InMotion Hosting Review 2024 | Feature-Rich and Business-Focused
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Overall rating
4.5 out of 5 stars
InMotion is the overall third best web hosting provider around with an overall hosting score of 4.5 out of 5. Known for its excellent features (particularly security features) InMotion came out best for photography in our research, getting a photography score of 4.7 out of 5.
While not quite on the same level overall as Bluehost, InMotion still has a lot to offer. And, depending on your needs, InMotion may be the best choice for you. InMotion is fantastic for larger websites, blogs, and ecommerce stores!
In doing our own research of the very best hosting providers, testing them, and comparing the data, we can say without a doubt which providers are best for what. InMotion came in third place overall, gaining an overall score of 4.5 out of 5. InMotion’s strengths in the types of hosting it offers are VPS, WordPress, and ecommerce hosting, and is the very best for photography hosting.
Who Is InMotion Best Suited For?
We recommend InMotion for photography sites due to its impresive performance in our photography hosting research. The security features that make it so good for photographers also make InMotion a fantastic choice for medium to large businesses.
Consider InMotion if you have a decent size budget, and want to create an ecommerce website or a website that has a lot of data and imagery. InMotion in our research earns an ecommerce score of 4.6 out of 5, placing it second after Bluehost.
Notably across InMotion plans you can expect some excellent features, fantastic performance, and pretty great help and support too.
Let’s take a closer look.
Pros and Cons
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Reliability & Performance
No matter what website large or small, reliability and performance are key to keeping you visible to online visitors. InMotion receives the best performance score for its dedicated hosting with an impressive 4.5 out of 5. In our research of other types of hosting, InMotion comes third place for performance in its VPS, WordPress, and ecommerce hosting plans — meaning your website will perform fairly optimally.
But performance encompasses a lot of different areas of running your website, when testing we usually look closely at:
- Performance Score
- Server Response Time
- Storage Space
- Bandwidth
- Cores (VPS, Dedicated)
- Threads (Dedicated)
- RAM (VPS, Dedicated)
While not the speediest host in the West, InMotion does offer unlimited bandwidth on its shared plan and 2TB on its cheapest VPS plan. On InMotion’s dedicated plans you can expect a range of 4 to a whopping 24 Cores, and 4GB-16GB of RAM.
If you’ve read our reviews, then you know one of the first things you need to determine is what kind of uptime a provider offers. This is key since you want your website to be going offline as little as possible.
Uptime refers to the amount of time your website is up and running online for users to browse. Most hosting providers tend to have an uptime of between 98% and 99.99%, with only two providers we’ve tested reaching that 100% uptime score.
Overall, InMotion scores a respectable 3 out of 5 for uptime in our ratings. To give context, IONOS was the only host in our ratings to score 5 out of 5, while other popular brands such as Bluehost and A2 Hosting also score 3 out of 5 for uptime. GoDaddy saw the worst uptime rating with 2 out of 5.
InMotion’s uptime across shared and VPS plans is 99.98%, based on our research. That’s a great amount of uptime, equal to less than three hours of downtime per year. Not bad at all. The uptime does decrease to 99.90% on dedicated and WordPress plans though, something to keep in mind.
InMotion has two U.S-based data centers, located on either coast, which are home to thousands of servers. Though InMotion’s server speeds are pretty great globally, they obviously have a quicker response time if you’re based in the U.S.
The only areas where InMotion’s server speeds fall below Google’s benchmark are in Asia and Australia. If that’s where you’re from, you may want to look at other providers.
Types of Hosting & Features
The first thing to explain is that InMotion has five different types of hosting services:
- Basic shared business hosting
- WordPress hosting
- Virtual private server (VPS) hosting
- Dedicated servers
- Reseller hosting
This is a decent range of plans to choose from – when assessing types of hosting in our research we awarded InMotion 4.3 out of 5 for this offering of different hosting options.
