The web hosting field is a crowded one, so it takes a special service to stand out from the ever-expanding pack. InMotion Hosting, with its many capable offerings, falls into that category. The web hosting service has a rich feature set that satisfies many personal- and business-related web hosting needs with its reasonably priced and well-rounded shared, dedicated, reseller, virtual private server (VPS), and WordPress plans. Its uptime and customer service are excellent, too. As a result, InMotion Hosting joins top competitors, such as DreamHost, HostGator, and Hostwinds, as an Editors' Choice pick.
Shared Web Hosting
Building a website doesn't need to be an expensive endeavor. If you want to dabble in cheap web hosting, check out shared hosting. With shared hosting, your site is in a roommate situation with many other sites on a single server, so you split the server cost and the available resources. Shared web hosting isn't very powerful, but it's a solid solution if you don't expect tremendous website traffic.
InMotion offers four, Linux-based shared web hosting plans. The most basic is the skimpy Lite plan ($4.99 per month with an annual subscription, renewing at $8.99 per month). It lets you host one website, and offers 10GB of SSD storage, a single email account, and unlimited monthly data transfers. The Launch plan ($6.99 per month with an annual subscription, renewing at $11.99 per month) builds upon that by letting you build two websites, create 10 email accounts, and store 50GB of files.
Next up the ladder is the Power plan, which nets you 50 websites, 100GB of SSD storage and 50 email accounts. Its annual plan costs the same as the Launch plan, but it renews at $15.99 per month. Pro tops Power by offering 100 websites, 200GB of SSD storage, and unlimited email accounts. Sadly, Pro is the only InMotion shared hosting tier that doesn't lock you into an annual contract. It starts at $19.99 per month, with additional discounts for an annual commitment ($15.99 per month, renewing at $24.99 per month). On the upside, all InMotion Hosting shared hosting plans include unlimited monthly data transfers, free SSL, and a free domain.
Choosing the best web hosting provider is a great place to start your journey towards building a solid online presence, which doesn’t have to be an overly time consuming task.
What is a web hosting service, and why do you need it? Well, it’s a service that allows individuals or organizations to host a website that is usually accessible via a web browser. It’s a specialist provider that securely stores your files (HTML, pictures etc) and runs your site live on the internet.
Some pointers you will need to consider when making your decision to pick the right web hosting provider for you are, whether a specific type of hosting (for example shared hosting) is for you, how much storage you really need, and whether an SSL certificate is included in the package.
As of September 2021, we have reviewed (and are continuously re-reviewing) more than 160 web hosting providers, a number that includes best website builders (as well as static site generators and landing page creators).
So, in short, we know what stuff the absolute top website hosting companies are made of. No one has reviewed more web hosting providers than us online.
We’ve provided detailed summaries for each web hosting provider and highlighted their respective strengths and features, things that may be important for your choice, plus information on pricing and why each particular web host may be ideal for you.
How we test?
Our reviewers test each web hosting service by signing up and checking out what the provider does to help new users, as well as how easy it is to navigate around the hosting provider’s dashboard.
We weigh up the details of what you get, and what you don't get, and rank each web hosting provider based on the quality of its features that many customers will use, and how clear the web hosting company is on what the customer is getting in every product.
That said, HostGator remains the PCMag Editors' Choice pick for shared web hosting services. InMotion's rival offers unlimited email, storage, and monthly data transfers with each plan, and adds the choice of Linux- or Windows-based servers. The Windows option is important for sites that have software that runs on an ASP.NET framework.
VPS Web Hosting
In terms of power, VPS hosting offers more pop than shared hosting. That's due to the fact that your site lives on a server with far fewer sites competing for resources than with shared hosting. Plus, the web hosts supply your site with a guaranteed minimum of resources. As a result, VPS hosting is more expensive than shared hosting, but it's a far more powerful and reliable system. You can think of VPS hosting as living in your own apartment; you'll have neighbors, but they aren't all up in your bandwidth to the same extent that shared hosting-style roommates can be.
