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InMotion Web Hosting Review: Web Hosting |
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| Adequate web hosting but needs upgrades; limited MySQL databases, advanced features. | ||||||||||||||||
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InMotion Hosting's Business Class hosting is a step-up from 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 $5.95 per month for two years of the Launch plan, InMotion's most basic option, or $6.95 a month for a single year. There are no set-up fees, although domain privacy is $5 a year, a pretty good bargain. Basic Features Like many web hosts, InMotion uses cPanel and Fantastico. 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. InMotion limits users to just 2 MySQL databases, which may be a serious drawback. Many features, including blogs, gallery installations, and sites built with the sitebuilder, require their own databases. This means that depending on your site, InMotion's database restrictions may prevent you from having all the features you want. You can upgrade to the Business Class Power Plan for two dollars-per-month more and get 50 MySQL databases. It's more than most people are likely to need, but it felt a bit like we were getting nickel 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. Advanced Features Advanced users will certainly have a problem with InMotion's limit of 2 MySQL databases per user, and will find many other policies pose similar problems. InMotion allows users to host eight live domains and six more "parked" domains, many fewer than most of our top rated hosts. All InMotion accounts are hosted on Linux servers, and InMotion supports coding in PHP, Perl, Python, CGI, and SSI. Users with shared hosting accounts (like the basic accounts we review) do not have shell access (SSH). Usability Since InMotion uses cPanel, the user experience will be familiar for many web hosting users. cPanel is generally fairly well laid out and easy to use. We did have some trouble finding the correct login page, but once we'd found the right place, it was smooth sailing. 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:
Support
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. Sign up for InMotion Web Hosting | Compare to Other Web Hosts |
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| Cheapest Price: | $5.95/mo |
| Storage/Data Transfer: | Unlimited |
| Money-Back Guarantee: | 30 days |
| Domain: | Free for 1 year |
| Support: | Email, Phone, Chat |
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