Because the web hosting industry is so crowded, it takes a unique service to stand out from the crowd. With its many capable offerings, InMotion Hosting fits into this category. With its reasonably priced and well-rounded shared, dedicated, reseller, virtual private server (VPS), and WordPress plans, the web hosting service has a rich feature set that satisfies many personal and business-related web hosting needs. It also has excellent uptime and customer service. As a result, InMotion Hosting has joined the ranks of top competitors like DreamHost, HostGator, and Hostwinds as our top pick.
Shared Web Hosting
It is not necessary to spend a lot of money to create a website. Check out shared hosting if you want to try your hand at low-cost web hosting. With shared hosting, your website shares a server with many other websites, dividing the server cost and resources. Shared web hosting isn’t very powerful, but it’s a good option if you don’t anticipate a lot of traffic on your site.
Four Linux-based shared web hosting plans are available from InMotion. The Lite plan ($4.99 per month with an annual subscription, renewing at $8.99 per month) is the most basic. It includes 10GB of SSD storage, a single email account, and unlimited monthly data transfers, as well as the ability to host one website. The Launch plan ($6.99 per month with an annual subscription, renewing at $11.99 per month) expands on this by allowing you to create two websites, 10 email accounts, and 50GB of file storage.
The Power plan, which includes 50 websites, 100GB of SSD storage, and 50 email accounts, is the next rung on the ladder. Its annual plan is the same as the Launch plan, but it renews at a monthly rate of $15.99. With 100 websites, 200GB of SSD storage, and unlimited email accounts, Pro outperforms Power. Unfortunately, Pro is the only shared hosting tier offered by InMotion that does not require you to sign an annual contract. It starts at $19.99 per month and goes up to $24.99 per month if you commit for a year ($15.99 per month, renewing at $24.99 per month). On the plus side, all shared hosting plans from InMotion Hosting come with unlimited monthly data transfers, free SSL, and a free domain name.
Nonetheless, HostGator remains our top choice for shared web hosting. With each plan, InMotion’s competitor includes unlimited email, storage, and monthly data transfers, as well as the option of Linux or Windows-based servers. For sites that have software that runs on the ASP.NET framework, the Windows option is important.
VPS Web Hosting
VPS hosting is more powerful than shared hosting in terms of processing power. This is because, unlike shared hosting, your site is hosted on a server with far fewer sites competing for resources. In addition, web hosts guarantee that your site will have a certain amount of resources. VPS hosting is therefore more expensive than shared hosting, but it is a far more powerful and reliable system. VPS hosting is similar to having your own apartment; you’ll have neighbors, but they won’t be hogging your bandwidth to the same extent that shared hosting roommates can.
InMotion Hosting provides both managed and unmanaged cloud VPS web hosting services. Managed VPS plans start at $56.99 per month (or $41.99 per month with a one-year plan), while unmanaged, scalable cloud VPS plans begin at $5 per month. The managed offerings come with respectable top-level specs, such as 8GB of RAM, 7TB of monthly data transfers, a single dedicated IP, and up to 140GB of SSD storage. Also included are unlimited email, domains, websites, and MySQL databases. For a hefty $160 per month, the scalable cloud VPS offers 32GB of RAM, 8 CPU cores, 640GB of SSD storage, and 7TB of monthly data transfer. InMotion has a good VPS offering, but it’s not as robust as Hostwinds, our top pick for VPS hosting.
VPS plans from Hostwinds start at $4.49 per month for 1GB of RAM, 30GB of disk space, unlimited monthly data transfers, and unlimited email. Its prices range from $247.69 per month for 96GB of RAM, 750GB of disk space, unlimited monthly data transfers, and unlimited email to $247.69 per month for 96GB of RAM, 750GB of disk space, unlimited monthly data transfers, and unlimited email. Hostwinds allows you to expand your business.
Dedicated Web Hosting
Dedicated hosting places your website on its own server, allowing it to fully utilize the system’s capabilities. To put it another way, you don’t have to share your server with your roommates because you have the entire house to yourself. As a result, dedicated hosting is a very powerful web hosting service. If you expect a lot of traffic to your website, this is something you should look into. Dedicated servers should be used for mission-critical sites that cannot go down (or slow down).
InMotion Hosting’s dedicated and Bare Metal plans are a strong choice for large websites, having recently been upgraded to the latest Intel Xeon technology and now offering more Linux options (including CentOS 7/8, Debian 9/10, Ubuntu 18.04/20.04, and OpenSUSE). You can get up to 4TB of storage, 25TB of monthly data transfers, and an impressive 192GB of RAM for $139.99 per month on the company’s dedicated web servers. If you require even higher specifications, consider InMotion’s custom build services, which allow you to plan, build, and customize the hardware to your exact specifications.
Although InMotion offers good dedicated web hosting plans, AccuWeb, our top pick for dedicated hosting, offers better all-around packages. AccuWeb offers dedicated hosting plans that start at $99 per month and include up to 8TB of SSD storage and 512GB of RAM. They also have a monthly data transfer capacity of 20TB. For added flexibility, you can choose between Linux and Windows-based servers.
WordPress Web Hosting
WordPress is one of the most well-known names in web hosting, as it powers roughly 30% of the internet’s content management system. If you need WordPress hosting, InMotion has a number of options. Your digital footprint will be stored on a server dedicated solely to WordPress sites. In terms of load times and reliability, this is a huge benefit. Your WordPress website is part of a WordPress-only ecosystem, which has a number of advantages. Cache, PHP workers, and other server settings are all set to the WordPress-recommended specifications. You won’t have to worry about hosting your website on a server where one website runs Concrete5 and another runs Joomla. WordPress has created a world of harmony, speed, and reliability for all websites.
