InMotion Hosting is one of the best hosts we’ve ever had the pleasure of using. Although they lack certain speed enhancing features (no NGINX on shared plans) and they’ve only got 2 datacenters based in USA, their server response speeds are crazy fast!
They’ve also got a great support team, patient and knowledgeable enough to handle all our questions. InMotion Hosting gets two thumbs up from us! Learn more.
It’s a pity that very few people outside of a niche market are familiar with the name “InMotion Hosting”.
They’re certainly not as famous as Hostinger or SiteGround, but InMotion Hosting is definitely one the most underrated gems out there.
The independently owned American company has been around since 2001, and their impressive services and products are a reflection of a company that learns from experience and has evolved to be one of the top web hosts today.
Pro of InMotion Hosting
Con of InMotion Hosting
InMotion Hosting’s Plans & Features
How Does InMotion Hold Up Against The Competition?
Verdict
We logged into our old InMotion Hosting account, created a test site and went to town with it, just to see how they’ve been holding up since we last hosted with them, and boy oh boy we did not regret it.
We tested for speed, looked at their features, spoke to their customer support and rated their overall ease of use – and were pleasantly happy with the results!
As always, we’ve created a list of pros and cons based on our findings, just so you can judge for yourself if InMotion Hosting is the best web host for your e-commerce site.
So – let’s have a look at what they offer.
Note
The test site that we use in this review is imhhosted.com. It is hosted with InMotion Hosting Power Plan at their West Coast datacenter.
We set up a test site (https://imhhosted.com/) using InMotion Hosting’s Power Plan and used our very own unique server speed checker to discover InMotion Hosting’s response times when pinged from several locations all over the world, and the results totally blew us away!
| US (W) | US (E) | London | Singapore | Sao Paulo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 ms | 53 ms | 322 ms | 178 ms | 172 ms |
| Bangalore | Sydney | Japan | Canada | Germany |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 514 ms | 153 ms | 109 ms | 67 ms | 149 ms |
Pings from US West and East were the best, respectively scoring 2 ms and 53 ms each, which makes them superb if you’re targeting American audiences.
They also did very well from the other locations too, displaying very little latency when pinged from Singapore (178 ms), Sao Paolo (172 ms), Sydney (153 ms) and Japan (109 ms).
The only location that InMotion Hosting didn’t do too well in was in Bangalore, with 514 ms. Not surprising given the distance.
With a worldwide average of 172 ms, InMotion Hosting is very fast and ranks a solid A+. They cover international audiences pretty well so you won’t have to worry about server response times unless you’re targeting Indian audiences (In that case, see the best web hosting for India.)
We also performed a TTFB test using webpagetest.org and the results were pretty pleasing to us.
This test was done on a stock install with WordPress, with no configurations or speed optimizations whatsoever. The TTFB was really quick at 0.466 s, and InMotion Hosting scored mostly A’s in webpagetest.org’s scoring parameters, only getting F’s for compress transfer and cache static content. The results are further confirmed by the extensive tests done in WebHostingSecretRevealed.
Those F’s can easily be turned into A’s by just installing a few speed enhancing plugins, like W3 Total Cache.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: speed is king. A slow loading site directly correlates to a lack of sales, and nobody wants that!
If a web host can provide us with features that can decrease our site loading speed, they’ll have cookie points violently shoved down their throat. InMotion Hosting has more than a few speed enhancing features which does just that. Here are some that we found to be worth mentioning:
Datacenters in Max Speed Zone™
InMotion Hosting has strategically placed their datacenters right next to Internet Exchange Points on the east coast and west coast of America. This makes it ideal for e-commerce sites targeting US audiences, but their strategic location also helps their servers respond faster to requests from other countries, ensuring fast worldwide response times!
Peering
They’ve also teamed up with ISPs all over the world and peering exchanges to create direct data connections, which dramatically decreases data load speed. Instead of routing your data through multiple different networks, peering works by directly connecting you with the closest peer, which results in much quicker responses and loading speeds! Find out more about peering over here and here
Ultra Fast SSD Storage
Some web hosts out there still stores data on traditional HDDs. If they give me HDD storage options, I’ll throw it right back at them. We don’t want those antiquated Jurassic age slow ass HDDs with all their moving parts. We want ultra sexy beautifully made SSDs, built to cater to our lust for speed. This is why we love that InMotion Hosting utilizes SSD storage; it practically cuts loading speeds by 40%!
