InMotion Web Hosting Review: Web Hosting

Rating:

Bottom Line:

Adequate web hosting for intermediate users; limited MySQL databases

Full Review:

InMotion Hosting's Business Class hosting is a step-up from the the Value Class hosting we reviewed previously. InMotion promises better performance and no storage limitations with its Business Class hosting as well as a better site builder, so we thought we'd give it a look.

Pricing

The cost comes in at $6.95 per month for two years, or $7.95 a month for a single year. There are no set-up fees, although domain privacy is $5 a year, a pretty good bargain.

Features

As with most web hosts, InMotion's features are cPanel- and Fantastico-based. There are two sitebuilders: Soho and Viastep. Viastep's templates are nice, but you have to be comfortable with downloading and editing the html templates offline. Soho is more of a conventional online site builder. It does the job, but not with panache. Unfortunately its most compelling features (blog manager, shopping cart) are only free for 14 days. After that you have to pay for an upgrade.

Potential customers should be advised that the Launch plan limits you to 2 MySQL databases. That may sound like gobbledygook, but it's significant if you want to have more than 2 components such as the site builder, a blog, or a gallery installed at once. You can upgrade to the Business Class Power Plan for two dollars-per-month more and to get 50 MySQL databases. It's more than most people are likely to need, but it felt a bit like we were getting nickle and dimed for something that's pretty standard with most web hosts. The Launch Plan also lacks a shopping cart, so you'll need to move to the Power Plan for that as well.

Performance

InMotion had mixed results in our tech tests. While scores were above the group average, they weren't particularly impressive. See the chart below for details. For uptime, higher percentages are better. For all others, lower numbers indicate better performance.

InMotion Web Hosting test data:

	Inmotion	Group Avg.	Group Best	Group Worst
28-Mo. Uptime Score	99.88%	99.85%	99.99%	99.26%
28-Mo. Avg. Response Time:	0.549s	0.543s	0.355s	0.854s

Support

Support is provided by phone, chat, and email. The wait for phone support was around five minutes, though support was friendly and capable. There's a 30-day cancellation period, but after that period there is no refund possible. If you do cancel within 30-days there's a $12.95 charge associated with the domain cost.

We should mention that when we initially placed our order, a verification call-back was made. While we appreciate this, there were attempts to up-sell. We bought the domain privacy, though it wasn't actually applied to our account.

Conclusion

InMotion's Business Class hosting is capable, but it didn't really impress us on any particular level. InMotion does offer cheaper plans (down to $4.00 per month) that are even more limited. To us there's always been something arbitrary about InMotion's price tiers and limits. Though InMotion is rather fair about upgrading your plan, we feel more should be included at the lower price points.

Service Details:

Cheapest Price:	$6.95/mo
Storage/Data Transfer:	Unlimited
Money-Back Guarantee:	30 days
Domain:	Free for 1 year
Support:	Email, Phone, Chat

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InMotion Web Hosting Review: Web Hosting

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