiccup.

2. Average Speed

• Decent Response Time – 0.55s (11th)
• Slow Fully Loaded Time – 1.21s (12th)
• Quick Under Load – 0.67s (5th)

Speed is the second most important characteristic of the best web hosting providers (or the worst, for that matter).

The longer it takes for a page to load, the worse its ranking with search engines becomes mostly because end users would be leaving it very quickly. Nobody likes slow pages.

Nobody.

The speeds my benchmark tests clocked don’t look particularly impressive, but they are not bad at all. The fully loaded time falls right in the middle of the pack.

InMotion has a proprietary product called Max Speed Zones™, which is supposed to deliver the same loading speed across the globe.

I took my time and tested my site from Mumbai, Syndey, Stockholm and, sadly, the Max Speed Zones simply didn’t deliver.

The further away from LA my tests were, the more the loading time grew.

Still, the trend over the past few months has been positive, with InMotion loading times dropping significantly. If this continues, the company is bound to climb up the rankings here at the Hosting Tribunal.

The area the InMotion server excelled in was performance under stress. When I sent 50 virtual users, the hosting machine handled their abuse (50 users tend to create multiple simultaneous connections) with impressive resource distribution.

This alone shows that InMotion has a solid backend that can serve content to a growing number of visitors without breaking a sweat. Some other hosts clock in impressive response times, but under load the struggle quickly becomes very real.

All in all, it seems that if you are looking for a reliable US web hosting company, InMotion Hosting would be among the top choices, especially if your site drives a lot of traffic.

Verdict:  Excellent under load, good loading times for US users.

3. Excellent Support and The Best Support Knowledge Base

InMotion Hosting claims to have the best support team in the web hosting business. That certainly is a bold claim, especially when the likes of SiteGround, A2, and DreamHost are around.

Still, InMotion has something no other host offers: free Skype calls.

How awesome is that?

When I ordered my advanced hosting package to test and play with for this review, InMotion Hosting extended an uptime guarantee. Only a couple of months after purchase the ambitious 99.999% uptime SLA was breached.

I chatted with a tech support agent who took his time to check whether my site had really been down for as long as I was claiming. He wasn’t overly familiar with the ToS (I guess he doesn’t have a site hosted with InMotion) but was willing to help. He checked with a system administrator before transferring me over to the billing team.

For some reason, the billing agent wasn’t quite sure what was going on but figured it out rather quickly, and I ended up with a month of free hosting.

Good times!

I talked also with a sales rep to clarify some of the plan details (more below) and received help promptly.

Overall, the support interactions were pleasant and useful, albeit a bit slow. In all fairness, the long waiting time was communicated well in advance, which is all you can ask for when the support lines are swarmed.

However good the support might be, it pales in comparison with the stunning self-help center of InMotion. It is so good and comprehensive, full of text and video tutorials that I was resorting to it many times when I was troubleshooting as a senior support agent at another company a few years ago.

The InMotion knowledge base is an international treasure!

Verdict: Very good support with multiple channels of communication and absolutely superb knowledge base.

The Pros of InMotion Hosting

InMotion Hosting has a stable market presence and continues to improve its infrastructure. It is a company that tries to develop quality hosting solutions.

1. Generous Plans

All shared hosting plans come with unlimited bandwidth, storage, and email accounts. The terms of service indicate that excessive use could cause a warning and eventual action from the system administrators, but doesn’t go into specifics.

That’s why I contacted the sales team and asked what constitutes excessive usage. The answer wasn’t very clear, but I was assured I can use as much space as needed.

While disk size is not limited but the number of files is. No shared hosting account can have more than 50,000 files. Truth be told, this is not all that many files for the Pro (the biggest) plan, which allows for unlimited sites to be hosted. In reality, with a 50,000 file cap, you cannot have too many sites. To put things in perspective, the default WordPress installation comes with well over 2,000 files.

The unlimited bandwidth, on the other hand, is unlimited but I checked how many visitors the shared plans can serve without suffering performance issues.

Turns out, the InMotion shared hosting setup can handle between 500-800 page views per hour. That’s about 400,000 page views per month (going for the lower estimate) which is not bad. Pageviews don’t equate to unique visitors, but the number is quite solid.

Overall, the plans are generous, even though the file limitations could be felt.

2. Powerful Site Builder

InMotion Hosting is the developer of BoldGrid, which is one of the most powerful website builders at the moment. It works atop WordPress and can create practically any type of site.

It is not without its drawbacks, but that can be said about absolutely every site-building platform there is. The main issue with site builders is the extra code needed to make them work. Bloated coding can impact site speed and performance.

BoldGrid is relatively lean in this regard, largely thanks to the splendid templates it provides.

If you are looking for a site-building tool in a self-hosted environment, BoldGrid is among the best choices.

BoldGrid is included in all shared hosting plans.

3. Excellent WordPress Host

InMotion Hosting lagged behind other top hosting providers in creating dedicated WordPress hosting packages, but even the shared hosting solutions of the company deliver quality.

The server setup is well-optimized to work with WordPress. Small wonder there, as InMotion developed its own site builder that works on top of WordPress.

Consequently, the support team are WordPress experts and can help way beyond basic configuration issues. They’d better be, as all shared plans come with WordPress automatically installed, with some useful basic plugins like Jetpack and Akismet.

I told you that initially InMotion was after technically savvy users and the presence of WP-CLI (CLI stands for command-line interface) under all three shared plans confirms that.

