Founded in 2001, InMotion Hosting (opens in new tab) is up there with some of the very best web hosting (opens in new tab) providers, and has over 570,000 customers around the world.
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What types of hosting does InMotion Hosting offer?
InMotion Hosting has low-cost and easy-to-use shared hosting (opens in new tab) plans, ideal for low-traffic personal and small business sites.
Its managed WordPress hosting (opens in new tab) supports running anything from simple family blogs to heavy-duty business sites, while hosted WooCommerce (opens in new tab) and Prestashop (opens in new tab) plans can help you build a professional web store.
If it’s raw server power you’re after, VPS (opens in new tab) (Virtual Private Server), dedicated and cloud hosting (opens in new tab) plans cover everyone from expert personal users to international corporations.
There’s a lot to consider, but next we’ll look at some of these hosting types, find out what they offer, what they don’t, and whether they could be a good choice for you.
Shared hosting
Shared hosting is a system where your website and many others are stored on the same web server. Sharing both resources and costs means shared hosting can be slow, but it’s also very cheap, and can be a good choice for smaller sites.
InMotion Hosting’s shared hosting starts with its Core plan (from $2.29 a month over three years.) This doesn’t include a free domain or backups, and only supports 10 email addresses (most accounts have no limit). But it allows you to host two websites, where other starter plans often allow only one, and elsewhere there’s free SSL, a free domain, unlimited bandwidth, malware protection and 1-click WordPress installation, while the excellent cPanel (opens in new tab) has everything you’ll need to manage your site.
Three more powerful shared hosting plans support hosting unlimited websites, handle as many email addresses as you need, and have some unusual speedup features (ultra-fast NVMe storage, for instance, something we rarely see with shared hosting.) Still no backups, though. They’re priced from $4.99 to $12.99 over three years.
Billing isn’t as flexible as we’d like. The top Pro plan has a monthly payment option, but everything else is only available in one, two or three year terms. (There are similar issues with other ranges.)
Unsure about signing up for long-term contracts? Us too, but InMotion Hosting offers more protection than most with a 90-day money-back guarantee (three times the industry standard 30 days), plenty of time to be sure if this is the right package for you.
These aren’t the cheapest shared hosting plans around, especially if you must have backups (add from another $2 a month.) But it’s also very easy to see why. The company hasn’t taken shortcuts to hit a low headline price: this is solid and reliable shared hosting with top quality features, and all the power you need to handle small to medium personal and business sites.
If price is top of your priority list, though, take a look at Hostinger (opens in new tab). Its $2.99 a month plan supports unlimited websites, includes at least weekly backups, and although it doesn’t have InMotion Hosting’s extra speedup technologies, our shared hosting tests show Hostinger is still a good performer.
WordPress hosting
WordPress is the world’s favorite website creator, a one-stop tool which can build anything from simple personal sites to busy web stores and the most heavy-duty business-critical projects.
InMotion Hosting’s shared plans have an automatic WordPress installer, good news if you’re just looking to learn the basics. But its specialist WordPress hosting range goes further, with server-level speed optimisations, extra security to keep hackers at bay, automatic WordPress updates and more.
Prices start at only $3.99 a month over two years ($11.99 on renewal) for the WP Core plan. It’s limited to two websites and ten email addresses, and there are no backups, but InMotion Hosting suggests a WP Core site could handle 20k visitors a month, more than enough for many users.
The $7.99 a month WP Launch plan adds offsite backups, and support for unlimited websites and email addresses, and enough resources to support 50k visitors a month, making it our budget pick.
If you need more, a WP-VPS range gives you extra system resources, and the power to handle very demanding sites (or lots of smaller ones.) Prices start at $19.99 a month over three years ($59.99 on renewal.)
These are capable plans, fairly priced, with the power to handle (at the top of the VPS range) perhaps a million visitors a month. But the WordPress-specific features are much the same as you’ll find with other providers. If you’re after real WordPress power, WP Engine (opens in new tab) offers genuinely Premium themes, intelligent updating, smart performance optimizations, page speed testing and more.
VPS hosting
Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting is a mid-range option which gives your website more server power, for a little extra cost. You’re likely to see better and more consistent speeds, with fewer of the slowdowns that often happen with shared hosting.
InMotion Hosting has four VPS plans. These start at $19.99 a month over three years for a 4GB RAM, 90GB SSD storage and 2 CPU core server, and range up to $59.99 for 16GB RAM, 360GB storage and eight core system.
Although these prices are more expensive than some, that’s because they’re stuffed with valuable features. Every plan gets a free domain, free migration, at least two dedicated IPs, five cPanel and one WHM license. They’re fully managed (InMotion Hosting keeps the VPS updated and running for you), and all plans come with Launch Assist, two hours with a VPS expert to help you set up and optimize the server, migrate a previous site, whatever else you need.
