InMotion Hosting, Inc.

About

Hi. Thanks for checking out this WebHostingGeeks video review. Visit our website, at WebHostingGeeks.com to see more reviews, and to get the latest information on all the top web hosting services. Today, I’m reviewing InMotion Hosting.

InMotion Hosting was founded in Los Angeles in 2001. They rapidly expanded, opening a second office and datacenter in Virginia in 2004, and since then have expanded that datacentre and their new, energy-saving, green facility in LA.

They provide business-grade shared hosting, as well as virtual private and dedicated servers. They currently host just under 244,000 sites, and that number has changed less than 1% over the last six weeks.

Products and Features

We’re going to look at InMotion’s product offerings, and we’ll focus on their shared server support. However they also provide three tiers of VPS service, and six levels of dedicated servers, including 3 levels of commercial class service running on Xeon servers with RAID storage.  We’ll look at those in another video perhaps, but for now, let’s take a look at the level of service most of us need to host our day-to-day websites and blogs.

Shared hosting means everybody shares the same resources on one or more servers. Each website or blogsite is secure and completely independent from the rest, but they all get an equal share of the available CPU, storage and bandwidth. The advantage is a price that’s considerably less than you’d pay for your own, private server.

And the features you get with shared hosting are often more than you’d get with your own server. Most of us aren’t webserver geeks, and we don’t want to worry about the infrastructure. A shared hosting solution gives you many easy-to-use tools for creating and managing your blog or website, so you don’t have to roll your own solution by hand.

InMotion Hosting has three levels of shared hosting called Launch, Power and Pro. Each one gives you unlimited storage for your site’s files, unlimited file transfers to and from your site, unlimited email, and an equal share of the 1 Gb/s network bandwidth.

All shared hosting plans offer Solid State Drive storage, for fast access and improved reliability.

New subscribers who sign up for at least six months on the Pro plan or twelve months on the Launch and Power plans, get a free one-year domain registration. Or, you can transfer in your existing domain from another server, with up to three sites, for free. You’ll get a temporary URL to use during the move so there’s no downtime while you get it set up.

Something that sets InMotion apart from a lot of the competition is their free backups for all sites under 10 GB. That’s automatic, every 36 hours, and you can have one free restore of your entire storage space every four months. If your site is larger than 10 GB you can still have automated backups for a small fee.

The number of sites and databases you can have varies with the three plans, starting at two sites and two DBs for the Launch plan, up to unlimited everything at the Pro level.

Something else that varies by plan is the amount of free Google Adword credits you get with your account: up to $275 for the Launch plan and up to $300 for each of the higher levels.

Email services are free and unlimited on all plans, and they use IMAP protocols, unlike a lot of hosts that only support POP3 for downloads. This gives you more flexibility to manage your email across multiple devices.

All accounts get the latest Softaculous app installer, with its suite of over 310, one-click install apps. The apps include WordPress, Joomla, PrestaShop, Drupal, Moodle and hundreds more to help you create websites, blogs, shopping carts, image galleries and all the other great stuff you see online every day.

If you like, InMotion will pre-install for free, your choice of WordPress, Joomla or PrestaShop. That way, you can get started building your site right out of the box with the tools you’ll need already in place.

And speaking of WordPress, InMotion hosting makes setting up and maintaining a WordPress site even easier. They install for you something called the WP-CLI. That stands for WordPress Command Line Interface, and it lets you easily manage multiple WordPress sites and plugins from the command line.

All shared hosting plans include a licence to build one of your websites using the Premium Website Builder. Of course, you can build more sites manually or using a CMS like WordPress or Joomla. You can add more Premium Builder sites for $15 each per year. This tool lets you build a website, photo gallery or blog based on hundreds of customizable templates. At the Power and Pro levels, you can also use it to create a full-function e-commerce site with inventory management, shopping carts, shipping calculator and payment integration.

Last but definitely not least, is InMotion’s 90-day, money-back guarantee. If for any reason you’re not happy with their products or service, they’ll refund your full subscription, minus your domain registration fees of course. The domains are still yours, and you’re free to transfer them to another host. If you choose to leave after your 90 days is up, however, there is no pro-rated refund for the remaining term.

Performance

So how is InMotion performing?

