InMotion Hosting Review: Is InMotion Hosting a Reliable Web Host?

Pros

• Excellent WordPress management tools

Cons

• High server downtime
• Slow servers
• Poor customer service

InMotion Hosting has been in the web hosting game since 2001 and has over 170,000 customers -- but how well does it perform? I’ve conducted an in-depth InMotion Hosting review to answer this question.

I researched InMotion Hosting’s plans and pricing, then created an account and tested its site creation tools, server speed and uptime. I also evaluated InMotion Hosting’s customer support by exploring the knowledge base and contacting customer service via a support ticket and live chat. You can read our detailed breakdown of how we test web hosting services for a deeper understanding of the review process.

I was optimistic about InMotion Hosting at the beginning thanks to its excellent WordPress tools. However, due to the abysmal server performance and customer service I experienced, I do not recommend using InMotion Hosting.

InMotion Hosting plans and pricing

InMotion offers several types of web hosting:

• Shared hosting
• WordPress hosting
• WooCommerce hosting
• VPS hosting
• Dedicated server hosting

Here’s a quick breakdown of these hosting types:

InMotion Hosting also offers reseller hosting. Reseller hosting is intended for people looking to start a web hosting company, not for average users looking to host their own website.

Shared hosting is the best option for most first-time website owners thanks to its affordability and ease of use, so I’ve focused on that for the bulk of this review, including testing.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting stores many websites on one server. Each site receives a limited amount of the server’s resources, such as storage space and bandwidth. This limits how much content -- like blog posts and landing pages -- your site can store and how many monthly visitors it can handle each month. Most low-end shared hosting plans can accommodate up to 10,000 monthly visitors, while high-end plans may be able to accommodate as many as 400,000.

Every shared hosting plan from InMotion hosting includes:

• Free domain for the first year
• SSL -- secure socket layer -- certification
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Website builder
• Choice of data center location
• Firewall protection
• Malware protection
• Distributed denial of service -- DDoS -- protection
• UltraStack caching, a software protocol that stores data in users’ browsers to improve site loading time

InMotion offers four shared hosting plans:

All listed prices are based on a three-year term.

WordPress hosting

WordPress is a content management system -- CMS -- for creating, organizing and maintaining website content like blog posts and landing pages. WordPress powers 43.4% of all websites, and many hosts have responded to this popularity by creating WordPress-optimized hosting plans.

InMotion Hosting offers two types of WordPress hosting: shared WordPress hosting and cloud WordPress hosting. Shared hosting is the best choice if your main focus is affordability, while cloud hosting is great if you want more resources -- like storage -- and better loading speeds for international users.

InMotion Hosting’s shared WordPress hosting uses shared servers with caching technology and NVMe -- nonvolatile memory express -- storage for better speed and reliability than regular solid-state drive -- SSD -- storage. You’ll also get pre-installed WordPress with custom themes and premium plugins for speed and security, auto-update plugins and specialized WordPress support. The entry-level plan -- which can host up to two websites -- starts at $3.19 a month ($10.49 a month on renewal) for 100GB of storage and unlimited bandwidth.

Cloud WordPress hosting uses cloud-based virtual private servers -- VPS -- for enhanced reliability and site loading speed when compared to shared hosting. You’ll also get pro services to help you set up and optimize your site. These plans start at $11.67 a month (renewing at $16.67 a month) for 150GB of NVMe storage and four CPU cores to provide reliable, fast access to thousands of complex web pages for the millions of visitors the 3TB bandwidth can accommodate. W3 Total Cache, a plugin for further improving site speed, is also included.

VPS hosting

VPS hosting creates an isolated virtual private server for each customer. This provides dedicated resources, like storage and bandwidth, allowing VPS users to store tens of thousands of large files -- like images and videos -- and accommodate several hundred thousand monthly visitors. This makes VPS hosting ideal for medium-sized businesses or small businesses that need other VPS features, like the ability to choose your server’s operating system.

VPS hosting may also give you better security than shared hosting, as virtual private servers are isolated from each other more effectively than shared hosting spaces. 

