InMotion Hosting vs A2Hosting – Which Hosting Company is Best?

InMotion Hosting and A2Hosting are both highly praised by their client base. Before you decide which hosting provider to choose from these two respected alternatives, you need to delve into the details. In this article, we are going to go through an in-depth review, presenting you the advantages and disadvantages of both companies.

By the end of this article, you will know exactly what to expect from them. Thus, it will be much clearer which one suits to your website’s needs the most. You will see plenty of free tools, powerful features, well-tailored plans, general user feedback about the two providers, and more. Most people have heard of InMotion Hosting thanks to its high-quality customer support.

Although it is an important part of any web hosting provider, there are still many more important things we want to mention about them. At A2Hosting, you can also get a lot of professional help from their customer support, although not that many people are familiar with the company. The reason behind it is A2Hosting doesn’t focus on advertising at all. The only thing they want is to invest in improving their services. Now let’s see what happens if we compare these two huge names!

InMotion – Consistent Web Hosting

Newcomers and long-time users usually don’t have the same opinion about a web hosting provider. New users are more optimistic about the service than those who have experienced its downsides. However, InMotion Hosting is definitely an exception. Being one of the most consistent providers, it easily earns the trust of most of its clients. The company got established in a small office back in 2001 and it had only two members at the beginning.

It all started with a single server which evolved into two huge data centers after many years of work. They might not be the biggest company in the industry, but that is only because they mainly invest in improving their services and providing more useful features with their plans. Shared hosting was the type of service they initially started with.

Now they provide various types of hosting plans, including business, VPS, reseller and dedicated packages. As a WordPress user, you can take advantage of the wide range of shared hosting plans that are optimized for the CMS and WooCommerce as well. Additional services at InMotion include domain registration, website building and various site hosting tools.

