If you’re in search of a web host for either personal or professional websites, check out InMotion Hosting. This web hosting service boasts several reasonably priced shared, dedicated, reseller, virtual private server (VPS), and WordPress plans, as well as numerous, free e-commerce tools. InMotion’s lack of Windows servers may turn off people who require them, but, overall, the web hosting service is a strong one that’s worth the investment.
Shared Web Hosting
Building a website doesn’t need to be an expensive endeavor. If you want to dabble in cheap web hosting, shared hosting is worth a look. With shared hosting, your site is in a roommate situation with many other sites on a single server. You split the server cost and the available resources. As you may have guessed, shared web hosting isn’t very powerful. Sharing the resources means that if one site starts using a lot, there are fewer for the rest. Still, it’s a solid solution for people who don’t expect tremendous amounts of website traffic.
InMotion offers three, Linux-based shared web hosting plans. The most basic, Launch ($4.99 per month with an annual subscription), supports two websites and 50GB of SSD storage. Power ($7.99 per month with an annual subscription) nets you 50 websites and 100GB of SSD storage. Pro builds upon Power by offering 100 websites and 200GB of SSD storage. Sadly, Pro is the only InMotion shared hosting tier that doesn’t require you to be locked into an annual contract; it starts at $19.99 per month. On the upside, all InMotion Hosting shared hosting plans include unlimited monthly data transfers and email accounts.
That said, HostGator gets the nod as PCMag Editors’ Choice award winner for shared web hosting services. InMotion’s rival offers unlimited email, storage, and monthly data transfers with each plan, and adds the choice of Linux- or Windows-based servers. The Windows option is important for sites that have software that runs on an ASP.NET framework.
VPS Web Hosting
In terms of power, VPS hosting offers more pop than shared hosting. That’s due to the fact that your site lives on a server with far fewer sites competing for resources than with shared hosting. Plus, the web hosts supply your site with a guaranteed minimum of resources. As a result, VPS hosting is more expensive than shared hosting, but it’s a far more powerful and reliable system. You can think of VPS hosting as living in your own apartment; you’ll have neighbors, but they aren’t all up in your bandwidth to the same extent that shared hosting-style roommates can be.
InMotion Hosting offers managed hosting and unmanaged cloud VPS web hosting. Managed VPS starts at $51.99 per month (or $29.99 per month, with a two-year plan), while unmanaged, scalable cloud VPS stars at $5 per month. You get respectable top-level specs, including 8GB of RAM, 6TB of monthly data transfers, five dedicated IPs, and up to 260GB of storage. Unlimited email, domains, websites, and MySQL databases are included, too. InMotion has a good VPS offering, but it isn’t as robust as the PCMag Editors’ Choice for VPS hosting, Hostwinds.
Hostwinds has stacked and flexible VPS offerings that start at $4.49 per month for 1GB of RAM, 30GB of disk space, unlimited monthly data transfers, and unlimited email. Its offerings scale up to $247.69 per month for 96GB of RAM, 750GB of disk space, unlimited monthly data transfers, and unlimited email. Hostwinds gives you a lot of room to grow.
Dedicated Web Hosting
With dedicated hosting, your website lives on a server all by itself and leverages the system’s full power. In other words, you don’t share your server with roommates—you have the whole house to yourself. As a result, dedicated hosting is an extremely powerful type of web hosting. It’s one that you should look into if you expect your website to receive a large amount of traffic. Mission-critical sites that can’t go down (or slow down) should be on dedicated servers.
Recently upgraded to the latest Intel Xeon tech and now with more Linux options (including (Centos 7/8, Debian 9/10, Ubuntu 18.04/20.04, and OpenSUSE), InMotion Hosting’s dedicated and Bare Metal plans are a strong choice for large websites. Starting at $139.99 per month, you can configure the company’s dedicated web servers with up to 25TB of storage, 15TB of monthly data transfers, and an impressive 192GB of RAM. If need even bigger specs, check out InMotion’s custom build services that let you can plan, build, and customize the hardware as you see fit.
Inmotion has solid dedicated web hosting plans, but AccuWeb, the PCMag Editors’ Choice for dedicated hosting, has better all-around packages. AccuWeb offers dedicated hosting packages (starting at $99) that can be outfitted with up to 8TB of SSD storage and 512GB of RAM. They boast 20TB of monthly data transfers, too. You even get a choice of Linux- or Windows-based servers for extra flexibility.
WordPress Web Hosting
WordPress is one of the top names in web hosting, as the service is the content management system for roughly 30 percent of the internet. If you’re looking for WordPress hosting, InMotion offers solid packages. Your digital footprint will reside on a server that exclusively hosts only WordPress websites. This is a huge advantage in terms of load times and reliability. Your WordPress website sits in a WordPress-only ecosystem which translates to some big benefits. Server settings such as cache, PHP workers, and more are dialed-in to the specs recommended directly from WordPress. No more having to host your website on a server where one website is running Concrete5 and another is running Joomla. All sites now live in a WordPress world of harmony, speed, and reliability.
InMotion Hosting’s Linux-based, WordPress-optimized servers come with the content management system preinstalled, and they offer website staging and automatic software updates. In a nice touch, InMotion Hosting automatically updates your third-party WordPress plug-ins. It also bolsters your WordPress installation with a custom-configured NGINX stack and an in-house caching system.
WP-1000S ($4.99 per month, with an annual plan) offers 50GB of solid-state drive storage, roughly 20,000 visitors, the ability to host one website, and unlimited email and monthly data transfers. WP-2000S (starting at $7.99 per month) ups matters with a 100GD SSD drive, 50,000 visitors, and the ability to host two sites.
