InMotion Hosting Review

I’d been following InMotion Hosting and their sister company WebHostingHub long before I signed up for a plan with InMotion Hosting. From everything I read or heard about them they seemed like they were a really well run company, but for whatever reason, I was hesitant to give them a try. Probably because they are considered to be one of the big guys, but that turned out not to be a negative in their case. They are a large company with a dedicated staff that knows what they are doing.

InMotion Hosting Signup Process

InMotion Hosting needs to do account verification with a phone call before you can access your new hosting account. A lot of companies do this these days and while it is a bit of a hassle, I do understand the need to cut down on fraudulent accounts. If you are in hurry to get a website up like I was, you don’t need to wait for them to call you, just give them a call right after you finish signing up online and they will take care of it right away.

After verifying a few things, I remember that there was a bit of an attempt by their representative to try and introduce some up-sells to me. Since I knew what I needed and didn’t need anything this didn’t last very long. Come to think of it, pretty much every business will try to see if there is anything else that you might need when you are wrapping up a phone call. Maybe I jumped to the “up-sell” conclusion and all she really was trying to do was to see if there was anything else she could help me with. So if a 5 or so minute phone conversation is a deal breaker for you then choose a host that doesn’t have a telephone account verification process. But honestly, if that’s the only downer I say let this verification/setup step slide.

Promotional Pricing & Monthly Term…

InMotion’s business class hosting costs more than your average shared hosting. They don’t have coupons but do have promotional pricing on the initial invoice (shown below). The first two plans (Launch and Power) have limits on the number of domains, email accounts, and MySQL databases. I have their Launch Business Class plan which only allows for hosting 2 websites and 2 MySQL databases. If you need to host more sites the Power plan allows for 6 websites, and the Pro plan allows for “unlimited” websites. The only plan that has the option for a monthly or 6 months contract is the Pro plan, but they shouldn’t even offer a monthly option because it has a $40 setup fee! InMotion Hosting does have a 90 day money back guarantee period. After the 90 days they will provide a pro-rated refund for any months left on your contract if you need to cancel. This made paying yearly acceptable to me.

Their sister company WebHostingHub offers shared hosting that costs a bit less. They use the same datacenters so it’s the same network backbone and as of July 2015 they use the same servers/hardware as InMotion Hosting (with pure SSD). WebHostingHub only provides shared plans, where as InMotion has shared, reseller, VPS, and dedicated hosting. Which would be better if you are looking for a shared hosting plan now, with the option to upgrade to a VPS if/when your site(s) get big enough to require one.

Support Department

I don’t have anything major to report on their support department because most things I can handle doing myself. One request I made was to have something modified in ssl.conf and they explained to me that this wasn’t possible because it would affect all the accounts on the shared server I was on. I don’t know why I didn’t realize this at the time, but they didn’t make me feel like a fool for asking. Other than that I haven’t required their help besides my initial account setup.

Very Good Uptime

Overall uptime on their East coast datacenter has been very good. I recommend choosing their East coast server location because the west coast datacenter has had issues lately. Most months uptime has been well above 99.9% (some random minutes of downtime here and there on my uptime monitoring). There have been a couple instances of downtime due to server issues or scheduled maintenance. One thing that always makes me angry is when a host doesn’t notify me in advance about any major changes/maintenance to a server I’m on. InMotion Hosting does send out notifications for scheduled maintenance.

• April 2015 – 99.93% uptime (32 minutes of downtime)
• May 2015 – 99.63% uptime (163 minutes of downtime)
  *Scheduled maintenance was the cause of May downtime increase.

  We are currently performing scheduled maintenance on our East Coast Data Center. Downtime is expected to vary but not exceed 180 minutes.

• June 2015 – 99.96% uptime (17 minutes of downtime)
• July 2015 – 99.995% uptime (2 minutes of downtime)
• August 2015 – 99.97% uptime (13 minutes of downtime)
• September 2015 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• October 2015 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• November 2015 – 99.993% uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
• December 2015 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• January 2016 – 99.98% uptime (8 minutes of downtime)
• February 2016 – 99.997% uptime (1 minutes of downtime)
• March 2016 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• April 2016 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• May 2016 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• June 2016 – 99.965% uptime (15 minutes of downtime)
• July 2016 – 99.97% uptime (13 minutes of downtime)
• August 2016 – 99.993% uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
• September 2016 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• October 2016 – 99.98% uptime (7 minutes of downtime)
• November 2016 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• December 2016 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• January 2017 – 99.98% uptime (9 minutes of downtime)
• February 2017 – 99.997% uptime (1 minutes of downtime)
• March 2017 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• April 2017 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• May 2017 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• June 2017 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• July 2017 – 99.993% uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
• August 2017 – 99.96% uptime (19 minutes of downtime)
• September 2017 – 99.993% uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
• October 2017 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• November 2017 – 99.99% uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
• December 2017 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• January 2018 – 99.93% uptime (30 minutes of downtime)
• February 2018 – 99.998% uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
• March 2018 – 99.996% uptime (6 minutes of downtime)
• April 2018 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• May 2018 – 99.975% uptime (11 minutes of downtime)
• June 2018 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• July 2018 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• August 2018 – 99.93% uptime (32 minutes of downtime)
• September 2018 – 99.98% uptime (10 minutes of downtime)
• October 2018 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• November 2018 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• December 2018 – 99.99% uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
• January 2019 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• February 2019 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• March 2019 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• April 2019 – 99.99% uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
• May 2019 – 99.99% uptime (2 minutes of downtime)
• June 2019 – 99.89% uptime (47 minutes of downtime)
• July 2019 – 99.99% uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
• August 2019 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• September 2019 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• October 2019 – 99.99% uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
• November 2019 – 99.77% uptime (99 minutes of downtime)
• December 2019 – 99.93% uptime (31 minutes of downtime)
• January 2020 – 99.99% uptime (6 minutes of downtime)
• February 2020 – 99.96% uptime (16 minutes of downtime)
• March 2020 – 99.99% uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
• April 2020 – 99.86% uptime (62 minutes of downtime)
• May 2020 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• June 2020 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• July 2020 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• August 2020 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• September 2020 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• October 2020 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• November 2020 – 99.99% uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
• December 2020 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• January 2021 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• February 2021 – 99.91% uptime (40 minutes of downtime)
• March 2021 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• April 2021 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• May 2021 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• June 2021 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• July 2021 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)

Impressive Speed Testing

As you can see below, my WordPress site hosted on an InMotion Hosting server located in Virginia (East coast datacenter option) loads very fast. I’ve posted Pingdom speed tests from three different locations: NY, Texas, and California. InMotion also has a West coast datacenter option in Los Angeles.

New York City Pingdom Test

Dallas, Texas Pingdom Test

San Jose, California Pingdom Test

Final Verdict

InMotion Hosting is one of the big guys in the hosting world. Usually I have found this to be a negative more than a positive. However in InMotion’s case they are one of the good big guys. You pretty much have to pre-pay for at least a year of hosting on their shared hosting plans. However, they do pro-rated refunds after the 90 day money-back guarantee period, which does make signing up for a yearly contract tolerable. Loading speed is very good and they have an in-house solid staff that overall knows what they are doing. If you are looking for a hosting provider that has been in the business for a long time that hasn’t been sold to EIG and most likely never will be, definitely consider using InMotion Hosting.