The content management system is preinstalled on InMotion Hosting’s Linux-based, WordPress-optimized servers, which also include website staging and automatic software updates. InMotion Hosting goes out of its way to keep your third-party WordPress plug-ins up to date. It also adds a custom-configured NGINX stack and an in-house caching system to your WordPress installation.
WP-1000S ($7.99 per month with an annual plan, $10.99 per month after that) includes 50GB of solid-state drive storage, one website hosting, and unlimited email and monthly data transfers. WP-2000S (also $7.99 per month, renewing at $15.99 per month) adds a 100GB SSD drive, Jetpack Personal, and the ability to host two websites to that base. The WP-3000S and WP-4000S round out the top two plans. WP-3000S gives you three websites, 150GB of storage, and unlimited email for $13.99 per month with an annual plan. There are no month-to-month subscription options available for the first three plans.
The WP-4000S package includes six websites, 200GB of storage, Jetpack Professional, and a dedicated IP for $25.99 per month ($22.99 per month with an annual plan, renewing at $36.99 per month). Finally, there are WordPress VPS plans, which are priced similarly to the managed VPS plans mentioned above. These are top-of-the-line packages that come with unlimited sites, dedicated resources, a dedicated IP, up to 140GB of storage, and 7TB of monthly data transfer, all fully managed by in-house experts.
Finally, InMotion provides WordPress Dedicated hosting. It offers managed hosting on a dedicated server, including up to 15 dedicated IPs, website migration, and the option to add a software RAID, starting at $159.99 per month for a month-to-month plan ($139.99 per month for an annual plan, renewing at $169.99 per month).
A2 is, however, the undisputed WordPress hosting champion. At each tier, our award-winning service uses Linux-powered servers with unlimited storage and monthly data transfers. It also has a number of managed options for those who want their sites to be handled with care.
Reseller Web Hosting
Check out InMotion’s reseller hosting packages if you want to get into web hosting but don’t want to set up your own servers or worry about providing the bandwidth for them. The Linux-based plans (which start at $26.59 per month) include up to 6TB of monthly bandwidth, unlimited email, and multiple cPanel accounts (depending on your account). InMotion Hosting also offers customer service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The plans are reasonable, though they don’t compare to Liquid Web’s robust offerings, which are our top pick for award-winning services. Liquid Web provides unlimited email and storage, as well as a choice of Linux or Windows servers.
When the sign-up confirmation page stated that an account specialist would contact us by phone to complete the setup process, we were a little skeptical; we couldn’t log in until that happened. The call was, however, prompt and helpful, and we were not pressured to make additional purchases. The representative emailed the appropriate welcome materials after asking a few questions about the type of website we wanted to build.
The service’s website builder requires a separate login and password, but otherwise, creating a website is a simple process. You can choose from three different site types: site, blog, or photo gallery. You can choose from a variety of themes and colors, as well as the types of pages you want to include on your site, using the website builder. You can add special pages like Flash Intro and eShop in addition to standard pages like Contact Us and About Us. Then, in your pages, you can include a map, poll, RSS reader, or script module. The website builder, on the other hand, does not produce particularly attractive pages; our site appeared to be out of date. Alternatively, you can build your site with WordPress.
E-Commerce and Security
InMotion Hosting offers a wide range of e-commerce services, though payment options are limited. For a more robust store, you can also download OpenCart or PrestaShop (both free). We tried OpenCart, which has a comprehensive dashboard for tracking customers and sales as well as a variety of shipping and payment options. Other hosts, like iPower and JustHost, charge an additional monthly fee for e-commerce. E-commerce is only available on the Power and Pro plans, unfortunately. It’s not uncommon for web hosts to save e-commerce for their more robust services. Are you really going to try to make money with a Lite plan that only gives you one email account?
InMotion has a number of security features, including free remote backup for accounts under 10GB. A free Sucuri Security plugin can be used to scan WordPress sites for malware and other security risks. McAfee spam and virus protection is also available for email accounts (starting at $1.39 per month). SSL certificates with a dedicated IP address are available for $99.99 per year plus a $25 installation fee.
Excellent Uptime
The importance of uptime in the hosting experience cannot be overstated. Clients and customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services if your website is unavailable. That is the worst-case scenario. Thankfully, InMotion performed admirably in our tests.
Over the course of 14 days, we use a website monitoring tool to track the uptime of our test sites. The tool pings our website every 15 minutes and sends an email if it is unable to contact it for at least one minute. Our InMotion site did not go down at all during the testing period, according to the data. As a result, you can rely on InMotion to create a solid website.
Cool Customer Service
On a weekday afternoon, we used InMotion’s 24/7 web chat to learn about the differences between shared hosting and WordPress hosting. A few seconds later, an InMotion customer service representative appeared and provided us with the information we required. We later called InMotion’s customer service department for information on dedicated hosting, which is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Someone quickly answered our call and explained the differences in everyday language in a gentle manner. InMotion’s customer service has exceeded our expectations.
InMotion offers a generous 90-day money-back guarantee, which outperforms most other web hosting companies’ 30-day refund policies. However, Dreamhost’s 97-day money-back guarantee beats InMotion’s by a week.
A Reputable Web Host
InMotion Hosting is a web hosting service with the chops to meet your personal or business-related hosting needs provided you don’t need a Windows-powered server or short-term hosting. It offers a variety of hosting types, excellent customer service, tremendous uptime, and a lengthy money-back guarantee. InMotion is still worth checking out if those aren’t deal-breakers. It gets our recommendation because it strikes a good balance between price, features, and functionality.