Pros & Cons of InMotion Hosting

Pros of InMotion Hosting

• The best money-back guarantee – No matter which hosting plan you pick at InMotion, you can rest assured that they give all your money back if you cancel your subscription in 90 days. That is a quite generous money-back guarantee, and probably one of the longest ones if you compare it to some of the other providers. 15, 30 and 60-day periods are much more common, but providing a longer refund period only shows how confident the provider is in its services. As the time goes by, you discover more and more good features and tools and as you reach the 90-day mark, you won’t even want to leave.
• Valuable unlimited features – Website owners choose a hosting provider based on the set of unlimited features it offers. This is because every website has different needs, and if the unlimited features offered by InMotion come in handy for your site, then it is probably worth signing up. The main selling points of their plans are unlimited data transfer and unlimited disk space, and you can get it even with their most basic plan. Many other companies offer only a limited amount of storage and transfer even in their more advanced plans, so this is actually a big advantage for InMotion Hosting.
• Extra features for free – The provider appreciates newcomers so much that it gives out free domain names for them along with other freebies. All you need to do is to sign up and you instantly get a domain along with free credits that you can use for promoting your website. The supported search engines where you can promote are Google, Yahoo and Bing. On top of that, InMotion makes sure that your website data is always secured by creating regular backups. The backups are completely automated and you don’t need to pay a dime, unless you exceed a certain limit. But we are going to talk about that later.
• Helpful customer support – Mistakes, glitches and bugs can happen at any time, even if you are a tech-savvy person. In those cases, you can easily get stuck and it might require some help to be able to resolve the issue. A much simpler case is when you want to ask some questions about the servers or a platform you are currently working on. Both cases indicate that there has to be a customer support team you can reach out to when things go wrong. Fortunately, customer support is one of the strong suits of InMotion Hosting. You can hardly find a company that does it better, even though there are plenty of bigger ones. They have a team of trained professionals ready to help you 24/7. They can be reached through various channels, including phone, live chat, email messages, or contact forms. Additionally, they have an extensive knowledge base where all the common issues are solved and explained in-depth. By using the Search bar, you can find tons of different guides, video tutorials and FAQ in their library.
• High-end server components – The performance of your website will mostly depend on the hardware used by your hosting provider. If it is about to get outdated, it will negatively affect the loading time of your web pages. This is why you should choose a provider that doesn’t shy away from investing into the latest hardware. InMotion Hosting considers it mandatory to equip their servers with high-end components. The Company has filled 2 data centers with their servers so far that are both located in the USA. They guarantee that your website can communicate with the server with little to no delay. Providers can enhance the speed of their servers with proper software infrastructure and account management, but at the end of the day, the performance will mostly depend on the hardware.
• Convincing uptime record – If you want to drive a huge amount of traffic to your website as a business owner or even a blogger, you need to make sure that the uptime of your provider is above the 99% mark. You can easily calculate what this number means. It means that your websites will experience only around 6 hours of downtime over the year, which is basically nothing. Keep in mind that this is the worst case scenario. InMotion Hosting is one of the providers that successfully keep its uptime above 99%, so you don’t need to worry about your viewers disappointedly leaving your offline site. They invested a lot into Dell servers and the latest Cisco components, which explains how they can be so consistent with the uptime. This already sounds good enough, but they needed to make sure there is a team of experts monitoring the servers in case something goes wrong. Add up the high-end infrastructure and the human component and the result is powerful and reliable hosting.
• High-level security – Security is another strong suit of InMotion Hosting. With their spam filter, your email inbox will no longer be a mess full of spam. Instead, it will be filled with real emails that are actually important. To protect you against malware and keep everything up to date, they use two popular security platforms: Patchman and Sucuri. Patchman is great at detecting and removing malware, and it also detects the vulnerable points of your website and applies the latest patch whenever necessary. Sucuri, on the other hand is responsible for security alerts, backup, website performance and malware. Both of them are highly powerful solutions, guaranteeing that you are a hundred percent protected.
• Carbon footprint reduction – InMotion is not the type of provider that pollutes the environment with its servers. They use wind turbines to generate energy in an environment-friendly way. Data centers require so much energy that it leaves significant carbon footprint to maintain one in the traditional way. InMotion basically gives you the opportunity to contribute to the reduction of carbon footprint by signing up to their hosting package. Of course, it is also a good marketing practice for the company, but decreasing pollution is increasingly important on our planet.

Cons of InMotion Hosting

• Not optimal prices – Website owners that sign up to a basic web hosting plan usually want to go step-by-step. As their websites grow, they eventually want to switch to the next plan that is slightly stronger and more expensive than the previous one. After all, you don’t want to pay for more resources that you actually need. The thing with InMotion Hosting is that their hosting plans are not really ideal. If you start with their cheapest plan, you will quickly run out of resources and there will be a big price gap between the next plan and your current one. Not to mention that you can’t pay monthly, as there are only one-year contracts or more. Newcomers might not want to stay for a full year. However, they can take advantage of the 90-day money-back guarantee at InMotion. According to the feedbacks, this guarantee does not mean much. Many people decide to leave right after they see the prices.
• Questionable package limitations – If you take a look at the hosting plans at InMotion, it seems like they are trying to force their users to upgrade their plan. For example, their Launch plan limits you to 2 websites and 2 databases, although it is a pretty strong plan with all the other features included in the package. These come off as unnecessary limitations. For those who really want to grow their online presence with more than 2 websites, the only option is to pay for the next plan which might be unnecessarily strong. It is like throwing a few dollars out of the window every month. You can find plenty of other providers where plans are tailored in a way so that you can slowly work up your budget with your online business until you can afford the next plan. Many of them also allow you to host more than 2 websites, if not unlimited.
• Long account setup – The whole setup process at InMotion Hosting is rather long and complicated. Instead of making it as straightforward and fast as possible, they chose to lead their clients through a sequence of pages that take a long while to finish. It shouldn’t be such an annoying process to get your server and website up and running.
• Limited free backup – Although they back up your website data on a regular basis, they have set a certain limit on their free backup service. As long as your website data doesn’t take up 10GB, you get the backup copies. In case it exceeds that limit, it becomes a paid service. However, it is understandable that they don’t want to maintain such a huge amount of data for free. Also, files older than 4 months get deleted, so that is how far they let you go back in time.

