InMotion Hosting Review

Hosting is one of the most important things to consider when you create any content that has to be seen publicly via the Web. Poor hosting can be an issue for your personal site and a nightmare if you deal with multiple clients. Choosing it wisely can simplify your life. I will start by reviewing our current hosting provider; InMotion Hosting. Please note the date; I am reviewing this provider now, in 2009. You might find other reviews saying some hosting providers suck, but always look at the date that post was published, because hosting providers often upgrade their plans and customer experience. Don’t worry; I will have future posts detailing issues we had with other hosting providers.

InMotion Hosting has been providing web hosting since 2001 from their offices in Los Angeles, CA and Virginia Beach, VA. They don’t outsource their tech support, so be prepared to speak to people that understand your needs and that are aware of the weather outside. Tech support is from their Virginia Beach office, not India! I don’t have anything against India, but can’t stand companies that use outsources for their tech support.

So far, they are the only hosting company I found, in this price range, which give you the option of hosting from two geographically different data centers. Why is this important to you? Well, depending if you are located on the West or East of the map, you can have faster services. Go here and give it a try. See how fast you download from the two locations. This will greatly improve the speed of your uploads and downloads. Don’t worry, visitors from all around the World will still experience fast downloads.

The Facts
Date we started using the provider: February 28^th 2009
Hosting plan currently used: VPS Hosting, Package 512M
Data Center currently used: Washington, D.C
Our current location: Montreal, Qc, Canada

Customer satisfaction
All I can say is WOW! InMotion Hosting provides 24×7x365 by toll-free phone, live chat or email support. Most often I work from home and I can work pretty late, sometimes until 5am. For me, there is nothing more frustrating than having an issue at 3 o’clock in the morning on my server (file permission question, SSL certificate, etc) and not being able to get an answer. Forums and blogs can help, but why take so much time to find an answer when you can just chat with someone. Yep, even at 3 in the morning, InMotion Hosting has someone online that can help you resolve your issue. We also noticed that InMotion Hosting was rated “A-“by the Better Business Bureau which is excellent and pretty rare in the hosting industry. Now we understand why they received so many awards for their hosting.

Speed
Another important facture in hosting is the download speed. You don’t want users waiting eternally for a page to load. Here are some stats:

Internet Connection: up to 6 Mbps in Download and Up to 1 Mbps in Upload
FTP Download: 850 kb/s
FTP Upload: 130 kb/s

Internet Connection: up to 30 Mbps in Download and Up to 1 Mbps in Upload
FTP Download: 2.5 mb/s
FTP Upload: 130 kb/s

You can download a 10mb test file from us to test your speed.

User Experience
We were able to perform multiple simultaneous FTP transfers without any issues. This is great because it makes site maintenance extremely fast.

Our VPS plan comes with a full cPanel License. This also is pretty rare; most companies charge you an extra for this. We can also modify the overall look of the cPanel so it matches our companies’ look. Fantastico is not included.

The network has 99.9% Uptime and we never had any downtime. No significant speed decrease was noticed in the past 8 months.

Complete automatic backup is included with the VPS. We never had any lost of files, so we can’t judge how accurate this is, but by looking at their site; they offer to restore the VPS once every 4 months for free. Additional 49$ fee applies if it needs additional restores.

We can park unlimited domains and don’t have any issues setting them up.

SSL certificate is not included in the plan, so an extra charge of 99$ (+25$ one time processing fee) a year applies, per domain.

The default settings allow for reasonable operation without running into annoying limitations. To see the rest of the tech specs, go take a look at their site.

Final verdict
Even if they are not the cheapest hosting provider, they have great value for the money. You get what you pay for! I prefer paying some extra bucks than wasting my time with poor service. Overall, I am very satisfied with them and will continue using their service.

We did not have the opportunity to test the shared hosting (Business Class and Personal/Cheap Hosting). We would imagine that they are just as great. If anyone has any experience with them, please share.

Oh, I forgot to mention that they also offer Web Site Management. They can redo your site or create you a new one. By looking at their preview page, I would not recommend it. I would never recommend a Hosting Provider to build and design your site. I strongly advise you to use a real Web Design Company… and I am not saying that because I have my own Web Design Company.

Pros
Fast
Reliable
Outstanding Customer Support
Full cPanel Licence (VPS and Dedicated)

Cons
SSL certificate not included
Fantastico not included
Not most competitive pricing
Requires some hosting knowledge, with lots of manual options (can be a good thing for some)