Uptime Guarantee is something you’ll want to lookout for in a web host. 1 minute of downtime may not seem like a lot in the grand scheme of things, but plenty of 1-minute downtimes adds up, and it’ll come to a point where your site becomes irrelevant to Google.
As a matter of fact, if your site is down most of the time, it’s basically non-existant to Google. People who search for your sites will be given results for similiar sites instead, and it’ll cost you losses in potential sales.
InMotion Hosting provides their business class customers with 99.99% uptime guarantee, which you’ll receive one month’s worth of credits into your account if they ever drop below that number.
Of course DDoS attacks or service interruptions caused by custom scripts are not eligible for the credits, but it’s nice to know that InMotion Hosting is confident enough in their services to provide this uptime guarantee in the first place.
Check out InMotion Hosting’s uptime SLA here.
We’re currently tracking the uptime of our test site with uptimerobot.com and as of this time of writing, the uptime is at 99.99%. The site’s uptime is continuously being tracked and the data is displayed below, so you can see for yourself if InMotion Hosting’s uptime guarantee lives up to its promise.
Uptime since April 2018
99.97%
* This counter is constantly updating
Nobody likes free site builders that comes with a web hosting plan. They are super restrictive and their design templates usually looks like the dodgy end of a dirty bus.
However, BoldGrid is completely different beast.
It is actually a PREMIUM site builder (which most people will happily pay for) that’s built on top of WordPress, so you’ll get to enjoy the full flexibility of WordPress without the all of the complexities!
Its UI is such a dream to use and it’s wonderfully intuitive. People with zero coding experience can practically build their own WordPress sites in under an hour with the help of their super easy to use drag-and-drop editor.
They’ve even got pre-built customizable themes if you prefer to use those instead.
Even if you’re an experienced web designer, you’ll find that BoldGrid has its advantages.
It streamlines your workflow, allowing you to work faster and create more dynamic sites, and you can also save your favourite loadouts to be used as templates for other sites!
One of the best perks of BoldGrid in my humble opinion, is that you have complete ownership of the website you’ve built using their system, whereby other site builders don’t give you full ownership for your sites.
BoldGrid usually costs $60 per year, but it comes FREE with InMotion Hosting’s shared business plans. The best things in life truly are free!
Check out this video for more information on Boldgrid.
Nobody likes being nickel and dimed for anything, but it can often feel that way when we’re setting up websites. We’ve got to pay for web hosting, pay extra for features we want, pay someone to design the site, pay for the images said site designer would use – the list just never ends.
This is why we were over the moon with InMotion Hosting’s decision to include a free domain (worth $14.99) with all of their shared business plans. The domain is actually only free for a year, but the fact that it’s free at all really makes a difference in customer satisfaction.
If you’ve already got an existing domain which you’d prefer to use, InMotion Hosting will even provide you with credits so you can transfer your domain over quickly and without any fuss.
InMotion Hosting’s Business plans comes with an awesome suite of security features which helps keep your site safe from any unforeseen attacks. It’s pretty cool because you can rest easy and concentrate on your business or content creation without worrying about any of that stuff.
The Security Suite consists of:
Free SSL
InMotion Hosting provides FREE SSL through cPanel, signed by Comodo, one the most trusted SSL brands in the industry. With just a few mouse clicks you are able to get ‘https’ activated in your website.
To us, this is pretty damn awesome because Chrome will start labelling sites without SSL as ‘not secure’ soon. And the convenience to activate the free SSL is simply unbeatable.
Hack Protection
InMotion Hosting uses an internal tool called Patchman which searches for vulnerabilities in your site and patches it before hacks can happen. It’s a great preventative tool to have for free and it’s excellent feature for e-commerce sites!
Free Automatic Backup
Can you imagine how tedious it would be to have to manually backup your data? What happens if you happen to forget to perform a backup on the one day your data decides to disappear?
InMotion Hosting helps us solve that problem by automating the process for us. We don’t have to worry about backups whatsoever as their system does it for us, allowing us to focus on the business aspect of things.
Restoring data is also super easy. Just 1 click is all it takes to restore your site to how it used to be. If you don’t know how to do it, just check with their excellent live team – they’ll be more than happy to do it for you.
DDoS Protection
InMotion Hosting’s DDoS protection is built into the infrastructure and is provided by Corero, one of the leading brands in cyber security.
They offer real time DDoS protection through their ‘first-line-of-defense’ approach, which inspects traffic and blocks attacks in real-time – in other words, they protect your site without interrupting actual consumer traffic!
Read up on Corero’s DDoS protection over here.