InMotion Hosting offers managed hosting and unmanaged cloud VPS web hosting. Managed VPS starts at $56.99 per month (or $41.99 per month with a one-year plan), while unmanaged, scalable cloud VPS starts at $5 per month. You get respectable top-level specs for the managed offerings, including 8GB of RAM, 7TB of monthly data transfers, a single dedicated IP, and up to 140GB of SSD storage. Unlimited email, domains, websites, and MySQL databases are included, too. The scalable cloud VPS tops out at 32GB of RAM, 8 CPU cores, 640GB of SSD storage, and 7TB of monthly data transfer for a hefty $160 per month. InMotion has a good VPS offering, but it isn't as robust as the PCMag Editors' Choice for VPS hosting: Hostwinds.
Hostwinds has stacked and flexible VPS offerings that start at $4.49 per month for 1GB of RAM, 30GB of disk space, unlimited monthly data transfers, and unlimited email. Its offerings scale up to $247.69 per month for 96GB of RAM, 750GB of disk space, unlimited monthly data transfers, and unlimited email. Hostwinds gives you more room to grow.
Dedicated Web Hosting
With dedicated hosting, your website lives on a server all by itself and leverages the system's full power. In other words, you don't share your server with roommates—you have the whole house to yourself. As a result, dedicated hosting is an extremely powerful type of web hosting. It's one that you should look into if you expect your website to receive a large amount of traffic. Mission-critical sites that can't go down (or slow down) should be on dedicated servers.
Recently upgraded to the latest Intel Xeon tech and now with more Linux options (including (Centos 7/8, Debian 9/10, Ubuntu 18.04/20.04, and OpenSUSE), InMotion Hosting’s dedicated and Bare Metal plans are a strong choice for large websites. Starting at $139.99 per month, you can configure the company's dedicated web servers with up to 4TB of storage, 25TB of monthly data transfers, and an impressive 192GB of RAM. If need even bigger specs, check out InMotion's custom build services that let you can plan, build, and customize the hardware as you see fit.
InMotion has solid dedicated web hosting plans, but AccuWeb, the PCMag Editors' Choice pick for dedicated hosting, has better all-around packages. AccuWeb offers dedicated hosting packages (starting at $99 per month) that can be outfitted with up to 8TB of SSD storage and 512GB of RAM. They boast 20TB of monthly data transfers, too. You even get a choice of Linux- or Windows-based servers for extra flexibility.
WordPress Web Hosting
WordPress is one of the top names in web hosting, as the service is the content management system for roughly 30 percent of the internet. If you're looking for WordPress hosting, InMotion offers solid packages. Your digital footprint will reside on a server that exclusively hosts only WordPress websites. This is a huge advantage in terms of load times and reliability. Your WordPress website sits in a WordPress-only ecosystem which translates to some big benefits. Server settings such as cache, PHP workers, and more are dialed-in to the specs recommended directly from WordPress. No more having to host your website on a server where one website is running Concrete5 and another is running Joomla. All sites now live in a WordPress world of harmony, speed, and reliability.
InMotion Hosting’s Linux-based, WordPress-optimized servers come with the content management system preinstalled, and they offer website staging and automatic software updates. In a nice touch, InMotion Hosting automatically updates your third-party WordPress plug-ins. It also bolsters your WordPress installation with a custom-configured NGINX stack and an in-house caching system.
WP-1000S ($7.99 per month with an annual plan, renewing at $10.99 per month) offers 50GB of solid-state drive storage, the ability to host one website, and unlimited email and monthly data transfers. WP-2000S (also $7.99 per month, renewing at $15.99 per month) boosts that baseline with a 100GD SSD drive, Jetpack Personal, and the ability to host two sites. Rounding out the top two plans are the WP-3000S and WP-4000S. Starting at $13.99 per month with an annual plan, WP-3000S gives you a total of three websites, 150GB of storage, and unlimited email. These first three plans have no month-to-month subscription options.
WP-4000S starts at $25.99 month-to-month ($22.99 per month with an annual plan, renewing at $36.99 per month) and nets you six website, 200GB of storage, Jetpack Professional, and a dedicated IP. Finally, there's the WordPress VPS plans, which mirror the pricing on the managed VPS plans above. These are top of the line packages fully-managed by in-house pros, giving you unlimited sites, dedicated resources, a dedicated IP, up to 140GB of storage and 7TB of monthly data transfer.
Lastly, InMotion offers WordPress Dedicated hosting plans. Starting at $159.99 per month for a month-to-month plan ($139.99 per month for an annual plan, renewing at $169.99 per month), it offers managed hosting on a dedicated server that includes up to 15 dedicated IPs, website migration, and the option to add a software RAID.
