inMotion Hosting Review

Signup and Setup
Like any good hosting company, InMotion gets you through the sign up process quickly and easily. The form takes a couple seconds to fill out and you good are to go. You don't have to switch pages or answer a ton of questions.

Once you get through the sign up process an email confirmation is sent to you outlining the details of your purchase. This email contains what your account login information is for the Account Management Panel (AMP) and for cPanel.

Account Management Panel
This is InMotion's billing and account information area. It's very basic and only holds a few options like upgrading your services.

It would be nice if the Account Management Panel was built into the cPanel. Going back and forth between the two panels gets confusing and it takes awhile to get used to which panel has what information.

cPanel
This is a control panel used by many different hosts. We like using cPanel because it's the best 3rd party hosting control panel around and it has a lot of useful tools. InMotion keeps their cPanel pretty organized and clean. It's easy to find what you're looking for. They brought the popular install scripts to the for front to make it easy for you to find them.

Installing Joomla
We chose to install Joomla the manual way (downloaded from website and setting up the databases) instead of using Softaculous one click installer. During the pre-installation check the install software tests the host's server compatibility. InMotion passed without issue.

If you want to use Softaculous it's there for you. Softaculous is widely used by many different hosting companies as a easy way to install different scripts. We have used it a lot and it works very well.

Running Joomla
Joomla performs quickly and responsively on InMotion's servers. Our test site has about 100 pages of content. We were able to easily navigate the backend of Joomla without hangups or timeouts. A quick test on the frontend and we experienced the same quickness.

Performance
First, it should be noted that we have only had a couple of days to monitor the site's speed and uptime. Keep checking back in the future to see what our experience is in the long run.

Uptime was at 99% for the first 72 hours of monitoring. This is not surprising given the short time period and we expect this number will wind up being closer to 98% over six months.

Speed was right on par. With out any of our caching, compression, minification, or a CDN we got around 1.8 second average response time. This isn't the best, but without our tools it's about what we expected. To test if our tools would make a difference, they did. As soon as we turned on the caching tool only (JotCache) we saw a dramatic drop to around .7 seconds. Now, whether or not we can keep speeds this quick or even quicker remains to be seen. Come back in a couple months and we should have some new data for you.

Pick A Datacenter
One cool feature on their website is their datacenter zones. Here you can determine which datacenter you want to host your site. They give you sample downloads to test the downloaded speed. One file from the datacenter in Los Angeles, CA and one file from the datacenter in Washington D.C.. You can use this download speed to test which datacenter is better based on your location. This helps local businesses reach their community with the optimal speed by reducing the distance the data has to travel from server to browser.

Support
To test out the technical support staff we started a chat session to ask a technical question. For this we chose to ask how to set up a new FTP account. The conversation is below.

Technician: Hello. How may I help you?
JHR: Hey, whats the best way to set up an ftp account?
Technician: In the ftp accounts section, the option you'll need to worry about are the files they are able to access. In my opinion giving the user access to the folder they need to access by setting it as the document root is the best method.
JHR: Where can I find the accounts section?
Technician: Are you in your cpanel currently?
JHR: No, how do I get there?
Technician: Logging in at www.YOURDOMAIN.com/cpanel or from in your account management panel.
JHR: Ok I was able to login
Technician: Alright, in the top left do you see the search box?
JHR: Yeah
Technician: Go ahead and type ftp accounts in there for me please.
JHR: Oh ok
JHR: I see
Technician: Search boxes make life much easier, agreed?
JHR: Yeah, it's real-time as well.
Technician: Yup, nifty little thing, so are you seeing what I was talking about with the ftp account creation?
JHR: Yeah, i think i can get it from here. im usually pretty good at following directions
Technician: Sounds good. Is there anything else I can assist you with at this time?
JHR: Not at this time, one question though, is that a stock photo or an actual picture for the technical staff on chat?
Technician: It's a stock photo, I'm kinda lazy about changing it.
JHR: Oh ha ha. thanks, just curious.
Technician: Not a problem.

A couple things to note from this conversation is that the technician automatically assumed we knew how to get to the FTP accounts section. Then when we explained we did not know how the technician was patient in directing us there. After we performed the search inside of cPanel, he made a non-robotic remark about how "nifty" the search box was. This showed some personality and made us feel less like strangers. Lastly, it was interesting that the staff members do not have to change their profile picture. It was a little weird that the technician admitted to being "lazy about changing it". Overall we got the help we needed and the support technician helped us patiently.

Conclusion
After having the site up for several weeks and monitored for a couple of days, we feel strongly that InMotion offers a pretty solid service. When we asked InMotion about what makes their business plan better than any other shared hosting plan and they said, "Hyperthreading is enabled and our servers are never loaded past 75% capacity which allows us to compensate for when an e-store takes off for example. We can target this traffic instantly and monitor it. This is highly important to a true online business as we can contact the customer immediately if we notice potential downtime for the site with increase load in a shared environment".

We have tested a lot of web hosts and performance is on par with other hosting companies like SiteGround's web hosting plan. It's early on so the data is not mature enough to make a clear assessment.

When it comes to hosting Joomla, we were satisfied. If you have your eye's set on InMotion hosting as your Joomla host, you can rest assured that Joomla will work well on their servers as well as having a responsive frontend and backend.

Their technical support did their job well. We did not have the toughest question in the world, but in terms of patience and personality, they did well. Also, they spoke good English which is important for solving problems quickly.

We plan to monitor the progress of our InMotion hosted website for the long term to see how it does. We will keep this review up to date so you can benefit from the data we gather!

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