Is your business growing out of shared hosting? Are you looking to upgrade to VPS hosting?
You should definitely consider InMotion Hosting for your VPS web hosting needs.
InMotion is a reliable hosting service and one of the oldest veterans in the industry. Its hosting has outstanding customer service and an unparalleled money-back guarantee.
It’s not the best web hosting service overall, and its slower overseas speeds may not be for your business, but InMotion is a great option if you need VPS hosting, especially if you are primarily U.S.-focused.
Compare InMotion to The Best Web Hosting Services
We have previously determined that InMotion has the best VPS web hosting services on the market.
VPS, or virtual private server, hosting is for websites that are too large for shared hosting. It mimics dedicated hosting, but it has a lower cost. It provides more security, performance, and reliability than shared hosting.
We’ve used about every hosting service available to manage hundreds of websites. We’ve also used extensive market research to build a list of the best web hosting services available. That experience and research led us to our eight top hosting providers.
You’ll see that our top two web hosting providers are Hostinger and A2 Hosting. Hostinger won the top spot for being super affordable, especially for shared hosting, while maintaining great speed and quality. And you can lock in its $1.39/month rate for basic shared hosting for up to four years.
A2 Hosting has a fantastic money-back guarantee along with a 99.9% uptime commitment, which is only slightly lower than InMotion’s 99.99% uptime. On top of that, it is well known for having the best and fastest speeds for every type of hosting.
Check out our complete buying guide to see which hosting provider is right for your website. See all of our top picks.
InMotion: The Good and The Bad
The Good
Excellent Uptime: InMotion prides itself on 99.99% server uptime. Uptime is a significant indicator of how well a hosting server performs. It measures how often a server is up and running and is listed as a percentage.
A web hosting service could have all the best features, the fastest speed, and better pricing than all of its competitors. But if it has poor uptime, none of those benefits matter. If its service is down, it can’t be used. Therefore, uptime is the most critical measure of a quality web hosting service.
InMotion was started in 2001, and it has mastered the art of reliability over the years. Its two server locations have dedicated management networks, so when something goes wrong, they are there to fix the issue immediately.
Although some tests indicate that it’s not at 99.99% uptime every year, it has never dipped far below. InMotion knows reliability and has been in the game for two decades.
24/7 Customer Support: The InMotion customer support team is available any day of the week at any time.
There’s nothing more annoying than calling customer support on a Saturday morning to hear a machine tell you that their “Service providers are unavailable at this time. Please call back Monday morning!” Believe it or not, there are customer service teams that operate this way. This would put you back two full days that you could be using to work on your business.
Therefore, customer support is a crucial factor when picking a hosting service provider. You want your problems solved as quickly as possible. This is why 24/7 customer support is such a great aspect of InMotion hosting.
You can email or call the team with questions. Calling is something that’s continually taken for granted these days as customer service declines. Having a call center sets InMotion apart. It has live chat options and community support forums to answer specific questions.
It also has support center guides with articles covering a variety of typical questions. InMotion values customer support and truly cares about its users.
High-Speed U.S. Connection: InMotion provides lightning-fast web hosting speed for its U.S. customers. It has two U.S. data centers. One is located on the east coast, and one is on the west coast. This allows it to easily cover the entire country.
The east coast server is in Ashburn, Virginia. It includes two tier-one ISP’s via BGP, and it has a carrier-grade network core from Brocade.
The west coast server is in Los Angeles, right near InMotion’s corporate headquarters. The server is in the One Wilshire building downtown. The data center is connected to four tier-one ISP’s with a carrier-grade network core from Arista.
InMotion uses a performance test from 35 U.S. locations to ensure its high-speed connection.
90-Day Money-Back Guarantee: InMotion offers a 90-day money-back guarantee with most of its products. This is very generous, and it is industry-leading. In comparison, Bluehost has a 30-day money-back guarantees and HostGator gives one for 45 days.
This demonstrates InMotion’s belief in its product. It also means it’s no risk for you to sign up. You have three months to determine if it’s right for you.
The Bad
U.S.-Only Data Centers: Because both InMotion’s servers are in the U.S., speeds tend to slow down overseas. As with everything, the farther it must travel, the longer it takes to get there.
If you want to target a global audience, this can present a big problem. A growing number of people globally are gaining access to the internet. Many businesses have customers worldwide.
Because InMotion has slower speeds to highly-populated continents like Europe and Asia, this can be a deal-breaker. However, if you are primarily U.S.-focused, this is nothing to worry about.
Expensive Short-Term Pricing: If you only need hosting in the short term, InMotion gets expensive. The most efficient way to spend your money with InMotion requires at least a two-year commitment. This can present problems for growing and unestablished businesses.
If you’re a new online business owner and decide to pivot to a global audience six months into a two-year contract, you’re stuck with InMotion hosting for 18 more months.
However, if you’re already established and know what you need for the next two years, this is not a problem.
InMotion Pricing and Options
InMotion Pricing
InMotion web hosting has four different plans. These are Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, and WordPress Hosting.
Most of these plans offer InMotion’s 90-day money-back guarantee. All plans have 24/7 customer support, and they include free SSL protection and premium malware.
Each plan has different pricing tiers, and prices vary depending on the length of time you commit to. Keep in mind InMotion sometimes has temporary discounts, so these prices may vary.
InMotion’s regular shared hosting plan starts at $5.99 per month. The Launch and Power shared plans also start at this price. The Pro plan starts at $14.99 per month.
VPS hosting starts at $17.99 per month. VPS-1000HA-S starts at this price. VPS-2000HA-S begins at $44.99 per month. VPS-3000HA-S starts at $67.99 per month.
Dedicated hosting starts at $57.50 per month. The Bare Metal Dedicated Servers plan also starts at this price. The Managed Dedicated Servers plan starts at $97.50 per month.