E-commerce businesses runs 24/7, and a good web host should have 24/7 support as well, to fix any issues no matter the time.
InMotion Hosting’s support team has always been responsive, knowledgeable and experienced, always ready to patiently help us with whatever problems we encountered. (And they are 100% U.S. based!)
They can be contacted through live chat, Skype, or if you’re feeling particularly chatty, through their dedicated support phone number.
Our own experiences with them has always been very pleasant, getting our issues fixed without any frustrations at all. They’ll answer all your questions patiently and professionally, no matter how stupid they may be.
This is HUGE. Most web hosts provides a prorated or partial refund within 30 days or 60 days. InMotion Hosting is confident enough with their services that they offer a FULL refund within 90 days, something I believe no other web hosting company has done before!
They’ll also sort our your site transfer for you completely free with no downtime whatsoever, and so you won’t have to pull out your hair worrying about breaking your site.
After all that, if you’re unhappy with InMotion Hosting, just cancel within the free look period and you’ll get your money back with no questions asked!
Everybody likes getting more value for their money, right? Lucky for you guys, we’ve managed to score an EXCLUSIVE DISCOUNT with InMotion Hosting which gives you 56% off their business plan bringing the price down to only $3.49 per month (Launch plan)!
That’s not all, if you’re looking for premium WordPress Hosting, you’ll be glad to know that we’ve got 37% off InMotion’s WP-1000s Plan, which will bring the price down to only $4.99 per month.
Compared to Bluehost’s starter WordPress Hosting plan which costs an exorbitant $39.99 (you don’t even get more features – more on that in InMotion VS Bluehost) we think you’ll obviously get more bang for your buck with our affiliate link below!
This is just a minor gripe, but it’s still something we found annoying – InMotion Hosting’s check out process can be a pain. There are no clear indications on what to do or where to press.
They’re one of the few companies out there that still practises manual call-to-confirm for new users. This can be quite troublesome, but it’s also a security feature. Whether or not this is a good or bad thing depends on the user.
The check out process is also really slow. A quick search revealed that some users also encountered problems completing the sale, with some people experiencing timeouts while others simply could not complete the process.
If you’re thinking of subscribing, do take note and be prepared – be patient, and the sale will eventually go through.
While InMotion Hosting’s Max Speed Zone™ is optimized for a global reach and works really well, but it kinda blows that their datacenters are only located in America.
I am located in Southeast Asia, and although InMotion Hosting’s servers seem to respond quite well, pinged from Singapore at 178 ms, it can potentially be so much faster for our customers to load up our site if only they had a datacenter located in Asia.
NGINX is a super popular server set up among most web hosts due to its contribution to the massive decrease in site loading speeds, and we’re quite disappointed that InMotion Hosting hasn’t implemented it in their shared hosting plans yet (it’s only available with their WordPress hosting options).
However, we did a little bit of digging and discovered that they are testing and reviewing the compatibility of NGINX with their shared servers, and they might eventually completely switch over from Apache.
It’ll be awesome for small to medium business owners when they do (site load speeds decrease tremendously with NGINX!) but as of this time of writing, it seems like a missed opportunity.
If you’re looking for shared business hosting for small businesses or e-commerce sites, you’ve got three options:
Our test site is hosted on the Power plan because we wanted to host a few domains, and this plan gives us more than enough leeway and resources to do everything that we wanted to do. As a matter of fact, we’re actually hosting other affiliate sites with this account and we still haven’t encountered any hiccups in service.
One that’s not really clear in InMotion Hosting’s website is the difference between 2x performance in the Power plan and the 8x Performance in the Pro plan. We did some digging and this is what we discovered
The physical memory allocated for the pro plans is literally 4 times of the launch plan, which means that the host can run the programs you need on your site more efficiently which directly translates to faster loading speeds, if your site requires those kinds of resources.
If you’re on the fence between the Power and Pro plan, the rule of thumb here is to always start small and upgrade as you grow. InMotion Hosting has a full range of services to cater for every need. So just pick a plan you with the resources you think you’ll need – if you find that you need more, you’ll always have the option to upgrade!
Also, you’ll get an exclusive 56% discount with you use our affiliate link, so don’t forget to use it!
For Agencies, resellers or developers, you can pick between two VPS plans that’ll suit your needs. These plans come NGINX server set up and other itty bitty benefits that gives you bragging rights when you hang out with those who are in the know. See all VPS features here.
However, if you’re looking for the best of the best, the most luxurious and decadent hosting plans around, look no further than InMotion’s Managed WordPress Hosting. They’re optimized to give you the best speeds possible with NGINX, SSDs, PHP7 and advanced caching.
