InMotion Hosting is one of the biggest hosting companies around. But hosting is a very personal thing. Is it right for you? In what follows, I try to answer that question for every time of person who needs web hosting.
Introduction to InMotionHosting
Ask any web developer about well-known web hosts, and InMotion Hosting will be one of the first that comes to mind.
They’re old, but have continuously invested in innovation to stay at the top of the field.
That’s not to say that they’re perfect, but they have solid plans for every size of business, with a few unique features that set them apart from other hosts.
This review is a deep dive into the most exciting parts of InMotion Hosting to me. I’ve used them as a customer, and I’d like to share the parts, both good and bad, that will help you decide if InMotion Hosting is right for you.
InMotion Hosting Features
- Free ‘.com’ domain
- 24/7 technical support
- Unlimited disk space
- 90-day money-back guarantee
- Free data backups & SSDs
- WordPress integration
They offer several plans, covering:
- Shared business hosting
- Reseller hosting
- VPS (virtual private servers)
- Dedicated servers
- Managed hosting.
The plans are not the cheapest, but they’re competitive with other hosting companies. I don’t think you should look for the cheapest host anyways in most cases, as the quality is sometimes poor.
Infrastructure
With InMotion Hosting, you get mature infrastructure, with redundant datacenters and automatic backups. You also get great support, and environmentally friendly servers.
If that sounds promising, read on. Let’s start digging into specific notable features on IMH.
Shared Hosting for Your Business
Shared hosting is the most popular type of hosting for small businesses.
What Is Shared Hosting
You share a server’s resources with other customers, and split the price. Since most small businesses have small and simple sites, they don’t need the full resources of a server themselves.
InMotion Hosting offers three shared hosting plans, in their business hosting section. The highest tier plan, the “pro business plan,” comes with the most resources and features of the trio.
The biggest plus of these shared hosting plans is that you benefit from InMotion Hosting‘s other hosting services. They have invested a lot of money into creating servers and services to attract customers.
You may not need managed dedicated servers, but you still get to benefit from (some of) that technology, even on shared plans.
Important Features
Here are the most interesting and important features to me:
Free data backups – Backups are available on most other shared hosts, but you have to do them manually, or pay extra. They’re free and automatic with any of these plans.
Free website transfer – While there are some conditions, InMotion Hosting’s support will transfer up to 3 websites from other hosts for you for free.
90-day money back guarantee – That’s about the longest trial you’ll ever find.
Free SSL – Many hosts still charge significant fees to add SSL to your sites. It’s free on all shared hosting plans.
Free domain name – A nice little bonus. It’s also cheaper when you need to renew it than on most other hosts that offer domain registering.
Unlimited Resources
There’s one final aspect of these plans that is potentially good or bad. These plans come with “unlimited” disk space and bandwidth.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you truly get unlimited resources.
In regular terms, it means that you get unlimited resources as long as your sites don’t affect the performance of other sites on the shared server.
The Good and Bad of Unlimited Resources
The good part of that is that InMotion Hosting cares about how customers are using their shared accounts. They won’t let other customers affect your sites if at all possible.
The bad part is that your site can run slower than expected at certain busy times of the day. If you’re using too many resources, it will affect the loading speed of your site, and may cause it to not load at all in some cases.
This is why I dislike “unlimited” shared hosting that many hosts offer. You need to monitor your website performance to see if it’s being throttled. If it is, you’ll have to upgrade to a more expensive plan.
WordPress Hosting in All Shared Plans
While you can install WordPress on any shared hosting plan, InMotion Hosting also offers 6 specialized WordPress plans.
WordPress Plans
The plans include the following features:
- WP-500S
- WP-1000S
- WP-2000S
- WP-3000S
- WP-4000S
- WP-5000S
The more expensive plans can support more monthly visitors, more websites, and have a few extra valuable features.
On these plans, WordPress comes pre-installed.
Special WordPress Features
There are a few features that these plans offered that are tailored specifically towards WordPress users.
InMotion Hosting offers BoldGrid and other premium plugins. You can get access to a library of premium themes and plugins at no extra cost (built into the plan cost).
Additionally, you get specifically configured NGINX server to optimize WordPress performance.
Finally, they provide a proprietary cache manager tool. InMotion Hosting created their own caching tool to speed up WordPress site performance.
WordPress is known to developers for being bloated and relatively slow. These features go a long way to minimizing those negative aspects of WordPress.
Reseller Hosting Packages
Reseller hosting is used to manage anywhere from a few to hundreds of websites, all from a single account.
Since you’re packaging up someone else’s hosting resources and selling them, it’s important that you’re dealing with a good quality host in the first place.
I think you can be confident doing that with all the technology that InMotion Hosting has behind them. The hosting you’ll be providing for your customers will have everything mentioned above in the shared hosting packages, and more.
Reseller Plans
There’s 3 reseller hosting plans to choose from and these are almost identical with the main differences in the amount of resources available.
Reseller Features
On top of the solid hosting infrastructure that InMotion Hosting has to offer their resellers, there are other valuable features on offer including:
- A free dedicated IP address
- Additional IP addresses available for purchase
- Free domain reseller account from eNom to earn even more
- Access for customers to Softaculous and all other applications like BoldGrid
- SSH access.
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