Inmotion Hosting

Inmotion Hosting Review 2017

In this review, we’ll take a look at the shared hosting services offered by InMotion Hosting. Overall, InMotion Hosting offers stellar speed at affordable prices.

Launched in 2001, InMotion Hosting is an established industry name at this point. They’re also one of the few budget shared hosts that is not owned by the hosting mega-conglomerate Endurance International Group, which might endear them to some users.

In our real-world tests, InMotion Hosting performed near the top of all of the shared hosts we tested. They also offer solid state drives (SSD) on all their shared servers, which is a huge plus and might explain why their hosting is so speedy.

Keep reading to get a peek at our test data, learn more about why SSD is important, and see all the features offered by InMotion Hosting.

Overview of InMotion Hosting Features

Here’s what you can expect when you go with one of InMotion Hosting’s shared hosting plans…

• Unlimited storage
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Solid state drives (SSD) used on all servers
• Free domain or migration
• Free backups
• Free access to InMotion Hosting’s BoldGrid website builder
• PHP7 and WP-CLI
• One-click WordPress installs
• Support for eCommerce sites
• 24/7/365 US-based support via phone, email, and live chat

InMotion Hosting Performance – Real Testing Data

We never like to blindly parrot marketing materials, so we always put the hosts we review to a real test. We set up a test site on InMotion Hosting’s Los Angeles, USA server to run them through the paces for speed and uptime.

Here’s what we tested:

• Time to First Byte – this is a basic measure of a web server’s responsiveness. Like the name says, it’s how long it takes for the first byte to download.
• Average Page Speed – this is how long, on average, it took our test site to fully load.
• Uptime – this is the percentage of uptime our site experience. We like to see 99.9% at an absolute minimum (ideally closer to 99.95%).

Here’s how InMotion Hosting handled our tests:

For Time to First Byte, they clocked in at 0.58 seconds. That’s not the fastest time that we tested, but it did rank fifth for the shared hosts that we looked at, which is certainly a respectable speed.

Moving on to average page load time, InMotion Hosting did a bit better, coming in at 1.88 seconds. That was the second fastest time of any of the shared hosts we tested. Those SSDs are definitely coming in handy!

Finally, our test site experienced 99.968% uptime, which was right up with the best of the shared hosts we tested and above our target of 99.95%.

Overall, InMotion Hosting performed very well in our tests. Their average page load times were right at the top when compared to other shared hosts, and Time to First Byte and uptime weren’t far behind. Based on the data, we can thoroughly recommend InMotion Hosting.

InMotion Hosting Data Center Locations

Your data center is the actual physical place where your website is hosted. Because it can have an effect on how quickly your site loads, you want this location to be as near as possible to your target audience.

InMotion Hosting currently operates two North American data centers in Los Angeles, CA and Ashburn, VA.

While this is definitely suitable for websites targeting North American audiences, if your primary targets are in Europe or Asia, you may want to consider a different shared host that offers data centers on those continents. You can also use a content delivery network (CDN) to mitigate any problems caused by distance.

InMotion Hosting Technology – SSD and PHP7

Another thing that we really like about InMotion Hosting is that they’ve adopted the latest technologies to offer the best hosting performance possible.

First off, they use SSD for all of their servers. Compared to physical drives, SSD can offer 200-300% better performance, which is obviously a massive performance increase.

InMotion Hosting also supports PHP7, which is the latest version of the PHP language. Without getting into the technical details, PHP7 offers some added performance boosts over earlier versions of PHP.

More advanced users will also love the inclusion of WP-CLI and SSH access.

InMotion Hosting Support and Documentation

InMotion Hosting offers 24/7/365 support via toll-free phone numbers, email, and live chat. We always like when hosts make it easy to get a real person on the phone, and InMotion Hosting does just that.

For those who like self-service, InMotion Hosting also offers a knowledge base with 700+ articles.

InMotion Hosting Shared Plans and Pricing

InMotion Hosting offers three different pricing tiers for their shared plans.

Their Launch plan supports two websites with unlimited bandwidth and storage starting at $4.99 per month (billed annually).

Their Power plan bumps up the support to six websites with unlimited bandwidth and storage starting at $5.99 per month (billed annually).

And finally, their Pro plan offers support for unlimited websites, bandwidth, and storage starting at $9.49 per month (billed monthly) or $7.99 per month (billed annually).

InMotion Hosting also offers VPS, reseller, and dedicated hosting plans if you need even more power.

Should You Choose InMotion Hosting?

We feel confident recommending InMotion Hosting as an excellent hosting choice.

They passed our real world tests with top marks, scoring near the top in every test that we ran.

We also like that they use most of the latest technologies in SSD and PHP7 and enable WP-CLI for developers.

And finally, they offer excellent support over a variety of channels if you ever need help.

With a generous 90-day money back policy, you have plenty of time to give InMotion Hosting a shot. And we recommend that you do just that!