Finally, WordPress integration hosting starts at $6.99 per month. This includes WP-1000S and WP-2000S at this price. WP-3000S starts at $9.99 per month, while WP-4000S starts at $14.99 per month.
InMotion isn’t cheap. For example, its lowest tier hosting plans are more expensive than all of Hostinger’s plans. Its VPS hosting is also on the higher end, but its performance here is unmatched. Its dedicated server plan is competitively priced, and the Bare Metal plan provides a cheaper alternative.
InMotion Shared Hosting
InMotion Shared Hosting is intended for small businesses. Its three tiers are Launch, Power, and Pro.
The Launch plan is intended for people starting an online business. Its benefits include two websites, 10 email addresses, 50 gigabytes of SSD storage, and three times speed and performance.
The Power plan has more horsepower and adaptability for heavy traffic. It offers 50 websites, 50 email addresses, 100 gigabytes of SSD storage, and four times speed and performance.
InMotion’s Pro plan brings maximum speed and performance and is for ecommerce businesses. Some of the features included are 100 websites, unlimited email addresses, 200 gigabytes of SSD storage, six times speed and performance, and professional support.
All three plans come with a free domain, free SSL, and unlimited bandwidth. The free SSD drives included are up to 20 times faster than basic hard drives. These plans have over 400 pre-installed apps, and they let people use the command line to administer sites using SSH remote access. It also offers a wide range of coding options like PostgreSQL, MySQL, and PHP.
InMotion plans are complex, and its shared hosting is no different. We like that you can easily upgrade to more websites and storage. However, InMotion shared hosting is overpriced compared to competitors, and we don’t believe it has anything to create a clear competitive advantage over them.
InMotion is not the best option if you are only interested in shared hosting. Hostinger allows 100 websites at much less of a cost than this plan.
InMotion VPS Hosting
InMotion VPS Hosting is for higher traffic sites usually run by bigger resellers and businesses. It is separated into three plans.
The first is VPS-1000HA-S. It offers 4GB of ram, three dedicated IPs, 4TB of bandwidth, and 75 gigabytes of SSD storage.
The second plan is VPS-2000HA-S. It offers 6GB of ram, four dedicated IPs, 5TB of bandwidth, and 150 gigabytes of SSD storage.
VPS-3000HA-S has 8GB of ram, five dedicated IPs, 6TB of bandwidth, and 260 gigabytes of SSD storage.
All three plans include cPanel, WHM, and free SSLs. They have 24/7 servers, SSH and DDoS protection, and are optimized for ecommerce.
They also offer free website transfers. This is important because website transfers can be scary. People fear losing data when they switch hosting providers. InMotion makes this a worry-free process at no extra cost.
We also like the server snapshot feature, which allows you to roll back to an earlier form of your server.
The VPS features here are unmatched. InMotion VPS Hosting has plenty of storage and bandwidth. The free website transfers and snapshots are our favorite features. If you need VPS hosting, InMotion is the best option out there today.
InMotion Dedicated Hosting
InMotion Dedicated Hosting is intended for IT groups, custom deployments, and the largest sites. The two plans offered are Bare Metal Dedicated Servers and Managed Dedicated Servers.
Bare Metal is almost half the price and is built for developers and system administrators. It’s a more hands-off approach and gives the user more server customization. It has unmanaged command line servers and allows you to choose your OS. This option gives users a dedicated server with minimal overhead.
The Managed Dedicated Server is more expensive and is built for business owners, resellers and agencies. It’s pricier because there’s more support. Server management, security updates, WHM, and cPanel are included. It has a launch assist tool that helps users get started quickly.
Both plans include ram options starting at 16GB, up to 15 IP addresses, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
We appreciate that it has the Bare Metal plan for a more hands-off and cheaper option. The Managed plan will be suited for most, and it is competitively priced.
We don’t like how InMotion takes away their signature 90-day guarantee with these plans. Although VPS hosting is InMotion’s strong suit, this is still a viable option for dedicated hosting.
InMotion WordPress Hosting
The shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting options are all available for WordPress integration. InMotion offers four different plans here.
- WP-1000S offers one website, four times performance, and 50GBof SSD storage.
- WP-2000S has two websites, six times performance, 100GB of SSD storage, and Jetpack Personal.
- WP-3000S features three websites, eight times performance, 150GB of SSD storage, Jetpack Personal, and a dedicated opcode cash pool.
- WP-4000S offers six websites, 12 times performance, 200GB of SSD storage, Jetpack Professional, a dedicated opcode cash pool, and a dedicated IP.
All plans have WordPress pre-installed, unlimited emailing, unlimited bandwidth, free WordPress themes, and premium WordPress plugins.
WordPress is extremely popular, and we think this is an excellent addition to InMotion’s products.
However, this is not the best option if you’re ultra-specialized in WordPress. WordPress recommends Bluehost for the smoothest integration.
Comparing the Best Web Hosting Services
To fully understand the best web hosting services and which is right for you, check out our in-depth review here.
- Bluehost – Best web hosting overall
- HostGator – Best for scaling your small business
- Web.com – Best for simple business websites
- Hostinger – Best if you need a lot of storage
- DreamHost – Best for simple hosting
- SiteGround – Best for keeping uptime above 99.99%
- InMotion – Best price for hosting two websites on one plan
- Nexcess – Best for experienced WordPress users
- A2 Hosting – Most dependable web hosting for global traffic
Choosing the right web hosting service is difficult, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the terminology.
InMotion has been around for two decades and knows what it’s doing. It’s a veteran in the industry and conveys this through its excellent customer service, a rock-solid belief in its product, and dependable reliability and performance.
If you need a VPS web hosting service, InMotion is your best option.
