Rat Race Armaggeddon: InMotion Web Hosting Review

Want to jump straight to the answer? InMotion is a great choice and one of the most underrated web hosts out there.

InMotion is one of the most reliable web hosting providers on the market today.

In fact, I ranked InMotion as the best web hosting for small business on my list of best web hosting providers.

Visit InMotion Hosting

Normally $7.99/month
Free domain and SSL certificate
Free and unlimited email
90-day money back guarantee

Get a 57% discount

That’s because of their outstanding customer support and dedication to providing a great hosting service.

But what exactly do they do well? And where could they improve?

This extensive guide covers all of InMotion’s hosting plans, the benefits of using InMotion, and some other considerations to keep in mind while making this decision.

The Benefits of Using InMotion Web Hosting

90-day guarantee

I won’t consider using any web hosting service that doesn’t offer a money-back guarantee.

Not because I plan to use it, but because I’m hesitant to pay for something that the company doesn’t stand behind.

In web hosting, 30 days is the industry standard. I’ve even seen a handful of providers that offer a 45-day or 60-day money-back promise.

InMotion blows the standard out of the water with their 90-day money-back guarantee.

InMotion Money Back Guarantee

That means they really believe in their product. So much so that they’re willing to lose money on it.

It’s worth noting that the money-back promise only applies to the business, VPS, and reseller plans. Plus, you need to sign up for a minimum of six months to get this benefit.

All month-to-month plans and dedicated servers have a 30-day guarantee, which is still good enough for me.

Outstanding support

Customer support is one of the most important elements of a good web host.

That’s because any issues like cyberattacks and server crashes means loss revenue and traffic for you.

You never want to need it. But when you do, you realize how worth it customer support is.

So if at any time you have a question, problem, or need some sort of assistance, it’s comforting to know that the InMotion team will be there to help you out.

InMotion offers support through live chat, phone, and email. In my experience, you won’t have to wait more than a couple of minutes to be connected with an agent.

If you’d rather learn on your own, InMotion has online tutorials and a community forum as well.

InMotion Tutorials

There are more than 3,000 articles on their platform with a wide range of categories to choose from.

Above-average uptime rates

Uptime is arguably the most important factor for web hosting.

If people try to visit your site and it’s down, that means a hit to your bottom line.

InMotion’s uptime is good. It’s not the best that we’ve seen, but it’s certainly not the worst. For shared plans, you can expect about 99.95% uptime rates.

If you’re paying for a VPS or dedicated server, the uptime will be better. But overall, they still come in above industry averages and it’s a reliable web host. You won’t have to worry about your site going down for extended periods at a time.

Fast page loading speed

In addition to outstanding customer support and specialty VPS plans, InMotion is known for its speed.

Speed is crucial for all websites, but it’s especially important for businesses.

If the site takes too long to load, it’s going to frustrate your customers. Frustrated customers abandon your site.

Furthermore, page loading speed has a huge impact on your SEO ranking as well. Google rewards sites that load quickly.

The shared web hosting plans are sufficient, but you’ll definitely want to consider a VPS plan if you want blazing fast loading times.

Freebies

I’ve written reviews in the past about web hosting providers that offer low pricing and then get you to pay extra with add-ons and upsells. InMotion includes more value with the basic packages compared to other web hosts on the market.

Here’s a quick look at just some of the shared hosting freebies, which are available even for entry-level plans.

InMotion Freebies

Furthermore, VPS plans come with free site transfers as well. Competitors typically charge $100, at a minimum, for this service.

While a freebie shouldn’t make or break your decision to use one web host over another, it’s a good way to add value to your plan.

Enhanced security

Unfortunately, cyber crime is something that every website owner needs to be aware of. You can’t have the “it won’t happen to me” mentality.

Most web hosts will offer some form of security protection for their clients, but I think InMotion really goes above and beyond with their plans.

By partnering with third-party security companies, InMotion’s plans help prevent DDoS and brute force attacks against your website. So you may not need to add extra layers of security, which will save you some money in the long run.

Other Considerations

No web hosting provider is perfect, and InMotion is no exception. Here are a few other considerations to keep in mind when deciding on InMotion.

High contract renewals

Your initial contracts with InMotion will be the cheapest. When your plan renews, expect to pay full price for their services.

This is typical with all web hosting services though. There are only a handful of web hosting providers that don’t increase the rates after the first contract term—and they aren’t usually that good.

So how much more do you have to pay? It depends on the plan. For example, the Pro shared plan promotional rate is just 8% lower than the renewal rate. But the highest-tier VPS plan is more than 50% off.

There is no avoiding this. Just make sure you understand what your rate will be when it comes time for you to pay full price. Your promotional rate won’t last forever.

Delayed verifications

As a new customer, you won’t have instant access to your plan. For security reasons, all customers need to be verified over the phone, which delays the sign up process.

I’ve even heard of some instances where InMotion has also required new customers to provide a photo identification card, although this is not a standard part of the verification procedure.

But if you look on the bright side, at least you know that InMotion is going above and beyond to ensure security. However, this can be a potential turn off for some clients, especially for people located outside of the US or Canada.

Plan restrictions

If you have a shared hosting plan, you’re going to have some restrictions. While InMotion advertises free backups, it’s only for websites smaller than 10 GB.

Furthermore, file restoration can only happen once every four months. There’s a fee for those of you who need this on a more frequent basis.

These types of restrictions will disappear for higher-tiered plans, like VPS and dedicated server hosting.

Compare InMotion Web Hosting Plans

I already mentioned that InMotion is a top choice for small business web hosting. They have plans to fit the needs of both business and personal websites of all shapes and sizes:

Shared Hosting
VPS Hosting
Dedicated Hosting
WordPress Hosting
Reseller Hosting

We’ll take a closer look at the pricing and features of each plan so you can figure out which one is the best for your website.