InMotion Hosting offers managed VPS hosting to spare you the hassle of server management. InMotion Hosting’s basic VPS plan starts at $10 a month and renews at $17 a month. This plan includes four virtual central processing units -- vCPUs -- for fast and reliable performance. You’ll also get 160GB of storage, 5TB of bandwidth and 8GB of RAM, allowing you to store hundreds of thousands of files and share them with millions of monthly visitors.

Dedicated hosting

Dedicated hosting gives each customer the full storage, processing power and bandwidth of a physical server. In most cases, this means you’ll be able to store hundreds of thousands of large files -- like videos and images -- and accommodate millions of visitors each month, making dedicated hosting ideal for large businesses with high-traffic sites. 

You’ll also get better security than VPS hosting and full server customization options. This makes dedicated hosting a good choice if you need to install specific software on your server or protect highly sensitive data, like medical information.

InMotion Hosting only offers managed dedicated hosting plans, so you won’t need to perform any web server maintenance yourself. InMotion Hosting offers several dedicated hosting packages, with the lowest-tier plan starting at $35 a month and rising to $70 a month on renewal.

InMotion Hosting ease of use: Cumbersome setup, great long-term management

I signed up for a shared hosting plan with InMotion Hosting and tested three aspects of the platform for ease of use: the purchase process, account management and website and server management.

Purchase process

InMotion Hosting’s purchase process is highly involved, with several steps on one page separated by tabs. I also immediately noticed a red flag: the cost breakdown on the right side shows the discount provided, but doesn’t clarify that renewals cost the original price. Unfortunately, this lack of transparency is common in web hosting -- I ran into the exact same issue during my GoDaddy review.

The preselected Backup Manager add-on is also frustrating. This add-on costs you an extra $90 annually. The cost breakdown on the left clearly shows this charge, but it’s still annoying to have to actively switch to No, Thanks. Unfortunately, this is another common issue in web hosting, one I encountered during my reviews of both GoDaddy and HostGator.

I also disliked being required to create an account before accessing the billing information area. This feels unnecessarily complicated when other hosts, like HostGator and A2 Hosting, let you do all of this on one page without switching tabs.

Account management

One thing I liked about InMotion Hosting’s account management area is how easy it is to access your account settings and billing. You can go to the Account or Billing areas through the top menu or select specific options like Pay Bill from the main area of the page. This is great, especially compared to sites like HostGator that hide account settings in a drop-down menu.

I don’t like how busy the account management page is. Along with all of the account management options, there are buttons for numerous aspects of site management. These include cPanel access, email, SSL management, DNS management and Jetpack management. It almost feels like a miniature cPanel.

Being able to access the cPanel and email quickly is great, but many users won’t use the rest of these tools regularly. Some of them -- like the DNS Zone Editor -- won’t be used at all by the average user and serve only to overwhelm people who are new to web hosting. Moreover, there’s no easy WordPress access, even after I installed it on my test site -- and WordPress is the thing average users will need to access most often.

Website and server management

There are two ways to install WordPress on an InMotion Hosting site: by clicking the Softaculous button on the homepage, then selecting the WordPress installation option, or by heading over to the cPanel.

If you open cPanel, the first thing you’ll see is a box pitching InMotion Hosting’s website builder. This is great if you want to use the site builder, but if you want to use WordPress, you’ll have to scroll past the Email management area to find the installer. This is different from other hosts, like A2 Hosting, which display the WordPress installation option near the top of cPanel.

There’s no guided installation process like the one offered by A2 Hosting or DreamHost, but it only takes a few clicks to set up WordPress on your site and you can choose to install recommended plugins right away.

You’ll then use WordPress for the rest of your site creation. There’s no site assistant like the ones offered by HostGator and A2 Hosting, so you’ll have to figure out how to navigate the WordPress dashboard yourself, but you won’t need any code and there are thousands of WordPress tutorials to help.

InMotion Hosting’s custom cPanel does include two WordPress tools: WP Toolkit and a WordPress Management area.

The WP Toolkit displays updates available for your WordPress site and makes it easy to perform these updates in a couple of clicks. You can also clone or manually back up your site here, plus view and update various security settings.

The WordPress management tool displays key information about your site and provides tools for managing plugins and themes. You can also set up “Auto Upgrade” -- InMotion Hosting’s term for automated updates -- for the core software, themes and plugins. Other aspects of site management, like blocking unauthorized access to sensitive files, can also be done here.