Rounding out the top two plans are the WP-3000S and the WordPress VPS plans. Starting at $10.99 per month with an annual plan, WP-3000S gives you a total of three websites, 150GB of storage, and unlimited email. WordPress VPS (starting at $51.99 per month) is the top of the line package which is fully managed by in-house pros and gives you unlimited sites, dedicated resources, three dedicated IPs and 75GB of storage with the ability to add on more storage as a paid feature.
Last but certainly not least, WordPress Dedicated hosting plans offer month-to-month or one-year subscriptions. Starting at $139.99 per month, it offers managed hosting on a dedicated server that includes up to 15 dedicated IPs, website migration, and the option to add a software RAID.
That said, A2 reigns as the WordPress hosting champ. The Editors’ Choice award-winning service boasts Linux-powered servers that offer unlimited storage and monthly data transfers at each tier. It also has several managed options for those who want their sites to receive the white glove treatment.
Reseller Web Hosting
If you’re looking to get into the web hosting game, but you don’t want to spin up your own servers or worry about providing the bandwidth for them, check out InMotion’s reseller hosting packages. The six plans, starting at $21.39 per month, offer up to 6TB in monthly bandwidth, unlimited email, and more than cPanel accounts (depending on your account).
The entry-level R-1000S plan comes with 80GB of storage, 800GB of monthly data transfers, and 25 cPanels. The mid-tier R-2000S plan ups the storage to 120GB, and the monthly data transfers to 1,200GB. R-3000S boasts 160GB of storage and 1,600GB of monthly data transfers. InMotion Hosting provides 24/7/365 customer support, too, and it gives you a choice of Linux- or Windows-based servers, too. The plans are quite respectable, though they don’t quite measure up with Hostwinds’ robust, Editors’ Choice award-winning offerings.
Setting Up a Website With InMotion
I chose the Launch plan for my testing. I am disappointed that my only option was to sign up for a full year. Like most web hosts, a discount is applied to the first term (for up to three years). InMotion discloses its renewal rates, so you don’t get any surprises. There are no month-to-month options, unfortunately.
I was initially a bit dubious when the confirmation page said that an account specialist would contact me by phone to complete the setup process; I couldn’t log in until that happened. However, the call was prompt and helpful, and I wasn’t pushed into making additional purchases. The representative asked a few questions about the type of website I wanted to build, and then emailed me the appropriate welcome materials. You access your general account settings from the Account Management Panel (AMP), but managing the website requires a separate cPanel login.
The service’s website builder requires yet another login and password, but building a website is an otherwise straightforward affair. You have three site types to choose from (site, blog, or photo gallery), you can select themes and colors, and you can pick the types of pages you’d like to include on your site. In addition to standard pages such as Contact Us and About Us, you can add special pages, such as Flash Intro and eShop. Next, you can add a map, poll, RSS reader, or script module into your pages. The Premium Website Builder doesn’t produce particularly attractive pages, however; my site looked dated. Alternatively, you can use WordPress to create your site. That opens the door to many site-enhancing WordPress themes and WordPress plug-ins.
E-Commerce and Security
InMotion Hosting has many e-commerce options although payment options are a bit limited. You can also download OpenCart or PrestaShop (both free) for a more robust store. I gave OpenCart a try; it offers a comprehensive dashboard for tracking customers and sales and multiple shipping and payment options. This beats other hosts like iPower and JustHost, which charge an extra monthly fee for e-commerce. Unfortunately, e-commerce isn’t available with the basic Launch plan, however, it is offered on their Power and Pro plans.
InMotion offers several security features, including free remote backup services for accounts under 10GB in size. For WordPress sites, a free Sucuri Security plugin can be used to scan for malware and other security risks. McAfee spam and virus protection (starting at $1.39 per month) is also available for email accounts. You can purchase SSL certificates ($99.99 per year, with a $25 installation fee), which include a dedicated IP address.
Excellent Uptime
Uptime is an incredibly important aspect of the hosting experience. If your website is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services. That is a nightmare scenario. Thankfully, InMotion showed dependable uptime in my testing.
I use a website monitoring tool to track my test sites’ uptime over a 14-day period. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings my website and sends me an email if it is unable to contact the site for at least one minute. The data revealed that my InMotion site didn’t go down at all during the testing period.
Cool Customer Service
I fired up InMotion’s web chat on a weekday afternoon to learn about how shared hosting differed from VPS hosting. A representative appeared a few seconds later, and I got the information I needed.
I later called InMotion’s customer support squad to learn about reseller hosting. Someone quickly fielded my call and gently explained the differences in everyday language. I am very pleased with InMotion’s customer service.
InMotion has a very generous 90-day money-back guarantee that bests most other web hosts’ refund policies. Dreamhost’s 97-day money-back guarantee bests InMotion’s offers by a week, however.
A Worthy Web Host
Boasting a multitude of hosting types, excellent customer service, lengthy money-back guarantee, and tremendous uptime, InMotion is a web hosting service that has the chops to meet your personal- or business-related hosting needs—provided that you don’t need a Windows-powered server. The other noteworthy limitation is that if you need short-term hosting, Inmotion only lets you go the month-to-month route with select plans. Still, if those aren’t dealbreakers, InMotion is a web host worthy your time and money.
If you need tips on creating your website, please read our primer. You might also want to check out our story on how to register a domain name for your website.
