Expert's Rating
Our Verdict
InMotion can help you get a WordPress site together in no time and benefits from providing you with lots of helpful support along the way.
Price When Reviewed
$5.99 per month (2 years), $10.99 per month thereafter
Best Prices Today: InMotion Hosting
InMotion is a US-based web hosting provider that has been around for almost two decades. Take a look at its website and you might be instantly put off by its stark business look: it’s certainly not aimed at beginners and won’t hold your hand through the process of choosing a package.
Pricing and plans
Speaking of those, InMotion’s hosting prices are easy to understand.
The website builder tool is included free and you get a free domain name too. If you have an existing site, you can migrate that to InMotion easily, and again freely.
Deals vary throughout the year, but at the time of review, prices started from $3.99 per month (approximately £3.21) for the Launch plan and that comes with unlimited storage, bandwidth, email and allows you to have two websites among other features. This includes a discount for signing up for two years, but there’s a 90-day money-back guarantee if you’re unhappy with what you’ve bought.
For twice the server performance, you’ll need the Power package, which costs $5.99 per month (around £4.82) and also adds ecommerce support. If you’re after twice the performance again and “pro-level” support, then the Pro package costs $13.99 per month (about £11.25). Again, these are all prices for two-year plans, billed up front.
There are extras you can pay for when you sign up, including a backup manager, dedicated IP address and even a QuickStarter site which is a one-page site made for you which gets your business online in two days.
That latter one could be a good option if you don’t want to do it yourself, and provides a good base (with SEO optimisation) to start from.
For alternatives, check out our roundup of the best web hosting services.
Features & site builder
Signing up with InMotion initially gets you several emails and that turns out to be a good thing as you’ve soon got everything you need to log in and start getting to grips with this website creation service. And, for additional comfort and convenience you’ll find that InMotion not only caters for the start-up individual but also offers a raft of other features, functions and services that allow you to scale any kind of project upwards until it has pages that run into the thousands.
Starting with the basics, InMotion has plenty to get you underway, without getting too bamboozled in the process. One of the key selling points here is the support for WordPress.
Yes, we’re well aware that this is featured in a good many other web hosting providers out there, but InMotion does a very tidy job of integrating it into your account so that it’s almost like an integral feature. Using WordPress in this environment is no different to working with it anywhere else, though, and you’ll find all of the usual tools in that reasonably user-friendly interface too.
At the same time, InMotion offers a plethora of additional options if you wish to boost the appeal of your web pages or, for that matter, ramp things up and do something altogether more adventurous.
This is because there is support for both cPanel and app auto-installer Softaculous, which means that you can upscale your site to something rather more impressive. Of course, that requires a bit of steep learning curve if you have little experience of building websites, but what we like about InMotion is that everything just seems to work.
Thankfully we didn’t encounter any flakiness or gremlins along the way and even something trivial such as a password reset is reassuringly by-numbers. That’s always good news if you’re the sort of person who tends to get bogged down with run-of-the-mill tasks and often can’t see the wood for the trees.
Support & management
And, InMotion offers a virtual comfort blanket along the way – we received another email a day or so later to check on how we were doing with our activities. We didn’t have reason to contact support, but this did reassure us that InMotion is in tune with its customers.
Some web hosting arrangements can leave you feeling a little bit isolated, but you get nothing of that here. On top of that there is a good level of support just in case you do become embroiled in a website building issue that you really can’t find a way out of.
There are a few aspects of the service that could perhaps be a little clearer though. For example, if you’re not familiar with the whys and wherefores of the administration area – the AMP – or Account Management Panel then it can be a little bit perplexing at first.
On top of that, you might well be using WordPress for much of the time but it’s actually named BoldGrid. These items are basically one and the same, but if you don’t know that, it can be slightly confusing. Added to that, there are numerous other options inside the AMP that can also send you unwanted curveballs.
Once you’ve got the hang of the way the AMP ticks then it all starts becoming clear, but up to that point we found the route was a little bit of a murky one. Nevertheless, if you stick with it and get things up and running then you’ll find that the pages you create run very nicely indeed.
In fact, performance seems to be one of the standout features of InMotion as a whole, and that’s going to be very good news if you’re planning on a site that features an awful lot of pages and content. Luckily, we did find that there was plenty of help on offer and the online tutorials and overviews are actually very useful indeed.
While the InMotion site is less simplistic and, in some respects, could prove a little more daunting than some of the very basic-looking hosts out there, you can’t really knock it for the level of information and support that’s available.
Everything is here although you might just have to look a little bit harder to find it. On top of that, of course, you can also get in touch with support staff (who work 24/7) and we also rather liked the look of the forum pages too. A forum is often a really good way of finding out how to do something from someone who has been down the same website building cul de sac as you.
Verdict
All in all then, InMotion is a promising and potent option for those who either have a WordPress site already or want to create one.