Most personal and small business sites will be fine with shared hosting – it’s the cheapest way to host your site, and has the capabilities to handle regular waves of traffic. InMotion’s shared features got a score of 4.1 out of 5, placing it in the middle of all the providers we tested.
InMotion’s most basic account is called Shared Business Hosting. This plan includes unlimited disk space and bandwidth, which is especially good. Unlimited bandwidth is quite common, but unlimited disk space for your site is not, at least at the basic level.
Disk space is essentially the amount of storage your website has. You need disk space to host everything on your site — the more pages, content and media you have, the more disk space you’ll need.
Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transmitted at once. Think of bandwidth like a bridge: only a certain amount of cars can cross over at any given time. If the bridge doesn’t have a limit on cars, it can allow as many as possible to cross at once.
InMotion also gives you a free SSL certificate, which in turn signals to Google and visitors that your site is safe. Its most basic shared plan also offers other security features like hack and malware protection — keeping your website safe and sound. Like other services, you’ll also get a free parked subdomain, and only on more expensive plans will you get a free domain, unlimited parked and unlimited subdomains.
There’s also a free backup manager available to create custom backup generation schedules. Plus some DDoS protection. The free backups are really nice, as not all hosts offer this for free. The DDoS protection is also interesting, though many of the larger web hosts are built to withstand any major denial of service attacks.
Like other services, InMotion also has its own drag-and-drop website builder for those who aren’t going down the WordPress route. You will be able to manage your hosting from InMotion’s cPanel. This is a widely used, intuitive dashboard that’s easy to get to grips with.
InMotion’s Advanced Features
If your requirements stretch a little further than shared hosting, there’s plenty of other options. InMotion’s managed VPS hosting, for example, comes with server management and automated security updates. InMotion received a pretty great VPS feature score of 3.9 out of 5, slowly improving in its features as the plan prices increase.
Dedicated hosting is another route to go down, but this is usually reserved for large websites or enterprise-level businesses. InMotion’s dedicated hosting feature score is 4.8 out of 5, the best of all the providers tested. It comes with multi-layer security, 20x faster loading times with free SSD, and your own launch assistant to get things off the ground.
Further Information:
Best Web Hosting Providers – find out who competes with InMotion for the title of best hosting service.
Customer Support
InMotion has a range of support options, including a knowledge base, phone, email, live chat, and support tickets. It also offers Skype chats, and dedicated hosting customers receive special one-to-one support too. Overall, InMotion scores 2.5 out of 5 for its support – better than providers like DreamHost, A2 Hosting, IONOS, and Hostinger, but not as helpful as hosts such as Bluehost, HostGator, or GoDaddy.
One of the main issues is that InMotion failed to impress us when we tested its customer support.
We tried and tested InMotion’s live chat, email, and knowledge base ourselves, to give you a real insight into its support services.
We found InMotion’s knowledge base a little tricky to use, at times information was hard to find and we were left without answers to our questions.
InMotion’s email support was polite and speedy, but too salesy for our liking. We disliked the pressure to sign up to a plan straight away, as well as InMotion’s frequent use of jargon:
“The sales assistants were polite and the responses were fast (within the same day of sending the original email). However, their email responses came across as very salesy and pushy, trying to make me sign up to a plan. I found this a bit annoying since I clearly explained in my email that I simply wanted a few questions answering, and nothing more!”
We had similar complaints with InMotion’s live chat. InMotion’s live chat is run by sales reps, meaning that while you certainly receive helpful and relevant answers, there’s also a noticeable pressure to sign up to a plan, which can distract from the answers they provide.
“I found the customer assistant quite pushy — he asked me three times whether I wanted to sign up to InMotion there and then, which definitely disrupted the flow of conversation. I think it’s odd that to simply find out some information about InMotion you have to speak to sales rep. No other hosting providers I’ve spoken to try to sign you up on the spot, so it’s a shame InMotion does this.”
