InMotion Hosting Review 8 Pros & Cons You Should Consider

InMotion Pricing

What Do Their Shared Plans Include?

InMotion Hosting plans can be purchased either yearly or bi-yearly. Obviously, the longer the plan the cheaper it gets. However, be aware that you’ll be required to pay the full amount in advance. Monthly plans are available too.

With the Core tier, you are limited to 2 websites, 100 GB of storage, 40 databases and 10 email accounts.

The Launch plan is a good option for those needing unlimited websites, storage and email accounts. It also comes with a domain name included.

The Power tier seems to be ‘ecommerce ready’ and offers advanced caching options too.

The main selling point of the Power tier is the faster customer care support it offers.

If you have a professional project, you’ll want to have some sort of backup feature integrated. InMotion only offers this as an add-on starting at $1 a month for 10 GB of backups, so make sure you factor this into the price. For example, the Launch plan will go from $13.99 to $12.99 a month.

The purchase process can be a bit tricky, as some add-ons are added to the cart without you doing so – make sure you remove them. For example, the backup manager or the privacy protection for your domain name (see image above).

InMotion Pros & Cons

But you are probably wondering, ‘Is InMotion a good hosting provider for my website?’. Let me explain when I’d recommend InMotion and when I wouldn’t.

When to Use InMotion Hosting

I would recommend InMotion Hosting if you are looking for a web hosting provider that offers a lot of bandwidth and is simple to use.

For instance, smaller projects that won’t be needing a top performing and a cutting-edge service can find a good partner in InMotion. I would say small businesses’ websites like bakeries, law firms and beauty salons could use InMotion.

When Not to Use InMotion Hosting

But of course, InMotion isn’t for everyone. If you have a very hosting-dependant project (e.g. an ecommerce or a blog), InMotion may not be your best alternative as it can be slow.

Developers or larger teams (e.g. agencies) needing advanced features like staging areas, GIT repositories or built-in backup systems may find InMotion’s (too) simple system frustrating.

InMotion Shared Hosting Details

InMotion Performance Tests

You should not purchase a hosting provider without knowing what to expect from their performance; low-performing services can harm your project.

So let me share with you the results I got from my InMotion Hosting uptime and speed tests.

InMotion Hosting Speed Test

Having a slow server can be a huge pain as it’ll slow down your website. As you can imagine, today’s internet users aren’t very patient and will not wait around until your site is fully loaded (if too slow). Your conversion rate will therefore sink.

On top of that, search engines factor in websites’ speed when creating their rankings. Therefore, a slow site can cost you a bunch of SEO points too.

Unfortunately, in our latest web host speed tests to find the fastest web host, InMotion performed very poorly:

2022 web host speed tests

In fact, InMotion’s average loading time (2.58 seconds) was one of the slowest of all the providers tested. Competitors like GreenGeeks, DreamHost and SiteGround (read comparison) were faster.

And as you can see from the table below, InMotion has been consistently slow over the last three years:

Results in seconds

While there are plenty of things you can do to fix a slow website and even make WordPress faster, it’s difficult to overcome slow web hosting.

So this shortcoming is important!

Is InMotion’s Uptime Good?

Another critical aspect for hosting providers is the uptime levels. The uptime measures the percentage of time that your website went offline (sporadic and short downtimes aren’t a massive deal and won’t punish you).

But if your website is down all the time, your conversion rate will decrease. Search engines like Google or Bing won’t like it either.

You should aim to have at least an uptime of 99.95%. In other words, in a whole year, your server (website) should not be down for more than about 4 hours.

As you can see in the chart below, InMotion performed really well in this year’s web host reliability tests, with 100% uptime!

They didn’t do quite so well in the previous two years, but as you can see in the table below, the results weren’t bad at all.

To monitor uptime I use StatusCake, a tool that checks each website every 5 minutes.

InMotion Hosting Review: Do I Recommend It?

Not really.

InMotion’s performance is not acceptable – the uptime and the loading speed have a lot to improve.

Its reliable support and (first-term) affordable prices are a good perk. Its storage is also generous, and they don’t meter the traffic you can get. So if you don’t care too much about performance, it could be a good option.

But providers like DreamHost or GreenGeeks offer similar (or cheaper prices) and better performance. In fact there are plenty of better, cheap web hosting providers to choose from.

And there are also some missing features with InMotion Hosting:

There aren’t integrated backups in place unless you purchase their add-on starting at $1 a month – not crazy expensive but good to be aware of. And advanced users may miss some key features like Git repositories or staging areas for their projects.

> Check out InMotion for 90 days for free