These are powerful products which could work for many levels of user. The Starter plan is ideal for mid-range sites which have outgrown shared hosting, or demanding projects which need more resources (a busy photography site where users can explore many image galleries, for instance.) Upgrading to a more powerful VPS may help with sites where consistent performance is critical – a web store where just a brief slowdown might drive customers away – or if you need to host multiple sites on the same server.
If you don’t need InMotion Hosting’s level of VPS power, take a look at IONOS. Its plans are more basic, but then they start at just $2 a month, and that could work for experienced users who know exactly what they need.
Consider Hostwinds (opens in new tab), too. Its VPS plans have more configuration options, there are more powerful servers at the top end of the range, and there’s Windows VPS hosting on offer if you need it.
Dedicated hosting
Opt for dedicated server hosting (opens in new tab) and your site gets the full power of a server all to itself. No more unexpected slowdowns because a neighboring site is suddenly really busy, because there are no neighboring sites: the server is entirely yours. If you’re running a large business-critical site, where speed matters, even when you’re really busy, dedicated hosting is a must-see.
InMotion Hosting has five dedicated hosting plans. These begin at an affordable $139.99 a month (billed annually, $169 on renewal) for an managed 4 core, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD system, and range up to a hugely powerful $539.99 ($619.99 on renewal) Dual Intel CPU, 192GB RAM and 2x2TB NVMe SSD monster. That’ll cover most sites and requirements, but if you’re unhappy, a ‘Build your own’ plan allows you to choose whatever CPU, RAM, storage and other features work for you.
These aren’t the lowest prices around, but as with other InMotion Hosting products, that’s because the company isn’t skimping on the server specs. There’s a 1Gbps network connection, for instance; unmetered bandwidth; at least 50GB free backup space; free cPanel and WHM licenses, free SSL, free website migrations, and more.
The closest we can get to a disappointment is you can only buy servers in US data centers. Many providers can host your server in other continents, important if your main audience is elsewhere in the world.
If location isn’t an issue, InMotion Hosting’s dedicated products offer a capable full-featured service which can handle some of the most demanding business and speed-critical tasks.
If you’re more interested in the budget end of the market, check out IONOS (opens in new tab), where very basic dedicated plans start at $47 a month. But if it’s power you’re after, Liquid Web is more expensive, but has more plans and add-ons, and data centers in USA and Europe.
Does InMotion Hosting have a website builder?
InMotion Hosting includes the BoldGrid (opens in new tab) WordPress Website Builder for free with all its WordPress plans. Choose a prebuilt starter site from 200+ industry-specific designs, drag-and-drop blocks (text, pictures, videos, forms, more) onto the page, and you can customize them with your own text and photos just like any other editor.
BoldGrid is easy to use, and a handy site-creating alternative if regular WordPress feels a little too intimidating. But it doesn’t have a lot of features, and is really only suitable for creating small-scale sites.
HostGator’s Gator (opens in new tab) website builder (opens in new tab) is also simple and seriously cheap (from $3.84 a month), but even the most basic plan supports a tiny web store and email campaigns. At the top of the market, Wix (opens in new tab) has great templates, stacks of features, an intuitive editor, and the power to handle almost any web task.
How easy is InMotion Hosting to use?
InMotion Hosting’s customer account panel looks more appealing than most, with the usual text links replaced by 30+ colorful cPanel-like icons. Unfortunately, many of these are for functions you’d use rarely, if ever. Add another credit card; buy or transfer in a new domain; buy a Sucuri website security package; read InMotion’s GDPR statement. These should be tucked away in a menu, not permanently taking up valuable screen real estate as though you might need them every day.
There’s a separate set of icons for each hosting package you have, but they share a similar problem. There are some useful shortcuts, for example to launch cPanel, or Softaculous (opens in new tab) to install WordPress or hundreds of other apps. But many of the others are less helpful. How often do you think you’d use functions like ‘Request Email Limit Exemption’ or ‘Simple CSR Request for 3rd party SSL’, for instance?
Fortunately, you don’t have to spend long in the account panel. One click launches Softaculous, you can have WordPress ready to go within a minute or two, and the excellent cPanel has all the email, file, database and other management tools you need to get your site running smoothly.
How fast is InMotion Hosting?
We began our performance tests by signing up for an InMotion Hosting shared plan, then setting up a simple WordPress website based on a standard template.
Next, we measured our server’s uptime by using monitoring service Uptime.com to check the site every five minutes over 14 days. InMotion Hosting managed a perfect 100% uptime, with a speedy server response time of 0.340 seconds (that’s third fastest in our last 15 tests.)
