InMotion Hosting Review

Company Information

Founded: 2001
Headquarters: Marina del Rey, CA

Awards and Accreditations

Pricing

InMotion Hosting offers 6 packages that are suited for individuals and small businesses. The Power Package is the plan that offers services that are the most similar to other companies' 'basic' plans, such as FatCow's Original Plan and iPage's Essential Plan. While the Power Plan is significantly more expensive than comparable web hosting plans offered by other companies, you can choose a less expensive plan if you don't need all of the features offered in the Power Plan.

Money Back Guarantee

Like most other quality web hosting companies, InMotion offers a 90-day money-back guarantee on all 1 or 2 year Business Class or Virtual Dedicated packages. If you read the fine print, however, you will see that many restrictions apply.

• There is a $12.95 administrative fee to keep your domain name.
• If you've purchased the domain name, the purchase price is non-refundable.
• All setup fees are non-refundable.
• If you've used more than 500MB of bandwidth you will also be penalized, though the exact amount depends on how much bandwidth you've used.
• If InMotion finds that you've violated their terms of service your request for a refund may be denied.

Features

	Value Class Packages			Business Class Packages
Package Specifications	Starter	Basic	Max	Launch	Power	Pro
Websites per Account	1	1	1	2	6	16
Domain Supported (Parked Domains)	0	2	5	6	26	Unlimited
Additional Sub Domains	0	0	0	25	100	Unlimited
Disk Space	100 GB	150 GB	200 GB	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Bandwidth	1000 GB	1500 GB	2000 GB	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Website Builder	None	Standard	Standard	Premium	Premium	Premium
Free Domain Included
Email Accounts
Spam Safe Email
E-Commerce Shopping Cart Integration	None	None	OsCommerce, Cube Cart and Zen Cart	Google Checkout	OsCommerce, Cube Cart, Zen Cart and Google Checkout	OsCommerce, Cube Cart, Zen Cart and Google Checkout
FTP Accounts	1	1	5	1000	2000	Unlimited
MySQL Databases	0	1	2	2	50	200
Shared SSL
Money Back Guarantee	30 Day	30 Day	30 Day	90 Day	90 Day	90 Day

In addition to these relatively standard specifications, InMotion's Power Package offers several add-ons and features that are designed to simplify your web building process. These features include regular data backups, free templates and an unrivaled range of applications that can be integrated into your hosting package. Located low-down in the control panel is the software/services section, which has a jam-packed folder called Fantastico De Luxe which offers more CMS options, blog platforms, e-commerce applications and site builders than most of InMotion's competitors. InMotion offers 3 blogging platforms, for example, while Register.com, which also uses the cPanel, offers WordPress only. What was noticeably absent from InMotion's extensive list of applications was the integration of any Google tools such as Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics or AdSense. It did however have a range of website analytical tools directly in the control panel which is very helpful.

Ease of Use

Every InMotion package uses the cPanel control panel which is a relatively intuitive system. The cPanel's middle section looks similar to the vDeck control panel which is used by some competing web hosts, but the left navigation shows critical statistics about your website such as the disk space used and the number of email accounts set up. It also has a dynamically generated Frequently Accessed section which provides you with quick links to the places you visit the most. As opposed to other web hosts such as Register.com that keep email services separate from the cPanel, InMotion has integrated your email accounts directly into the cPanel for convenient access at all time.

Control Panel

I attempted to install the WordPress application with a 1-page installation from the Fantastico De Luxe section of the cPanel.

WordPress Installation

Surprisingly, the blog did not immediately appear, and was still not available after several moments of waiting. Instead, I received a 'coming soon' page.

Coming Soon screen

When I called customer support for help, I was told that I needed to redirect the homepage so that it would display. This is similar to the problem that I had when installing a blog with iPage. The friendly customer service representative was able to fix the problem instantly so that the blog displayed as it should.

WordPress Blog

I then attempted to set up an email for myself. InMotion's email setup was quick and easy, and although they also offered a tutorial about how to do it, I found that it was so straightforward that no additional assistance was required.

1-step email account setup

I emailed myself 5 minutes after I set up the email account and was pleased to see that the email account was already active and easy to access.

Customer Support

InMotion offers 24/7 technical support via phone and live chat. Sales support is available by phone from 8am-midnight EST Monday-Friday, and 10am-9pm Saturday-Sunday. Billing support is available from 8am-11pm EST Monday-Friday and 10am-7pm EST Saturday-Sunday. They also offer email support and a help center with forums, user guides and hundreds of video tutorials that can answer most questions and guide you throughout the site building process.

I placed my first call to InMotion in the early morning on a Wednesday and was answered within 2 minutes. The agent was unsure of how to answer my basic questions and was extremely apologetic. After taking several minutes to look into the issue he was able to direct me.

I used lnMotion's live chat 6 times and, for the most part, found their representatives to be exceptionally pleasant. There were two main differences between InMotion's live and the live chat of the other web hosts that I tested. Firstly, InMotion's live chat service informed me how many customers were online ahead of me. What was more impressive was that InMotion's chat service pinged me gently each time the representative responded. With this notification I was able to minimize the chat box and pursue other activities while waiting for a response. With other chat services I never knew when the response was coming and was forced to leave the chat box open or to check back repeatedly so as not to miss a response.

InMotion Hosting chat support

The only real downside of InMotion's customer support is that if you are holding for a chat representative for more than 2 or 3 minutes they automatically disconnect you and ask that you email in your question. This happened to me several times throughout the same day, and eventually I did send a message. 3.5 hours later I received an auto-response saying that they got my email, and exactly 52 minutes later I received a personal response which answered my questions effectively.

InMotion's email responses

Finally, it is important to note that InMotion's customer support is entirely separate from the cPanel. Consequently, if you are working on your website and have a question or problem, you'll need to open up another window for InMotion's website and contact customer service from there. Once you are aware of this system, however, it is inconvenient but tolerable.

Summary

Positive Features

• 90-day money-back guarantee
• 99.9% uptime guarantee
• Offers you a choice of data centers so that your information transfer will be as fast as possible
• Offers a noticeably robust offering list of add-ons and applications to help make site building easy

Negative Features

• Contacting customer support cannot be done directly from the control panel
• Online chat often times out while you're waiting for a representative
• Expensively priced as compared with other web hosting services
• No integration with Google tools