If you plan on using WordPress, opting for a shared hosting plan to get you going makes a lot of sense financially and technically. Once your site grows sufficiently, you can consider switching to a dedicated WordPress package. InMotion started offering those as well, and they seem very solid but cost more than regular shared hosting.

Overall, InMotion Hosting is one of the best WordPress hosting providers for 2022.

4. 90-day Money Back Guarantee

InMotion Hosting exhibits confidence typical of the best hosting companies and then some. The industry standard money-back guarantee is 30 days, with the occasional hosting provider that ups the ante to 45 days.

InMotion goes bravely where no other host has ever gone before, offering the unseen 90-day money-back guarantee.

You might think that this is marketing overkill but that’s not the case. 30 days, especially the first 30 days, are not much at all in the life of a new website. A month is a very short period of time to generate any meaningful traffic and to test your site properly.

With proper outreach efforts, content strategy, and good SEO practices, in 90 days you can start seeing some meaningful traffic coming in. This is when the true value of the hosting company shows, as even a personal computer can serve a site with meaningful speed to one or two users.

5. Stellar Infrastructure

InMotion Hosting runs two data centers, one on the East and one on the West Coast of the USA. They are highly secured facilities with reserve power supplies, cool cooling, and all that jazz. The best part is that they are connected directly to Tier 1 network providers that guarantee excellent bandwidth and strong DDoS protection.

Actually, I might have spoken too quickly. There is another best part.

Equipped with SSDs across the board, the InMotion data centers rely on RAID-6 configuration for unprecedented redundancy. Without delving into the RAID technicalities, suffice to say that RAID-6 setup can sustain complete disk failure TWICE.

Mind, disk failurе and data redundancy are not backups, so you should always keep a recent copy of your website.

Or not.

Because, you know, InMotion Hosting keeps one for you.

6. Free Backups

All shared hosting plans include free backups. They might not be daily, as is the case with Scalahosting, but 36 hours is a reasonable frequency. Your site should be 10GB or smaller for this feature to work.

Besides the automatic backups, InMotion Hosting puts in your hands the fully-functional backup tool native to cPanel. Most other respectable hosts have it enabled as well, but InMotion goes the extra step to encourage you to use it through a simple but informative tutorial.

As the saying goes, backup the user data once, he’ll have an instance of it; teach a user how to back his own data, he’ll never lose a file again.

Amen.

7. +400 Apps and Freebies

Get all the apps!

You won’t see many hosting providers, even the best ones reviewed here, offering such a functional opulence. Mostly all other hosting companies I have reviewed come with the standard Softaculous 1-click installations packages of 80-100 applications.

InMotion, with its geek-oriented approach, goes for the whopping 400 installs across all plans.

To accommodate some more complex applications, the hosting provider includes PostgreSQL databases, besides the standard MySQL.

All InMotion plans can use free SSL. Helpful addition for those who wish to run an ecommerce gig.

Another helpful freebie is the $150 worth of ad credits all shared plans can benefit from. To put it in context, $150 can buy you hosting for two years!

Speaking of buying things, you get a free domain name too.

8. Migration

You can bring up to three cPanel sites for free to InMotion. Or rather, the InMotion Hosting support team can bring them over for you, free of charge.

Free migrations are very useful because the receiving server often is set up in a slightly different fashion than the originating one. Different enough to cause glitches, malfunctioning pages, and whatnot. The skillful inbound migration team should know how to avoid any downtime and any unwanted website behavior.

The InMotion support team promises just that.

9. Fast Backend

The control panel or AMP, as it is dubbed over at InMotion Hosting, is nothing special, but the layout is functional enough. Its most impressive characteristic is the very fast response time, which translates to a very fast cPanel and WordPress admin area as well.

Everything loads lightning fast in all three areas, making all aspects of the site management a much more pleasant experience.

10. Positive User Reviews

InMotion Hosting commands ferocious loyalty, as evident by the majority of user reviews. Geared toward more technically-oriented users, the hosting provider receives an acknowledgment for its superb infrastructure and numerous developer tools.

In fairness, there are a few complaints about InMotion Hosting, mostly about billing issues and unhelpful support.

All the same, the US-based host has a lot to offer and it is appreciated by its customers.

The Cons of InMotion Hosting

Occasionally, InMotion makes you stop and think twice. I touched on several of the issues I encountered while testing and probing the InMotion services for this detailed hosting review. The company is not perfect, and while none of the downsides is a serious offender you should know where the service lacks so that you can make an informed decision whether this is the best website hosting option for you.

1. 50,000 File Limit

I mentioned that the 50.000 files cap is not a serious hurdle for the smallest and even the medium plan, in the majority of cases. However, carrying over the restriction to the Pro plan is a bit too much. People normally purchase bigger hosting plans to have more space and to accommodate larger sites.

This limit makes little sense.

2. Potentially Slow Account Activation

Often, the InMotion security team checks new customers by calling them and asking for verification, especially if the new client resides outside the US. They are polite and don’t ask anything unreasonable (a passport would do), but it is something to have in mind.

There is a good chance that your account will not be active right after the payment is cleared. The company does well to communicate this so it doesn’t come as an unwanted surprise.

Do We Recommend InMotion?

Yes, InMotion is a very solid choice for US-based sites with moderate to high traffic demands.

The response times my benchmark tests report are not that great, but they are not bad either. The company has a very adept support team and superb knowledgebase.

InMotion is an excellent place to grow your online presence, as the host boasts a splendid reputation when it comes to virtual and dedicated servers.

Indeed, on average, its products are slightly more expensive, but you get what you pay for.

InMotion Hosting at a Glance