Shared hosting

InMotion’s basic shared plans are geared toward small businesses. They refer to these options as Business Essential Hosting.

Here’s an overview of the three shared plans.

InMotion’s pricing is very straightforward and transparent. What you see is what you get. These are all great choices for static websites, custom applications, and any data-driven CMS.

All of the Business Essential plans also come with a free drag-and-drop site builder, which is a great bonus for those of you who are planning to build a new site from scratch.

You’ll also benefit from a free domain, data backups, free SSD drive, SSH access, and a free SSL.

InMotion’s shared plans are supported by multiple languages so you can develop your site in Ruby, PHP, MySQL, and more.

Even with these entry-level hosting plans, InMotion lets you choose your data center. With any Business Essential plan, you’ll have unlimited disk space and bandwidth.

These price points are very affordable, especially considering all of the features, benefits, and freebies. They are definitely a tier above the cheapest web hosting plans on the market, but the cost is still reasonable.

InMotion offers other shared options specifically for WordPress and website building. But for similar pricing points, you won’t get unlimited storage or bandwidth. There are also restrictions for how many sites you can host.

That’s why I lean toward the Business Essential plans with the drag-and-drop builder included for anyone who needs it.

VPS hosting

For those of you who are looking for more power, customization, and additional resources, then look no further than the VPS plans from InMotion.

All InMotion virtual private servers come with the following features:

Free site migrations
cPanel and WHM included
Launch assist
Unlimited domains and websites
Advanced firewall protection
Unlimited email accounts
Unlimited MySQL databases

The VPS plans are ecommerce optimized and offer optional root access, for those of you who want that added control over your virtual server.

Most of you probably want a hands-off hosting experience. In this case, InMotion offers fully managed VPS services with each plan as well.

The fully managed services include things like server monitoring and data migration.

I’d recommend the VPS plans for websites that experience high volumes of traffic with the occasional traffic spike. Maybe your small business runs limited time sales or deals on a monthly basis that draws more people to your site at those times.

In this case, with just one click you can always add additional resources to increase power and speed to meet those traffic needs.

Developers and IT teams may be interested in the cloud VPS plans from InMotion. These unmanaged plans are ideal for quickly building, deploying, and scaling applications.

Virtual private servers are best for small to medium-sized businesses that are continuing to grow. If you’re just running a small personal blog, then you’ll be fine with the shared plans.

Dedicated servers

Dedicated servers are the top of the line in web hosting. You’ll only need to consider these options if you need enterprise-level resources.

Here’s a look at how much it’ll run you with InMotion’s offerings:

Essential — Starting at $105.69 per month
Advanced — Starting at $166.59 per month
Elite — Starting at $238.99 per month
CC-500 — Starting at $340.99 per month
CC-1000 — Starting at $414.49 per month
CC-2000 — Starting at $519.49 per month

As you can see, there’s a pretty wide price range here. If you select the Essential, Advanced, or Elite plans, then you can customize your InMotion dedicated server.

As expected, any changes will impact the price. In the example above, I upgraded the memory and SSD drives. This raised the Essential plan price from $105.69 to $161.85 per month.

I’d rather customize one of those first three plans as opposed to paying over $500 per month for the top dedicated server. In most cases, you probably won’t need that one.

I don’t have any issues with InMotion’s dedicated servers, but this provider specializes in VPS and shared hosting for small businesses. If I wanted a dedicated server, I’d look elsewhere. Check out my guide on the best dedicated hosting plans if you want to review some other options.

WordPress Hosting

WordPress hosting is web hosting that’s optimized for and tailored to—you guessed it—the WordPress content management system.

Like their other offerings, InMotion offers a wide variety of plans with a robust set of offerings for each.

All of their WordPress hosting plans include the following:

Unlimited bandwidth
Unlimited email
WordPress installed
Security suite
Marketing tools
Free domain
Free SSL

The prices aren’t half bad but you’ll definitely find cheaper hosting elsewhere.

The plans also come with unlimited professional email addresses. That means you can create as many domain-based emails as you want. Very helpful if you’re looking to add a little professionalism to your business.

They also include an in-house website migration team who will move your website to InMotion to you. That price is built in with each plan, so it’s pretty much free!

They’re so confident you’ll like their WordPress hosting that they offer a money-back guarantee.

Reseller Hosting

Reseller hosting is very niche-specific. It’s made for web developers, designers, and agencies who want to squeeze some additional revenue out of their existing clients.

So if you fall into that category, you might want to consider InMotion’s reseller hosting solutions.

InMotion offers both shared and VPS reseller plans, totaling six different options:

R-1000S — Starting at $15.39 per month
R-2000S — Starting at $21.99 per month
R-3000S — Starting at $30.24 per month
Reseller VPS-1000 — Starting at $41.64 per month
Reseller VPS-2000 — Starting at $62.84 per month
Reseller VPS-3000 — Starting at $89.94 per month

All plans come with a free WHMCS license to make it easy for you to manage automated billing for your clients.

InMotion also offers assisted setups and migrations. This is helpful whether you’re starting from scratch or migrating your existing client sites to InMotion. InMotion’s Launch Assist will ensure that the onboarding process goes as smooth as possible.

I’d recommend the reseller VPS plans. The traditional reseller plans are ok, but they don’t come with scalable dedicated resources, root access, or a WordPress optimized stack. Those plans also aren’t ideal for large deployments.

Even if you’re only managing a handful of sites right now, I’d still go with a VPS reseller option. The starting price is very affordable and the benefits are significantly better.

For a more in-depth analysis of InMotion’s reseller plans and some other options, check out my most recent list of the best reseller hosting plans on the market today.