InMotion Hosting is a popular US-based company that provides a wide range of web hosting solutions including personal hosting, business class hosting, dedicated servers and VPN hosting.
Todd Robinson and Sunil Saxena co-founded the company in 2001 while they were both working at another hosting company. The pair wanted to create a customer-centric hosting business with an open-source community and InMotion Hosting was born. While the company started out with just a single server, InMotion has grown tremendously since then and as of 2018, it has locations in Los Angeles, Virginia and Denver with over 300 employees on its payroll.
InMotion Hosting sets itself apart from the competition with its generous extras including a drag and drop website builder, basic backups, malware protection and unlimited ‘spam-safe’ email thanks to the company’s free SpamAssassin utility.
Now let’s take a closer look at the company's plans, features and pricing to see if InMotion is the right web host for your site.
Click here to go directly to the Inmotion website
Pricing
InMotion Hosting offers a number of web hosting products to choose from that appeal to both businesses and individuals.
To give you a better idea of how the company prices its various hosting services, WordPress Hosting starting at $7.25 a month, VPS Hosting starts at $19.99 a month, dedicated servers start at $105.69 a month and business hosting starts at just $5.99 a month. In this review though, we’ll be looking at InMotion’s business hosting in greater detail.
InMotion’s ‘Launch’ plan gives you a free domain, two websites and unlimited disk space, bandwidth and email for just $5.99 a month with its current promotion. Marketing tools, a security suite and free SSL are also included.
Next up is the ‘Power’ plan for $7.99 a month which raises the number of websites to six and offers twice the performance thanks to the fact that this plan has access to a greater level of server resources like RAM and CPU.
Finally, we have the ‘Pro’ plan for $13.99 a month which gives you access to unlimited websites, pro level support and four times the performance of InMotion’s Launch plan.
InMotion’s prices are quite competitive and if you check its site often, you’ll even find that the company does offer occasional discounts to help sweeten the deal. A 90-day money-back guarantee is also available to give you a chance to try out its web hosting on your own.
Signing up
From the first time you visit its website, InMotion presents its hosting products clearly with detailed prices and summary information. The company even provides a table to help you compare the different features available with each ot its plans. You can also compare InMotion’s prices to its competitors right on its site and an FAQ section is also available to help you answer any other questions you might have.
After clicking the Order Now button, the site asked us to choose a domain name for our site. InMotion gives you the option to register one domain for free with each of its plans or alternatively, you can use a domain you already have.
On the next page, we were able to choose whether our preferred hosting center was in either Washington D.C. or Los Angeles along with the option to have WordPress, Joomla, PrestaShop or BoldGrid preinstalled with our account.
Payment options are limited to credit or debit card, US purchase order or check. PayPal would have been a nice option to have but InMotion still offers more payment options than some web hosts we’ve seen.
The signup process was generally very fast but we were most impressed with the company’s honesty as InMotion did not try to upsell us on additional products or services with our hosting plan.
Creating a site
Onboarding is one area in which InMotion excels and after signing up, new users are presented with a list of common starter topics (new customer’s guide, pointing to our nameservers, etc) and can pick the ones they need. The company then emails you liinks to these guides to help you get started.
Next up we decided to give inMotion’s free website builder a try. Instead of being a standalone site builder like Weebly or other similar services, the company’s builder is actually a set of WordPress plugins called BoldGrid which required a separate installation.
Once we got BoldGrid up and running, the site builder was relatively easy-to-use and also contained some well-designed templates as well as drag-and-drop editing. BoldGrid also gives you access to the Softaculous framework where you can find, install and manage hundreds of popular applications for your site such as WordPress, phpBB, Joomla, Drupal, PrestaShop and more.
Since InMotion uses cPanel, you’ll be able to use all of the standard tools for managing your site including FTP, a File Manager, SSH and more. Experienced users will feel right at home but beginners will likely need to take some time to learn how cPanel works. This time won’t be wasted though, as many web hosts use cPanel and your skills are easily transferable.
Performance
When testing a web host’s performance, one of the first things we like to do is to take a look at the support options on hand as even experienced users can run into difficulties when configuring their site.
From the customer portal, we could search the support database and clicking on the Support button gave us links to useful guides, US-based support phone numbers, a form to create a support ticket and we could even launch a live chat window to speak directly with one of InMotion’s representatives.
The web support center offers a long list of all of the company’s resources and guides. There are sections for Tutorials, Product Guides, Frequently Asked Questions, a community forum and more. We were thoroughly impressed by the sheer amount of content that InMotion provides and its support articles were both relevant and up to date.
All of the company’s guides are searchable and each document showed the date it was uploaded on to give us a better idea of whether it would still be relevant or not. InMotion even has a comments section where customers can leave questions and get answers right from its staff.
To complete our performance tests, we used Bitcatcha and other benchmarks to evaluate our site speeds. We found that our connection was fast and that overall performance was well above-average.
Verdict and Conclusion
There is a great deal to like about InMotion’s web hosting services. The company gives its customers a wide range of plans and services to choose from without forcing unneeded extras or additional features on them as other web hosts often do.
InMotion’s US-based phone support is a nice touch as it allows users to discuss their problems with a real person. However, you may even find the answers you’re looking for in its extensive knowledgebase and if you’re prefer video guides, the company also has a YouTube channel which is updated regularly.
In addition to speedy web hosting, the free website builder and additional tools provided by InMotion give you everything you’ll need to build your first website or to keep your existing site up and running.
Regardless of whether you’re a beginner or an experienced website builder, InMotion has plenty to offer and a 90-day money-back guarantee is even available in case you’re not as pleased with its service as we were.
- Want to see the competition? Check out our guide to the best web hosting
