Tom's Guide Verdict
Excellent customer support and well-specced plans make InMotion Hosting a good web hosting choice for larger businesses expecting serious traffic.
Pros
- +
90-day money-back guarantee
- +
Great tech support
Cons
- -
Expensive after the introductory discount
- -
Average performance in testing
Why you can trust Tom's Guide Our writers and editors spend hours analyzing and reviewing products, services, and apps to help find what's best for you. Find out more about how we test, analyze, and rate.
InMotion Hosting is a US-based web hosting provider that offers shared hosting, virtual private servers, and dedicated server solutions. With a focus on managed solutions, it advertises that no support agent can helm its chat, phone, or support email channels without first completing a rigorous internal training program.
In this InMotion Hosting review, we test whether it could be one of the best web hosting services for your particular needs.
InMotion Hosting: Plans and pricing
InMotion Hosting offers shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, WordPress hosting, and private cloud storage solutions. You can choose 1-month, 1-year, 2-year, and 3-year terms on most plans, with significant discounts on longer terms. Here, we list pricing for three-year plans when available.
The cheapest shared hosting plan, called Core, begins at the equivalent of $2.49 a month, rising to $8.99 a month after your first term. There are three other shared hosting plans, Launch, Power and Pro, which add more hard drive space and improved performance.
InMotion Hosting has four unmanaged plans for WordPress sites. The cheapest WordPress plan starts at $4.99 a month ($11.49 a month on renewal). You get 100GB SSD storage, a free domain, and unlimited bandwidth. The more expensive WordPress plans have better performance and more disk space. New managed WordPress options start at $15 a month.
InMotion Hosting offers managed VPS hosting that starts at the equivalent of $14.99 a month for the first term, but then the price jumps to $44.99 a month. The six other managed hosting plans increase the RAM, SSD storage, and bandwidth that you get.
Finally, you can get dedicated hosting starting at $89.99 a month.
InMotion Hosting: Features
With so many plans on offer, InMotion Hosting can suit a wide range of business needs. Fast SSD drives are used on all plans, improving your website response time. You get a free domain name, unlimited bandwidth on shared hosting plans, and SSH access.
You can choose a plan with WordPress pre-installed, and there’s a free WordPress website migration tool if you want to move your existing WordPress site to InMotion Hosting.
All WordPress plans include Jetpack as standard. This is a suite of tools that speeds up and optimizes a WordPress site. You also get a content delivery network, so your site will load quickly for all users, no matter where they’re located globally.
Most website hosts offer some kind of drag-and-drop website builder, and InMotion Hosting is no different. It’s one of the few hosts that includes BoldGrid, a website-building tool that runs on top of WordPress. This allows you to build a responsive, good-looking WordPress website using a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) interface.
In terms of functionality and ease of use, we found the builder to compare favorably with some of the best website builders, like Wix and Squarespace. A few BoldGrid features require upgrading to a Premium plan, but at $2.50 a month, it shouldn’t break the bank.
InMotion Hosting: Interface and in use
Sign up for InMotion Hosting, and you’ll receive an email with attached PDFs explaining how to get started with your hosting.
Account management is performed using the Account Management Panel (AMP). It’s a slightly dated but tried-and-tested web hosting management interface. If you prefer, cPanel is available too, which is another web hosting management interface that’s popular across the industry.
InMotion Hosting: Support
InMotion Hosting has a strong support center, with hundreds of articles on common web hosting topics. Beyond that, there are YouTube videos, product guides, educational resources, and a community forum.
One reason to pay InMotion Hosting’s higher prices is the 24/7, 365 days a year support. You can contact the team via live chat, email, or phone. In our testing, the support agents always took the time to get involved and help instead of directing us to an online article. This is to be commended when so many providers advertise a managed service but don’t offer valuable support.
Alternatives to InMotion Hosting
For shared hosting, there are many cheaper options than InMotion Hosting. Cheaper doesn’t always mean better, but Bluehost is a hosting company that we can recommend, particularly if you’re interested in creating a website using WordPress and WooCommerce. Its introductory plans start from $2.95 a month.
At the higher end of the scale, Hostwinds competes strongly with InMotion Hosting for virtual private servers and dedicated servers. It offers better storage limits and bandwidth allowance for the same amount of money.
InMotion Hosting: Final verdict
InMotion Hosting is a professional web host with excellent technical support. The cheapest shared hosting plans lack storage space, but its more expensive shared hosting plans, VPS plans, and dedicated server plans are competitively priced and well specified.
For small websites that won’t see much traffic, there are cheaper options out there, particularly when you factor in the big price hike after your introductory period. But the excellent tech support, well-specced plans, and fine performance results make InMotion Hosting a good choice for SMEs and larger businesses.
More from Tom's Guide
Take a look at our range of buying guides covering various hosting types, including the best VPS hosting, the best cloud hosting, the best WordPress hosting, the best Windows hosting, the best Linux web hosting, and the best unlimited hosting.
