InMotion Hosting Review

InMotion Hosting was co-founded by Todd Robinson and Sunil Saxena back in 2001 while the pair were working at another hosting company. Together they came up with the idea to create a customer-centric hosting business with an open-source community and InMotion Hosting was born. The company began with just a single server. InMotion has grown significantly since then. As of 2018, it has locations in Los Angeles, Virginia and Denver with more than 300 employees on its staff.

The company also throws in a number of great extras with its web hosting plans. These include a drag and drop website builder, basic backups of your site, malware protection and unlimited ‘spam-safe’ email thanks to its SpamAssassin utility.

So let’s take a closer look at InMotion’s plans, features and pricing to see if this web host is the right fit for your website.

Pricing

InMotion offers a number of web hosting products that cater to the needs of both businesses and individuals.

To give you a better idea of the company’s pricing, 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, we’ll be taking a closer look at InMotion’s business hosting plans.

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. It also includes Marketing tools, a security suite and free SSL.

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 offers competitive prices. If you check its site often, you’ll also find that the company even provides occasional discounts. A 90-day money-back guarantee is available with all of its products as well. This is just another compelling reason to give this web host a try for yourself.

Signing up with InMotion Hosting

When you first visit InMotion’s website, you’ll see that the company presents its web hosting products in a clear and straightforward way with detailed prices and summary information. The company even presents its different plans in a table to help you compare the features they offer. In fact, you can even compare InMotion’s prices to its competitors right from its site. In addition, there is a FAQ section to answer any questions you might have.

After clicking the Order Now button, the site asked us to choose a domain name for our website. InMotion gives you the option to register one domain for free with each of its plans or alternatively, you can choose to use one you already own.

On the next page, we were prompted to choose whether we wanted our preferred hosting center to be in either Washington D.C. or Los Angeles. Users also have the option to get WordPress, Joomla, PrestaShop or BoldGrid preinstalled with their account.

InMotion’s payment options are limited to credit or debit card, US purchase order or check. PayPal would have been a nice option to see here but this is by no means a deal breaker.

Overall, the signup process was relatively quick and most importantly, honest as InMotion did not try to encourage us to add additional products or services to our order.

Creating a site

Onboarding is one area where InMotion particularly 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. InMotion then emails you links to all of the guides you selected to help you get started.

From there we decided to try out the company’s free website builder. InMotion’s site builder is a set of WordPress plugins called BoldGrid which requires a separate installation, instead of being a standalone website builder like Weebly.

Once we got BoldGrid up and running though, the site builder was easy-to-use. BoldGrid also includes some well-designed templates as well as drag-and-drop editing. InMotion’s free site builder might not have all of the integrations that its competitors do but since there are no page limits, you’re free to build a large site without restrictions.

The company also gives you access to the Softaculous Framework. Softaculous allows you to find, install and manage hundreds of popular web apps such as wordPress, phpBB, Joomla, Drupal, PrestaShop and more.

Experienced users will appreciate how InMotion allows you to use cPanel to manage your site with standard tools like FTP, a file manager and SSH also at your fingertips.

InMotion Hosting Performance

One of the first things we look at when testing a web host’s performance are the support options on hand as even the most experienced users can run into difficulties. Thankfully, InMotion’s support system left us thoroughly impressed.

From the customer portal, we could search the support database and clicking on the Support button gave us links to useful guides. In addition, there are US-based support phone numbers, a form to create a support ticket and we were even able to launch a live chat window to speak to a company representative directly.

The web support center provided us with a long list of all of the InMotion’s resources. There are sections for Tutorials, Product Guides, Frequently Asked Questions, a community forum and more. It is rare that we see a web host that offers the sheer amount of content that InMotion provides. We also found its support articles to be useful and up to date.

Users can search all of the company’s guides and each document has the date it was uploaded which helps in determining whether or not it would be relevant. There is also even a comments section where customers can leave questions and get responses straight from InMotion’s own staff.

To complete our performance tests, we used Bitcatcha and other benchmarks to test our site speeds. We found that our connection was fast and 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. In addition, 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, InMotion gives 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