Other than the options for enabling auto upgrades, this area offers essentially the same functionality as the WP Toolkit. Combining these areas into one would improve the user experience, but their separation is only a mild complication.

My one big complaint is that I found these tools -- and the InMotion Hosting cPanel generally -- slower than other versions of the cPanel and similar tools I’ve used.

Overall ease of use

InMotion loses some points here for its cumbersome signup process and overwhelming account management area, but overall, it was pretty intuitive. The WordPress management tool within cPanel is also one of the best I’ve seen, with everything clearly laid out and explained. So, overall, I’m giving InMotion an ease-of-use ranking of 7/10.

InMotion Hosting performance: Bottom of the barrel

I created a basic test site using the Total WordPress theme with two text blocks and two images to simulate a simple homepage. I then spent one week testing this site for two key performance metrics:

• Uptime, which is how much time a site spends online. Uptime is important because visitors who find your site down will often go somewhere else -- for every minute your site is down, you’re potentially losing traffic and, if you’re running a business website, money.
• Site speed, which is how long it takes for your site to load. Site speed is essential because users are more likely to leave your site if it takes a long time to load.

I also took a quick look at the performance tools offered by InMotion Hosting.

Performance tools

InMotion Hosting offers UltraStack caching on all plans. According to the company’s shared hosting page, this means at least double the speed and performance when compared to the average Linux-based web server. WordPress installs come with “Nginx Helper,” a caching plugin -- and part of the Ultrastack package -- that theoretically improves site speed.

InMotion Hosting lets you choose the data center where your site will be hosted, letting you pick one closer to your target audience so they may experience faster loading times. However, there are only three options: Washington D.C., Los Angeles and Amsterdam. If your target audience is in Asia or Australia, you’ll want a web host, like GoDaddy, that has servers all over the world.

Some InMotion plans also offer “Advanced Caching”, but the site doesn’t clarify how this differs from UltraStack.

Uptime

InMotion Hosting claims to provide the industry-standard 99.9% uptime guarantee on basic plans, meaning server issues won’t cause your site to go down for more than 10 minutes per week. I used BetterStack monitoring for one week to determine if InMotion Hosting lives up to this guarantee.

InMotion Hosting failed this test, with one hour and 12 minutes of downtime over the course of one week. The longest period of downtime was 20 minutes and happened during the middle of the day in the time zone where my data center -- the Washington, D.C. one -- was. This represents a spectacular failure to live up to the 99.9% uptime guarantee. For comparison, the next-worst performing host I’ve tested, HostGator, only had 7 minutes of downtime.

This lands InMotion hosting an uptime ranking of 1/10. This is the worst uptime I’ve experienced with any web host I’ve tested -- the next-lowest ranking company, HostGator, had a 6/10 ranking. Every other host I’ve tested, even DreamHost -- a company with several other issues -- had 100% uptime during my week of testing. 

Performance may improve if you choose a higher-tier plan with a claim of 99.99% uptime, but I don’t recommend spending the extra money to find out.

Site speed

Site speed is how long it takes your site to load on users’ devices, measured in seconds. Most experts recommend aiming for a site speed of under 3 seconds because bounce rate -- the number of people who leave your site after visiting only one page -- increases by 32% when load times go from 1 to 3 seconds.

I ran speed tests on my site over five days using WebPageTest. This tool lets me test from devices in numerous locations to understand how international users will experience InMotion Hosting sites. I also tested at different times each day to get a sense of how the experience of using an InMotion site might vary for users accessing the site at different hours. 

This broad collection of data helped me determine the following average loading speeds, measured in seconds (remember, lower numbers are better).

Based on these loading times, I came up with the following average loading speeds:

• Mobile site speed of 4.61 seconds.
• Desktop site speed of 3.07 seconds.
• Overall site speed of 3.84 seconds.

This is the worst site speed of any web host I’ve tested. DreamHost -- the company with the slowest site speed I experienced before this review -- had an average speed of 2.75 seconds, a full 1.09 seconds faster than InMotion Hosting. Moreover, InMotion Hosting is the only company I’ve tested that couldn’t even provide a site speed of less than 2 seconds in the US when using a US-based data center.