Well, according to uptime.besthostratings.com, they’ve enjoyed 100% availability since October 2012. Prior to that, they rarely managed a month without at least one unplanned outage, and achieved an overall rating of 99.89% – just off the industry benchmark of 99.9%.

However, since October 2012, they’ve had no outages, and hit 100% every month. This may be because they replaced the Fantastico app installer with the newer, more frequently-updated Softaculous in September of that year. Or, it might be because, 7 months earlier, in March 2012, they invested a quarter of a million dollars in technical support staff and equipment.

Customer Reviews

What do their customers say?  In 2010, customer satisfaction was 4.19 stars out of 5, or 83.8%. With the exception of a slight dip due to a hacking incident in 2012, that number has risen to its current level of 4.35 stars, or 87.0% .

Since mid-2012, customers seem very happy with InMotion’s professional and timely customer support. They also rave about their trouble-free service and reliability. Prior to that, there were some complaints about sites that had been suspended for suspicious or potentially hazardous activity. There were also a few negative comments from customers who wanted features that  weren’t supported at the customers’ service level. They accused tech support of trying to up-sell them, when in fact, they really needed to move up to the next tier or buy dedicated service to get what they needed. It’s interesting that most of the negative customer reviews predate the customer service expansion in early 2012, and recent datacenter upgrades in 2013. It’s possible that InMotion was just growing too quickly, and the quality of their services and support was struggling to keep up.

 

Purchasing the Hosting Plan

To put InMotion Hosting to the test, we’ll now go onto their site, sign up for a hosting account and register a new domain name. I’ll select Launch, their low-end shared hosting plan, and have them preinstall WordPress during checkout. Then we’ll see how long it takes to complete the transaction and what kind of confirmations we receive. Let’s go.

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Now we’re on InMotion’s site. We’re going to select the Launch plan, and click Order Now,

Notice I can choose from all the plans here. I’ll pick 12 months of Launch, and click Continue.

Next InMotion confirms what we’ve chosen and gives us the opportunity to purchase a new domain or transfer in an existing one. I’ll enter a new domain here and call it my-domain-InMotion. Now we click Continue and see if that name is available…

…and it is. And here we’re offered our first upsell – the chance to upgrade our plan from Launch to the next higher level, Power. I’ll leave that blank and Continue.

The next selection is which server you want to be hosted on – East or West. If you’re not sure, InMotion will make an educated guess. I’m in the West so –

And now we enter the name and address information for the new account. I’ll just put up my privacy screen and go ahead with that –

Next we have a chance to buy domain privacy—If you select this, anyone doing a search for the owner of your new domain will see InMotion’s contact info instead of yours.

You can also buy one of three levels of McAfee spam protection for your new email accounts;  I’ll say no thanks to this –

And finally, we can choose whether we would like InMotion to pre-install one of these three content management systems for us. I’m going to choose WordPress.

Now comes the fun part – I’ll just whip out my credit card and fill in my payment details. I can see what will be charged to my card, right here. Everything looks good.

Also we’re reminded to read the Terms of Service, and that our card will be billed automatically every 12 months. If you’re happy with all this, you can check off “I Agree” right here, and then complete the transaction by clicking the Purchase Account button.

This takes us to the order confirmation screen. Here this tells us that our account will take a few minutes to set up, and that we’ll get a confirmation email when it’s done, and a follow-up call from a New Account Specialist.

While we’re waiting, we’re offered a free five-minute phone consultation about InMotion’s website design services. I haven’t used this service, but a free consultation is a pretty good thing, especially if this is your first website.

And that’s it. InMotion gives us a final look at their support numbers and a confirmation of what we’ve just purchased. I’ll write down that support number, because coming up next, I’m going to give support a call, and see how they handle a question from a new subscriber.

Support Call

InMotion Hosting  [IMH]:         Thank you for calling Support. We are currently having higher-than-normal call volumes. Please stay on the line and an associate will answer your call very shortly. Thank you for your patience.

IMH:    Support. Kimya.

WebHostingGeek [GEEK]:      Oh hi!

IMH:    Hi. How can I help?

GEEK:  My name is Rick and I have a question for you. I just signed up yesterday for a new account, and I’ve noticed that at the various service levels—I’m at the launch level—there’s a number of databases available. Can you tell me what I’d used a database for?

