InMotion Hosting Review

If you are looking for a web hosting provider, you have a huge number of choices.my Best Web Hosting Providers article, I looked at 15 providers that offer a wide range of plans.InMotion Hosting Review
To get a better feel for each provider, I set up the most basic account possible and ran a series of tests. I’m going to dive into InMotion Hosting’s offerings and other providers in future articles. Stay tuned for an in-depth look at

How Pricing Really Works

For the series of hosting reviews I’m doing right now, I’m testing the basic entry-level plans. In the case of In Motion Hosting, this is what they call their launch plan. For pricing, I only use InMotionHosting.comIf you want to save some money, however, read to the end of this section.

While it looks like you can get the Launch plan for $4.99 per month, that’s only if you pay upfront for three years, which means you’re actually paying $179.64. If you only want one year, you’re charging $83.88 to your card (that’s $6.99 per month).
There’s a catch, though: when you renew, you’ll pay more. This is not uncommon for hosting plans and is a practice that I sincerely wish the hosting industry would stop. Instead of paying $179.64 for three years, you’re paying $359.64, which is double the price — a 100% increase.

What’s Included in the Base Launch Plan

The plans below are for one website and one site only The fact that InMotion’s launch strategy allows for two sites pleased me. While most people starting out with their first website will only need one site, having a second site allows for both growth and experimentation.
You can use the second site as a staging site or test new ideas without jeopardizing the performance and functionality of your main site.
InMotion makes the same unlimited claims regarding disc space, bandwidth, and email that are made by the majority of hosting providers today. In practice, these infinite values ​​are limited by service. For example, you can’t use your unlimited storage as a giant backup tank where you dump gigabits of video. Furthermore, he states that “Accounts that negatively impact server or network performance must resolve these issues or be asked to upgrade to a virtual or dedicated server.”

Dashboard Access

When researching a new hosting company, I like to check around their dashboard first. Is it an old friend, like cPanel? Is it some kind of junky, barely organized open source or homemade mess? These are often the ones that bother me the most because they almost always hide the restrictions that I have to work with in some way.
When you first log into InMotion’s dashboard, you are greeted with their account management panel. Here, you can manage your credit card information, get support, and more. Additionally, each account is displayed as a section in the panel.

Learn more…On Hold

Installing WordPress

Certainly other content management and blogging applications that you can use in addition to WordPress. That said, since 32% of the entire web uses WordPress, it’s a good place to start. WordPress sites can be moved from hosting provider to hosting provider, so there is no lock-in. And by testing a site built with WordPress, we can achieve some consistency in our testing between hosting providers.
I was a bit surprised to see that a WordPress site had already been created for me by InMotion. So first I deleted it.
Softaculous is a standard app installer that makes installing a web application as easy as installing an app on your phone. Once I was sure that the previous WordPress files were gone and the database was dead, I clicked on the Softaculous icon.I had a WordPress site up and running in about five minutes after a quick and painless installation.

Quick Security Checks

One of the biggest problems with operating a website is security.You want to make sure your site is secure from hackers, doesn’t get flagged by Google, and can connect securely to payment engines if you’re running any kind of e-commerce site.
While the scope of this article doesn’t allow for a complete security check, there are some quick checks that can help identify whether InMotion’s cheapest platform is starting with a secure foundation.
The first of these is multi-factor authentication. It’s very easy for hackers to break into a website’s login screen and force-pass a password. One of my sites has been locked down by some hacker for weeks, but since I have some relatively strong protections in place, the bad actor couldn’t get in.

Performance Testing

I then wanted to use some internet performance testing tools to evaluate how the site worked. It is important not to take these tests too seriously. We are deliberately looking at the lowest offers from hosting vendors, so expect the sites they produce to be relatively slow.
That said, it’s good to think about what to expect, and that’s what we’re doing here. The way I test is to use a fresh install of WordPress and then try the “Hello, World” page, which is mostly text, with just an image header. That way, we can focus on a basic page response without worrying too much about media overhead.
First, I tested Pingdom Tools, one from San Francisco and one from Germany. Here’s the San Francisco test rating:

Responsiveness

In a word (well, five words): Much better than I expected. During testing, I had two reasons for reaching out to get the information for this article alone. Then a standard test I use to gauge support between hosting providers and their backup offerings.

First contact was through chat. I suddenly couldn’t log into AMP and kept getting error messages. I reached out via sales chat and was transferred to a tech support chat operator, who told me to try a different browser. It was discovered that Chrome was the problem. Clearing the cookies solved the problem. This chat took less than a minute to connect.
My second attempt was trying to find out if there was a multi-factor authentication option for the main dashboard, and I couldn’t find it. It took 10 minutes to connect. Sadly, he also told me there was no MFA.
The third attempt was by voice. I was initially concerned that there was no phone support as sometimes the chatting and ticket systems can take forever. As it turns out, while there is no phone number to call, there are Skype accounts to connect to. I reached out to in-motion support, and to my surprise, I was connected in less than two minutes.
The agent I spoke with provided some logical responses. How frequently do you back up my account? was my initial query. The answer is every day, however every new day replaces the backup from the day before.