This earns InMotion Hosting a speed ranking of 6.5/10.

Overall

InMotion Hosting had the worst performance of any web host I’ve tested so far, with excessive downtime and slow servers, leading to a performance ranking of 3.75/10. 

This is significantly lower than the next-lowest ranking I’ve given so far, which was 6/10 for HostGator. Compared to A2 Hosting’s 8.5/10 and GoDaddy’s 9/10 rankings, this ranking is, quite frankly, atrocious. Even DreamHost, a company I don’t recommend due to sign-up difficulties and poor customer service, earned a notably higher performance ranking of 8.75/10.

InMotion Hosting security: Surprisingly decent

All InMotion Hosting plans come with basic firewall protection and a security suite, including:

• Secure socket layer -- SSL -- certification: This essential protocol encrypts data sent to and from your website -- like personal information submitted by your visitors -- signaling to Google, browsers and VPNs that your site is safe. Without SSL certification, visitors may not even be able to open your site.
• Hacking and malware protection: These tools scan your website continuously and install patches to eliminate vulnerabilities.
• Distributed denial of service -- DDoS -- protection: This protects your server from attacks that attempt to flood it with malicious traffic and shut it down.
• Monarx Security: This program protects your site from threats like adware and phishing.

This security suite is better than what you’ll get from some popular web hosts -- HostGator and GoDaddy only provide SSL certification for one year, and GoDaddy doesn’t provide any firewall protection on shared hosting plans. 

However, InMotion Hosting security isn’t the best in the business, as it doesn’t include built-in backups -- you have to pay at least an extra $2.50 a month for those. Backups aren’t included with every host, but there are several companies, like A2 Hosting, that offer this feature in every plan.

InMotion Hosting customer support: Impossible to reach

A good web host will be able to provide fast, helpful customer support via multiple channels, like live chat and support tickets or emails. You should also be able to find information on the host’s site so you can perform simple tasks yourself.

To see if InMotion lives up to this expectation, I looked at both the knowledge base -- where you can find tutorials for basic web hosting tasks -- and the experience of reaching out directly to customer service via live chat and support tickets.

Knowledge base

The InMotion Hosting Support Center offers numerous articles separated into categories you can explore in various ways. Listings for Most Common Tasks, like basic account setup and software installation, are prominent, while things like Domain Names and Product Guides are further down the page.

There’s also a search bar at the top of the page and four links near the top for commonly accessed areas like Knowledge Base and Tools & Resources, plus a sidebar with recent support articles and information about Control Panels. The number of links here can be overwhelming, but it’s fairly easy to navigate if you know what you’re looking for.

The articles themselves are clearly laid out, using simple language and step-by-step tutorials with screenshots where appropriate. A couple of the articles I read were accompanied by videos, which is great for visual learners.

Overall, I’m giving InMotion Hosting’s knowledge base an 8/10. The resources are great, but the area’s overwhelming to navigate and it would be nice to have more videos available for visual learners.

Direct communication

InMotion Hosting offers three methods of support: live chat, support tickets and phone. You can access support by clicking on the Get Help link at the top of the account management page.

This leads to a page with a prominent form for submitting a support ticket:

I found this interesting because other hosts, like A2 Hosting, push live chat as the first option, but it’s not a bad thing. The form itself is laid out well, so I entered a simple question for technical support and sent it off. I waited for over 24 hours and didn’t receive a response. This was frankly astonishing when compared to the 2 to 4 hours I’ve waited for other hosts to respond to support tickets and even the 10 hours it took for A2 Hosting to respond.

Other customer support methods are listed further down the page:

I clicked on the Launch Chat button and was shocked to receive notice that I was number 25 in the support queue. I’ve waited for live chat support staff to respond when reviewing hosts like GoDaddy, but I’ve never gotten a message other than “Someone will be with you soon” -- certainly nothing implying a long wait like a queue of 25 people. I’ve also never waited more than a few minutes. 

I waited almost 40 minutes and reached seventh place in the queue, only to receive a message saying my chat had been disconnected. I opened another chat and found myself back at position 25 in the queue. Another 40 minutes passed and I reached third place in the queue, then got disconnected again.