IMH:    Yes. Usually it’s for, um, people use it for, like, a WordPress or Joomla installation, a CMS. I can tell you if you’ve used any so far and what they were used for.

GEEK:  OK. Yeah, I actually had WordPress pre-installed, so that…

IMH:    That would have used one of them, uh-huh. 

GEEK:   If I also wanted to install something like an image gallery and possibly an installation of Moodle, do they each use their own database as well?

IMH:    By default yes.

GEEK:   Is there any way that I can install something like Moodle and an image gallery and WordPress without, um, using more than two databases?

IMH:    Yes. You can. Um, what you would be doing is basically, when you go to install it—and I don’t know if Softaculous will allow you to do this; I don’t think it will; I don’t think it will install if anything you’re asking for already exists; it likes to everything from scratch, but—

You can just, um, for instance, like, for WordPress—and it’s a little difficult to describe, but I will attempt to anyway—so you have a database. That database is going to be called ‘your cPanelname underscore something’, we’ll say, ‘your cPanel7_WordPressDatabase. OK?

So your first WordPress installation, as a general rule Softaculous likes to default to ‘WP_’ as a table prefix. So inside of this cPanel7_WordPress there are tables that start with ‘WordPress_’, whatever, like one of them’s ‘Options’, right?

You can install it manually, which is actually not that hard with WordPress. I will not promise for, like, some of the image galleries, and you can tell it, instead of using ‘WordPress_’, use ‘WordPress2_’ or use ‘Image_’.

And that way you have one database and different sets of tables.

GEEK:   Using multiple schema in the same database.

IMH:    Precisely.

GEEK:   Uh, I suppose there’s probably a little bit more information about, um, how WordPress uses its database at the WordPress site itself; so if I were to go to WordPress I can get the details on the tables and, uh…

IMH:    Yes. Pretty much all of the information is available in the codex.

GEEK:   Well you’ve really answered my question today. That’s great.

IMH:    Awesome. Do you have any other questions for me?

GEEK:   Um, no. I think that that solves it for today. I didn’t get your name though, when you first came on, sorry.

IMH:    Kimya (spells it out)

GEEK:   OK thank you very much Kimya. I’ll let your supervisor know you did a fabulous job with me today.

IMH:    Alright. Awesome. Thank you for that. Do you mind if I get your domain so I can note your account?

GEEK:   my-domain-inmotion

IMH:    We are 24/7, and if you get interest or feedback feel free to leave some.

GEEK:   Terrific. Thank you very much for your help.

IMH:    You’re welcome. Have a great one.

AMP and cPanel

AMP is InMotion’s proprietary control panel that is used to manage your account, billing, request support or purchase additional products, like hosting, domains and SSL certificates.

AMP also has a lot of shortcuts to your common hosting operations like creating email accounts or installing WordPress. All these functions are always available in your cPanel.

cPanel is the most commonly used control panel in the world and InMotion has it. Most of your website operations will be done here—tasks like creating email accounts, managing FTP users, and installing apps like WordPress, Joomla, online stores and image galleries to name just a few. cPanel is feature-rich and easy-to-use. No wonder it is fast becoming industry standard website control panel.

So InMotion definitely stands at the top. cPanel with Softaculous—that gives you 310 applications with single-click installs—and AMP, their easy-to-use Account management panel that you can use to access cPanel, and manage your InMotion account.

You can get more detailed information, often with videos, about AMP and cPanel and anything  else you may need to operate your hosting with InMotion, in the Support Center, at   www.inmotionhosting.com/support/.

Conclusions

All in all, we were impressed with InMotion’s range if plans and the features they offered, especially using Solid State Drives on all plans, and offering a 90-day guarantee. They also have great WordPress support.

Between 2005 and 2012 they had some growth issues, but that seems to be behind them now, and they have logged a solid 100% uptime since 2012.

The majority of customers are very satisfied with InMotion’s service, and give them an 87% approval rating.

Buying a hosting plan was easy and straightforward.

Finally, when we called Customer Service, we had our question answered quickly and professionally.

We’ve enjoyed our experience with InMotion Hosting, and we can recommend them to you.

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