We measure website speed by using GTMetrix to access a test page, and calculate how long it takes to load the main content (a figure technically known as Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP.) The lower the LCP, the more snappy and responsive your site feels.
InMotion Hosting scored an LCP of 0.610 seconds, fourth fastest in our recent tests, and less than half the time of budget shared plans from Domain.com (opens in new tab) (1.5 seconds) and iPage (opens in new tab) (1.6 seconds).
Measuring the load time of a single page is useful, but we also use k6 to discover how a site performs when it has 20 visitors accessing a page at the same time.
Our server did a good job, handling a peak of 20 requests per second without difficulty, and averaging a mid-range but very acceptable 15 requests per second.
These are positive results, but keep in mind our site was hosted on a shared plan. Our figures can’t tell you how InMotion Hosting’s VPS, dedicated or other plans might compare to the competition.
What is InMotion Hosting’s support like?
InMotion Hosting offers 24/7 US-based support via phone, email and live chat, a web Support Center and community forums.
The website has a 5,000+ articles, guides and tutorials on the full range of hosting topics, way more than you’ll see with most providers. The search engine doesn’t do a good job of sorting its results by relevance, so it might take some scrolling to find what you need, but there is a lot of detailed and helpful content to explore.
Ticket support wasn’t the fastest we’ve seen, with replies to even relatively basic product queries taking around four hours. These typically pointed us in the right direction, though sometimes didn’t have all the details we’d expect.
Fortunately, live chat gave the best results. We found responses were speedy and helpful, and the agents were able to give us useful answers to any extra questions we asked.
Final verdict
Whether you’re a total website newbie or a big business running a huge and high-traffic web store, InMotion Hosting has a fast and feature-packed product which can help. A must for your web hosting shortlist.
InMotion Hosting FAQs
What payment types does InMotion Hosting support?
InMotion Hosting accepts payment via card and PayPal.
Does InMotion Hosting offer refunds?
InMotion Hosting has a ‘100% satisfaction guarantee’ which promises your money back if you ask for it within a very generous 90 days.
There are some exceptions. There’s 90 days of protection for all shared hosting, 6 month and longer VPS and reseller hosting packages. But dedicated servers and monthly-billed VPS and reseller plans get 30 days.
Most hosts only give 30 days across the range, though, so even taking the small print into account, InMotion Hosting tramples over the rest.
Does InMotion Hosting have an uptime guarantee?
InMotion Hosting’s website doesn’t quote an uptime guarantee (opens in new tab) for shared hosting. Most hosts do a little more, typically claiming 99.9%, and with some explanation of how this is calculated and the compensation you might get if this isn’t met.
The company looks to do better with VPS hosting, claiming each VPS is on a server ‘with 99.99% uptime.’ It doesn’t use the word ‘guarantee’, though, and there’s nothing in the small print to explain how this 99.99% is calculated or guaranteed.
Confusingly, the website quotes two figures for dedicated servers. At the top of the page it says servers are on a ‘99.99% uptime Tier 1 network’; at the bottom, it says current network uptime is 99.999%. Again, there’s no mention of a guarantee.
We prefer hosts to offer more clarity, and offer compensation if expected uptime isn’t met. For example, Scala Hosting’s Uptime Guarantee says customers get all their monthly fees back if unscheduled downtime is greater than 1% (that’s more than around 7 hours 18 minutes).
Where are InMotion Hosting’s data centers?
InMotion Hosting has two US-based data centers in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. Even shared hosting users can choose which data center should host their website.
What is my InMotion Hosting IP address?
If you need to connect your InMotion Hosting site to a domain managed elsewhere, it can help to find your web server’s IP address.
To locate it, first log into the InMotion Hosting account management panel.
Scroll down and find your hosting plan in the list (it’ll appear under your domain name).
Find and click your plan’s cPanel icon (probably top left in the list.)
Your server IP address appears in the General Information panel on the left, in the ‘Shared IP Address’ box.
If you can’t see a General Information panel, click the Server Information link, and look for the ‘Shared IP Address’.
What are InMotion Hosting’s nameservers?
InMotion Hosting’s nameservers are ns1.InMotionhosting.com and ns2.InMotionhosting.com.
How do I cancel an InMotion Hosting product?
Point your browser at www.InMotionhosting.com, click Login top-right of the page, and log in using your regular InMotion Hosting credentials.
Click Billing, My Subscriptions.
If you see a red cross to the right of the subscription you’d like to cancel, click it and fill in the cancellation form. Your plan will remain active, but it won’t renew and you won’t be willed again.
If the Cancel column includes the text ‘Set to Manual Renewal’, the plan already has its ‘auto-renew’ setting turned off. You’ll still receive email reminders just before the subscription is due to end, but if you’re not interested, you can just ignore these and leave the account to expire.