That said, A2 reigns as the WordPress hosting champ. The Editors' Choice award-winning service boasts Linux-powered servers that offer unlimited storage and monthly data transfers at each tier. It also has several managed options for those who want their sites to receive the white glove treatment.
Reseller Web Hosting
If you're looking to get into the web hosting game, but you don't want to spin up your own servers or worry about providing the bandwidth for them, check out InMotion's reseller hosting packages. The six Linux-based plans (starting at $26.59 per month), offer up to 6TB in monthly bandwidth, unlimited email, and multiple cPanel accounts (depending on your account). InMotion Hosting provides 24/7/365 customer support, as well. The plans are quite respectable, though they don't match Liquid Web's robust, Editors' Choice award-winning offerings. Liquid Web offers a choice of Linux or Windows servers, plus unlimited email and storage.
Setting Up a Website With InMotion
We were initially a bit dubious when the sign-up confirmation page mentioned that an account specialist would contact us by phone to complete the setup process; we couldn't log in until that happened. However, the call was prompt and helpful, and we weren't pushed into making additional purchases. The representative asked a few questions about the type of website that we wanted to build, and then emailed the appropriate welcome materials.
The service's website builder requires a separate login and password, but building a website is an otherwise straightforward affair. You have three site types to choose from: Site, Blog, or Photo Gallery. The website builder lets you select themes and colors, as well as the types of pages you'd like to include on your site. In addition to standard pages, such as Contact Us and About Us, you can add special pages, such as Flash Intro and eShop. Next, you can add a map, poll, RSS reader, or script module into your pages. The website builder doesn't produce particularly attractive pages, however; our site looked dated. Alternatively, you can use WordPress to create your site. That opens the door to many site-enhancing WordPress themes and WordPress plug-ins.
E-Commerce and Security
InMotion Hosting has many e-commerce options although payment options are a bit limited. You can also download OpenCart or PrestaShop (both free) for a more robust store. We gave OpenCart a try; it offers a comprehensive dashboard for tracking customers and sales and multiple shipping and payment options. This beats other hosts, such as iPower and JustHost, that charge an extra monthly fee for e-commerce. Unfortunately, e-commerce is only available on the Power and Pro plans. That's not unusual; many web hosts save e-commerce for their more robust offerings. After all, are you going to attempt to make money on a Lite plan that offers a single email account?
InMotion offers several security features, including free remote backup services for accounts under 10GB in size. For WordPress sites, a free Sucuri Security plugin can be used to scan for malware and other security risks. McAfee spam and virus protection (starting at $1.39 per month) is also available for email accounts. You can purchase SSL certificates ($99.99 per year, with a $25 installation fee), which include a dedicated IP address.
Excellent Uptime
Uptime is an incredibly important aspect of the hosting experience. If your website is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services. That is a nightmare scenario. Thankfully, InMotion showed dependable uptime in our testing.
We use a website monitoring tool to track our test sites' uptime over a 14-day period. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings our website and sends an email if it is unable to contact the site for at least one minute. The data revealed that our InMotion site didn't go down at all during the testing period. So, you can count on InMotion to build a rock-solid website.
Cool Customer Service
We fired up InMotion's 24/7 web chat on a weekday afternoon to learn about how shared hosting differed from WordPress hosting. An InMotion customer support representative appeared a few seconds later, and gave us the information we needed. We later called InMotion's 24/7 customer support squad by telephone for details about dedicated hosting. Someone quickly fielded our call and gently explained the differences in everyday language. Overall, we're very pleased with InMotion's customer service.
InMotion has an extremely generous 90-day money-back guarantee that bests most other web hosts' 30-day refund policies. Dreamhost's 97-day money-back guarantee bests InMotion's offers by a week, however.
A Worthy Web Host
Featuring a multitude of hosting types, excellent customer service, tremendous uptime, and a lengthy money-back guarantee, InMotion Hosting is a web hosting service that has the chops to meet your personal- or business-related hosting needs—provided that you don't need a Windows-powered server or short-term hosting. Still, if those aren't deal-breakers, InMotion is worth checking out. It earns our Editors' Choice award for deftly balancing price, features, and functionality.
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