Note: I no longer can recommend inMotion Hosting. I’ve had too many outages and slow performance. I recommend HostGator as someone that offers more than you receive below, for a better price, with better performance and support.
If you’re just looking for the nitty gritty down to the basics one paragraph summary on inMotion Hosting, read the Conclusion and Final Summary below.
A website hosting company is essential to a business that markets itself online and honestly who doesn’t do that nowadays? The worst thing that could happen is that your site is unavailable, slow or timing out when a customer that’s going to buy comes to your site. I kept this in mind on my search for the best website host when looking for my companies.
My main criteria for a website host is:
- Consistent uptime
- Performance
- A full feature set
- Ease of use
- Excellent customer service and technical support
- Large amounts of available storage and bandwidth
- A cheap price
Looking at this list now you might say that I was a little unreasonable with my expectations. Well, that may be but I found the host! After going through many sub par companies and some pretty bad experiences (slow websites, website being down, customer complaints), I found inMotion Hosting.
Now I was a little jaded from some bad experiences so I did a fair amount of research on reviews both praise and complaints. The praise I found was very good and the complaints that I found tended to be far and few between or they seemed to be nonconstructive spam.
I started out with inMotion Hosting’s Power plan for $8.95 a month, which includes 6 domains but they do have a Launch Plan for $6.95 a month, which includes 2 domains and might be good for someone just starting out. They also offer an industry leading 90 day money back guarantee so I was willing to let them prove to me they were the provider for me. The Power Plan I got included:
- 6 sites
- 26 parked domains
- 100 sub-domains
- CPanel, which is an easy to use web management panel and seems to be the industry standard
- Data Backup
- Unlimited email accounts
- eCommerce support
- All script support like php, perl, etc.
- Easy FTP
- mySQL databases
- Business Class software that increase speeds upwards of 50%!
- Unlimited Disk Space!
- Unlimited Monthly Transfer!
Now here’s where it really gets interesting!
Are you kidding me! That’s huge for me as I have one site with pictures, videos, documents, and other files that not only take up a lot of space but also create high monthly transfer amounts. Even if you don’t have a real intensive website, it’s nice to know you don’t have to worry about being charged for overage on disk space or monthly transfer rates. You only need to get one $300 charge for overage on monthly transfer rate with another hosting company before you see how truly awesome these unlimited amounts are!
They also have features included like data backup, easy to use website development tools, support for blogging like WordPress, Linux or Microsoft hardware, and a lot more! I would recommend checking out all of the features included, as I know I missed a lot, at the inMotion Hosting website.
Needless to say, they have the features and stats. Enough of that, I’m sure you’re saying, how was the actual execution?
My experience in the past 2 years with them has been excellent. The features and included tool sets have made it very easy for me to maintain my websites, implement new websites, and make any needed updates. With the included support of WordPress through a tool called Fantastico, I was able to get my WordPress blog up and running in literally 2 minutes. I’m not kidding! That tool is really user friendly and a really cool feature to have included. The CPanel is really easy to use and provides great functionality. I’m an advanced user and I find that everything is available that I need.
Customer Service
We have not had any complaints on our websites for being unavailable and we have a service that checks our uptime and hasn’t yet reported an outage. Each time we test our websites we get a fast response. I have not had to use customer service much but each time that I do I get a fast response by an intelligent person that is able to help me out each time. I absolutely hate when a company uses some auto-reply that tells me to read there support documents or support personnel that quickly glances at a support e-mail and replies back before reading through the whole thing. Thankfully inMotion hosting support is not that company and has great customer service.
My Constructive Criticism
Now, any good review wouldn’t be complete without a good constructive aspect to it and here it is. I was switching my Exchange hosting company to Google Apps so I required an MX records update. Usually with CPanel this update is available but I found it wasn’t there with inMotion Hosting it wasn’t. I had to contact customer service to get the MX records updated to switch over. Now I actually still met my timeline and I’m sure it has something to do with making sure the site isn’t getting hacked and reducing spam but… the option to update it myself would have been nice.
Conclusion and Final Summary
inMotion Hosting provides unlimited storage, unlimited monthly transfer, ease of use features for anything you would need, great customer support, and excellent performance. Not only do they have all of that but they manage to bundle it in very cost effective packages that can meet anyone’s needs and will appeal to even the very budget conscious consumer.
If you find a better website hosting provider, let me know. I haven’t found that company yet and I doubt that I would switch as I’m a big proponent of finding what works very well and sticking with it.
Check out the inMotion Hosting website for the specifics on packages. Don’t forget that they do offer their industry leading 90 day money back guarantee. I guess when you have a great product, you can offer a great money back guarantee.
Jared Pomranky
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