InMotion Hosting

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InMotion Hosting is a popular US-based company which provides a wide range of web hosting solutions, and has made our list of the best web hosting services.

Todd Robinson and Sunil Saxena co-founded InMotion in 2001 while working at another hosting company. The pair came up with the idea to start a customer-centric hosting business with an open-source community and InMotion Hosting was born. While it began with only a single server, InMotion has grown rapidly and as of 2018, the company has locations in Los Angeles, Virginia and Denver with over 300 employees now on its staff.

In addition to web hosting, the company also throws in a number of great extras including 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 performance to see if this web host is the right choice for your website.

Image credit: InMotion Hosting

Costs and what's covered

InMotion has a number of web hosting products to choose from 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 (about £6) a month, VPS Hosting starts at $19.99 (about £16) a month, dedicated servers start at $105.69 (about £95) a month and business hosting starts at just $5.99 (about £5) a month. However, in this review we’ll be looking at InMotion’s business hosting in much more detail.

InMotion’s ‘Launch’ plan gives you a free domain, two websites and unlimited disk space, bandwidth and email for just $5.99 (about £5) 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 (about £7) 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 (about £13) 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 competitive and if you check its site often, you’ll find that the company even offers occasional discounts to sweeten the deal. A 90-day money-back guarantee is just another compelling reason to try out the service for yourself.

Image credit: InMotion Hosting

Signing up

From when you first visit its website, InMotion presents its hosting products in a clear and straightforward way with detailed prices and summary information. The company provides a table that helps you compare the features available in each of its plans, and you can even compare InMotion’s prices to its competitors right from its site. There's also an FAQ section to help you find any other answers you may be looking for.

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

On the next page, we were able to choose whether we wanted our preferred hosting center to be in either Washington DC or Los Angeles, and we were given 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. We would have liked to see PayPal as an option in this list, but this is by no means a deal-breaker.

Overall, the signup process was fast and, more importantly, honest as InMotion did not try to upsell us by encouraging us to add additional products or services to our order.

Image credit: InMotion Hosting

Creating a site

One area where InMotion particularly excels is its onboarding process. 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 these guides to help you get started.

Next we decided to give InMotion’s free website builder a try. Instead of being a standalone website builder such as Weebly, the company’s site builder is actually a set of WordPress plugins called BoldGrid which required a separate installation.

However, once we got BoldGrid up and running, the site builder was reasonably easy-to-use and also contained some well-designed templates as well as drag-and-drop editing. InMotion’s free site builder may lack some of the integrations of its competitors but since it doesn’t have any page limits, you can build a large site without restrictions.

The company also provides access to the Sofaculous framework which allows you to find, install and manage hundreds of popular applications including WordPress, phpBB, Joomla, Drupal and PrestaShop.

Experienced users will appreciate the fact that InMotion allows you to use cPanel to manage your site as well as standard tools including FTP, a file manager, SSH and more at their disposal.

Image credit: InMotion Hosting

Performance

When it comes to testing a web host’s performance, one of the first things we do is to take a close look at its support system, and InMotion 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, US-based support phone numbers, a form to create a support ticket, and even the ability to launch a live chat window to speak directly with a company representative.

The web support center provided us with a long list of all of InMotion’s resources. There are sections for Tutorials, Product Guides, Frequently Asked Questions, a community forum and more. Few of the web hosts we’ve reviewed have the sheer amount of content that InMotion provides and we found its support articles to be useful, relevant and up to date.

All of its guides are searchable and each document even showed the date it was uploaded on to give us a better idea of whether or not it was still relevant. Surprisingly, there is even a comments section where customers can leave questions and get responses right from InMotion’s staff.

To complete our performance tests, we tested our site speeds using Bitcatcha and other benchmarks to find that our connection was fast and that overall performance was well above average.

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