On top of that, we found it difficult to get connected — one of our team had to wait 20 minutes, which is less than ideal.
That said, the quality of support you get does depend on the hosting plan you choose. On InMotion’s shared plans you’ll get the second best help and support on the market, as InMotion got a score of 4.6 out of 5, while VPS and dedicated plans offer the third best support scores of 4.4 and 4.5 out of 5 respectively. So it’s not all bad!
Pricing & Value for Money
InMotion’s shared hosting is split into three plans: Launch, Power and Pro. But there’s also a special discount plan just for Website Builder Expert readers called Core.
InMotion falls at the value for money hurdle with an overall value score of 2.9 out of 5. Across the board, InMotion is more expensive than its competitors, getting a value score of 2.4 for shared plans, 2 for dedicated, and 3.4 out of 5 for WordPress hosting.
Looking at InMotion’s shared plans, Core starts at $3.29/month, though this offer is only available for those who commit to a minimum of a year plan.
Power retails at $6.99/month for twelve-month signups and $17.99 thereafter. This plan represents the best value for money, allowing you to host an unlimited amount of websites with 4x faster performance.
If you’re unsure, why not just give it a go and see for yourself? InMotion has a 90-day, full money-back guarantee. So if you’re unsatisfied with the service you receive, you can get a full refund any time before the three month mark.
WordPress hosting – unsurprisingly, offers better performance for WordPress sites – has four tiers priced between $4.49/month and $16.99/month.
VPS hosting starts at $24.99/month (for the year) with both managed and self-managed services.
Dedicated hosting ranges from $89.99/month to $269.99/month across six plans. The three lower-priced plans have a promotion to double RAM (Random Access Memory), while all but the lowest allow you to choose which of InMotion’s data centers your server is based in.
If price is a big sticking point for you, you can get cheaper deals elsewhere. HostGator, for example, starts its shared hosting plans at $2.75/month and offers an excellent service.
Further Information:
Best VPS Hosting Providers – If you need a VPS hosting provider, look no further.
InMotion's Place in the Market
In our research on the market, InMotion didn’t come out on top as the poplar host. When we conducted market analysis, InMotion recieved an average 3.3 out of 5 for both dedicated and WordPress hosting, and even lower for its VPS and shared plans.
Despite not securing a top spot in the market, InMotion offers a lot of great deals when it comes to its shared and dedicated hosting plans. InMotion is designed for businesses looking to grow, and for personal sites who need great features.
InMotion is a Linux-only shop, which means it does not provide Windows-based servers. If you’re after a Windows server, then InMotion does not have what you need.
Due to its strong security and performance, however, InMotion is a great choice for photography websites, or online stores looking for scalable features.
- Best Ecommerce Hosting Providers: InMotion is the second best hosting provider when it comes to ecommerce hosting.
- InMotion vs Bluehost: See who came out on top when we pitted HostGator against InMotion.
- InMotion vs SiteGround: Another well-fought contest, but who won?
Summary: Is InMotion Right for You?
InMotion is an interesting service that offers more freebies at basic levels then you’ll find in the bigger hosting companies. But there is no ultra-cheap tier for beginner users.
If you’re willing to pay a little more, then you really do get what you pay for. You’ll be welcomed into a platform with more features than you can shake a stick at.
We’d recommend InMotion to any medium business looking for a hosting provider. Its cPanel provides an easy-to-use interface, and the unlimited disk space and bandwidth certainly shouldn’t be scoffed at. It’s a great choice for photography sites and online stores, but only if you have the budget for slightly higher pricing than some other hosts on the market.
All in all, InMotion is a high-performing, reliable option, and the third best around in the hosting sphere. That’s pretty impressive! If you can look past the price, it’s in a bracket with HostGator and Bluehost as the best providers on the market.
Further Information
Web Hosting Comparison Chart – InMotion not for you? Check out our detailed comparison chart for information on other providers.
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