I tried a third time and the message said I was now number 22 in the queue -- but the excitement was short-lived, as it took over 40 minutes for me to reach number 14. At this point, I gave up and moved on to other things because my query wasn’t urgent -- but if it was urgent, I would now be in full-blown panic mode.

For phone support, InMotion has notable limitations. The service is only available from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. PT on weekdays, with no nighttime or weekend availability, whereas other hosts like GoDaddy and A2 Hosting provide 24/7 phone support. Phone service also isn’t available on lower-tier shared or WordPress hosting plans. I chose a lower-tier plan, so I wasn’t able to test phone support, to me giving it a default ranking, rather than one based on testing.

I’ve given InMotion Hosting the following support rankings based on my experience:

• Support tickets - 1/10
• Live chat - 1/10
• Phone - 5/10 (default ranking)

Overall customer support ranking

InMotion Hosting’s customer support is practically nonexistent beyond its high-quality knowledge base, leading to a support ranking of 3.75/10. The only web hosting company I’ve experienced worse service from was DreamHost, which received a 3/10 ranking. Compared to other companies like A2 Hosting -- with a 7.5/10 ranking -- and GoDaddy -- with an 8/10 ranking -- this is a complete failure for InMotion Hosting.

Reputation

InMotion Hosting has a rating of 3.9 out of five stars on Trustpilot, which doesn’t sound too bad -- until you realize that a full 21% of its roughly 1,500 reviews give the company one star. These negative reviews reference the same issues I experienced: frequent downtime, long wait times and poor customer service if and when they do respond.

InMotion Hosting has an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau, with around 20 complaints made and closed in the past three years. While this presents a much more positive image of InMotion Hosting, I would still be wary of a site with such a high percentage of one-star reviews on Trustpilot.

InMotion Hosting value: Looks good on the surface

There’s one more thing to consider before we decide whether or not InMotion Hosting is worthwhile: how does it compare to other web hosts?

Let’s look at some of the most popular web hosting companies:

There are a few key takeaways from this information:

• InMotion Hosting provides low introductory pricing; the Core plan is more affordable than comparable plans from GoDaddy and HostGator. A2 Hosting offers a lower introductory rate, but the difference is less than a dollar per month, making it negligible.
• InMotion Hosting has average renewal pricing; the Core plan’s renewal cost is the same as what you’ll pay for comparable plans for GoDaddy and HostGator -- minus the extra fees HostGator and GoDaddy charge for SSL certification. It’s also less than the $13 a month renewal price for the lowest-tier plan from A2 Hosting.
• InMotion Hosting provides great storage space -- the only host in this table that offers a similar level of storage (100GB) on the base plan is A2 Hosting. GoDaddy and HostGator, meanwhile, offer way less -- 25GB and 10GB, respectively. 10GB or 25GB is plenty for most static sites and starter blogs, but e-commerce sites and longterm blogs will need more.
• You’ll get decent security from InMotion, with permanent SSL certification and built-in firewall and malware protection, but no automated backups. Automated backups aren’t offered in every hosting plan, but some hosts, like GoDaddy, make them available to everyone.
• InMotion Hosting also offers great tools for WordPress users, with the WordPress Toolkit and management area making it easy to manage updates and security. You’ll also get auto-updates for WordPress -- something only A2 Hosting offers on its lowest-cost plan.
• The big downside of Inmotion Hosting is low availability of phone support -- the phone lines are only staffed from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. PT Monday-Friday, and they’re not available at all for users on the lowest-cost plans.

Overall, InMotion offers good value for its price despite the lack of 24/7 phone support -- and it’s worth noting that many cheap web hosts limit phone support to keep their prices low. With this in mind, I’m giving InMotion Hosting a value ranking of 8/10.

InMotion Hosting: Is it right for you?

So, is InMotion Hosting company a good choice? Let’s take a look at the rankings across our test categories:

• Ease of use: 7/10
• Performance: 3.75/10
• Customer support: 3.75/10
• Value: 8/10

Together, these rankings give InMotion Hosting an overall ranking of 5.6/10. This is technically above the 5/10 ranking where we officially stop recommending web hosts, but I still wouldn’t recommend InMotion Hosting to anyone looking for reliable service. There are many other web hosting services with more reliable support and customer service, such as A2 Hosting and GoDaddy.