You’ll also enjoy managed security and managed updates which means you literally won’t have to worry about a single thing as InMotion’s Managed WordPress Hosting sorts everything out for you.
Obviously, with premium features come a premium price – be ready to splurge for those benefits! Check out their pricing here.
So – how do InMotion’s server speeds compare to SiteGround’s?
Server Response Time: 172 ms VS 136.9 ms
For this speed test, we created two web sites – one with InMotion Hosting Power Plan and one with SiteGround GrowBig. We put our two test sites through our intensive server speed checker to see which web host is faster in terms of response time, and the results took us by surprise.
InMotion Hosting really impressed with a worldwide average of 172 ms, which earns them an A+ ranking from bitcatcha.com!
From these results, it’s very clear that sites with US based audiences will benefit the most from their blazing fast speeds due to their 2 datacenters located in America, but pings from the rest of the world also came back reasonably fast (mostly below 180 ms) so businesses with international audiences can still enjoy faster-than-recommended speeds with InMotion Hosting!
SiteGround’s scores are pretty similiar with InMotion Hosting, with a speedy worldwide average of 136.9 ms, which also gets a ranking of A+.
We have covered a more detailed comparisons of their servers at SiteGround VS InMotion Hosting. Do check that out.
Datacenter Location: 2 VS 5
InMotion Hosting only has 2 Datacenters (US east and US west) strategically located for maximum worldwide coverage. Although InMotion Hosting’s datacenters are pretty fast wordwide, SiteGround has 5 datacenters spread out across 3 regions – this allows you to pick the datacenter closest to your target audience’s location, ensuring the speediest loading speeds possible for them (and as we all know, the faster your site loads, the more sales you can potentially make!).
Speed Enhancing Features
When it comes to speed enhancing software, both SiteGround’s GrowBig and InMotion Hosting’s Power Plan supports PHP7, but SiteGround seems to have the upper hand with their inclusion of the popular NGINX server set up, famed for its speed. SiteGround also has the advantage with their very own SuperCacher, an advanced caching system which allows you to boost site loading times up to 4x faster!
InMotion Hosting actually has high performance SSDs optimized with NGINX server set up, but it seems like those features are only available with their WordPress hosting plans.
Git & Staging
Those of you that enjoys quality of life features such as GIT or staging, you’ll be disappointed that InMotion Hosting does not offer either of these features. It’s a little disappointing, considering SiteGround can offer more at roughly the same price point.
Note
InMotion Hosting offers Git & Staging in their Premium WordPress Hosting, which start at $4.99 /mo. Learn More.
Next, we pitted InMotion Hosting’s brand new WordPress Hosting plan against Bluehost’s seasoned WordPress Hosting plan.
The first thing we noticed right off the bat was the price – InMotion Hosting’s WP-1000S plan is only $9.99 37% discount, $6.99 only monthly, versus Bluehost’s WP standard at a whopping $19.99 per month. When we placed the features side by side, we found that the massive difference in price really isn’t justifiable.
The only advantage that Bluehost seemingly has over InMotion Hosting is that they allow 100 million visits per month, in comparison to InMotion Hosting’s 20,000 monthly visits.
Other than that, it just makes no sense to host with Bluehost. InMotion’s WordPress hosting provides us with so many essential features at half the price (SSD, staging, auto-updates, page builder, site migration…the list goes on) they make Bluehost’s plan look really outdated.
Looking just at the features, it’s clear that InMotion Hosting’s WP-1000S is the logical choice to make if you’re thinking about getting Premium WordPress hosting.
We are very happy with InMotion Hosting!
Their speeds have improved over the last time we tested them and took us by surprise. Their 2 datacenters are efficiently used to cover an international audience without sacrificing loading times and they even scored faster speed tests than SiteGround!
The pros heavily outweigh the cons (frankly, we were nitpicking – we actually had trouble trying to come up with cons!) and we love their long list of features.
Their SSD storage is a huge draw. Throw in their other perks (unlimited emails, no downtime site transfers, free apps, unlimited bandwidth, etc) and it’s a no brainer – InMotion Hosting is an excellent web host.
Their plans are value for money with reliable uptime and customer service.
It doesn’t matter if you’re targeting a specific country or an international audience – just find out if the East or West servers are better for your target audience, and watch as your data gets carried to your customers’ screens in record time.
10/10 would recommend!
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Overall Uptime
99.97%
Overall Rating
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