6.InMotion

Summary

InMotion Hosting comes with a range of web hosting solutions that starts with the budget $3 shared hosting package and runs up to dedicated servers for $199.95. Such versatility means the company targets multiple segments of the market: personal clients, businesses, corporate clients, and so on. While the cheapest options can barely satisfy a serious webmaster, the business web hosting plans offered by InMotion look serious.

Business plans include three price options: $5.95/month, $7.95/month and $13.95/month. With the basic business plan you receive unlimited data transfer, unlimited disk space, 1000 FTP accounts, 25 subdomains, a maximum of six parked domains, free daily backups, and a set of scripts to install for free. More expensive plans also include shopping cart software, more domains, MySQL databases, and FTP accounts. Additionally, all accounts get a free domain name for one year and free advertising credits at Google and Yahoo/Bing.

The web host has been based in Los Angeles since 2001, but its servers are spread across the US. Power Dell servers, constant 24/7/365 monitoring and daily backups should guarantee the highest level of reliability: 99.9%.

InMotion claims to be eco-friendly by partnering with Trees For The Future, a non-profit organization dedicated to sustainable agroforestry. The company also tries to reduce consumption of electric energy by only using air conditioning in the data centers when it is necessary.

Reliability

The web host offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee for business plans. The Pingdom™ web host reliability service reported 99.47%* uptime for its servers. The average response time according to Pingdom™ was 0,544* seconds.

Money Back Guarantee

Depending on the plan you select, InMotion offers two types of money back guarantee: 30 or 90 days. Simply, a client purchasing a business class hosting plan for a longer period is eligible for a 90 day money back guarantee, otherwise it is 30 days. Domain name registration fee and setup fees are non-refundable. You can only request cancellation electronically. For some reason, phone calls and e-mail are not processed for cancellation requests.

Everything looks typical in InMotion's money back guarantee, except for a single remark. Customers requesting cancellation who have used more than 500MB of bandwidth, will be charged for that excess.

Ease of Use

Thanks to cPanel 11, every aspect of InMotion, from e-mail boxes and FTP accounts to MySQL databases and subdomains, is easy to configure. Conveniently, the panel has links to the billing form and to technical support. The "Advanced" section allows an experienced user to setup .htaccess handlers or configure cron jobs, while the "Software and services" section makes the process of setting up a new website as easy as pie (at least in theory). The Fantastico auto installer contains dozens of scripts, and you can start accepting credit card and PayPal payments within a minute by creating an account at PayPal and e-OnlineData directly from your account management panel. These are, of course, paid options.

The free premium site builder promised for all business accounts is not available in the control panel by default. You have to request it through your account management panel. The process is far less intuitive than it should be. Also, during the test, installation of the website builder failed for some reason.

Additional installation attempts also failed because the host reported that we already had a site builder on our account. Oh, did we mention you can only have one?

Then, after the builder finally appeared to work, the link to it was located in the "Account & Billing" section (why?), and it successfully… didn't accept the login data. We tried to reset the password but that didn't work either.

Finally, we asked support to reset the password and after that we, at last, were able to login to our hard earned Premium Web Builder.

As for Fantastico, it turned out to be less problematic. Fantastico provides 30+ scripts and software for automatic installation. WordPress and Drupal CMS installed swiftly and smoothly with no effort on our part.

Either the CMS version was outdated, or the hosting plan didn't have all features required to run the script.

The operation of InMotion's third-party tools and options isn't the best. Many functions don't work, or they have issues requiring technical support. Alas, we can't call this approach easy. Standard functionality, however, works fine.

Technical Support

We investigated the quality and responsiveness of technical support through the three main channels InMotion provides: telephone, e-mail, and live chat. The wait times were minor: three minutes for e-mail, and one minute for live chat. The average wait for a phone call was three minutes, which is a bit long.

As previously mentioned, the site builder didn't load when we set up and began working with our account. When we asked support for assistance, the problem was solved in 10-12 minutes total, including the time we spent describing the problem.

In general, the support team seems professional and polite. All questions were answered promptly and really helped to solve the issues raised.

In addition to the phone, e-mail and live chat support, you can also read FAQs, access online tutorials, or ask for help through the community forums.

Conclusion

InMotion's versatility is a bit of a low-down trick. While appearing to provide a range of hosting plans suitable for almost any target audience, InMotion doesn't really manage to provide an adequate level of service for all of them. Cheap personal plans starting at $3.00/month are simply too basic to be used for a serious website. With 1Gb bandwidth, no MySQL databases, no IMAP, and a single FTP account there are much better ways to spend your three bucks.

Business plans with the minimum fee of $5.95 per month are much more attractive, though you may still feel the lack of features at times. The Launch package, with only two MySQL databases, may force you to choose between a forum and a blog, and the zero eCommerce solutions offered by default leave little space for anything other than a tiny handmade e-store.

Although many third-party options had technical problems at the time of the review, the staff was extremely helpful and courteous at all times. Quick response and rapid problem resolution is a great advantage of InMotion Hosting. Free daily backups, even with basic plans also add to InMotion's overall rank.

With its 90 day money back guarantee you lose nothing, so why not give this web host a chance?