A2Hosting – High-Quality Web Hosting

The reason why this hosting provider is not that popular is because they don’t like to invest into promoting their brand. Their main goal is to improve the quality of their hosting services as much as possible. In fact, they don’t even need to advertise themselves. Most people that find their website and sign up to one of their hosting packages instantly become convinced that they are dealing with a highly powerful hosting company.

Instead of trying to impress their clients directly, A2 invests a lot in beating other big names in the industry in terms of speed, uptime, features, security and customer support. At the end, the result is the same. Their services grab the attention of more and more website owners that want to sign up and grow their businesses.

Pros & Cons of A2Hosting

Pros of A2Hosting

• Lightning-fast loading times – As we mentioned, quality hosting is all you should expect from A2Hosting. Their servers are equipped with the latest hardware, guaranteeing lightning-fast page load speeds for website owners. This is not only what the company says on their official site, but their clients also say the same thing in their reviews. For those who are interested in their services, A2Hosting has data centers available in three locations. These include Michigan, Amsterdam and Singapore, covering the USA, Europe and Asia respectively. This guarantees reliable website hosting for people from all around the World. In order to keep their servers running at top performance, they allow only a specific number of websites to run on each server.
• This also prevents outsourcing, so A2Hosting will definitely not be the type of provider that sells more hosting accounts than they can actually handle.
• Well-trained support – Their customer support team is not only well-trained, but true experts when it comes to solving problems related to your website or hosting service. With A2Hosting, you don’t need to wait hours until an issue gets resolved. They are constantly in the grind of helping one client after another. You can reach them via email, live chat and phone as well. The very friendly and on-point staff is fully aware of the fact that every minute counts for a website owner. They are available around the clock, readily waiting for clients that need help. If we would rate their customer support, we would surely give it a 5-star rating based on their strong performance in the past few years.
• Excellent server uptime – A2Hosting was quite successful so far in keeping their server uptime above 99.92%, which is a number that beats many of the other providers in the industry. What this means is that if you run your website on their servers, then it will experience 6-7 hours of downtime per year on average. Considering that problems can happen all the time and no hosting provider is perfect, that is a pretty neat number. Most providers are struggling to keep their uptime above 99%.
• Managed security – Along with the hosting package, the provider applies certain security measures to your account as well. Viruses and hacker attacks are rather frequent, which is why they need to protect your website data from harm. Once you sign up, they activate a firewall that provides protection against threats without pause. A2Hosting prevents malware from getting close to your data with HackScan, a popular and highly effective security service. This is somewhat different from the ones provided by other hosting companies, as it doesn’t require you to monitor the software yourself. A2Hosting will do it for you, while you can concentrate on your website tasks. They provide a service that doesn’t even require you to maintain it.
• Free website transfer – It is usually not a pleasant experience when you leave a web hosting provider. There are usually additional fees included, and don’t even think about asking them to migrate your website data. However, A2Hosting is not at all like that. They are generous even with those clients that want to end their subscription. Let’s say you want to leave the provider after one year of subscription because you have found a more promising alternative. In that case, they will be more than willing to help you migrate your website data to the new server. Who knows, maybe you will eventually decide to come back. This only requires the new hosting provider to run cPanel on their servers. This service is especially helpful for bigger websites that accumulated a lot of content and users. This would be an awesome paid service as well, but they decided to do it for free.
• Hosting with green energy – A2Hosting is one of the hosting companies that contribute to a better, healthier environment. Running servers with green energy is an increasingly popular solution among hosting providers. It is not only a marketing catch, as reducing the damage caused by such activities is highly important today. A2Hosting wants to give people the chance to make the World a better place by choosing a server that doesn’t pollute its environment. The company teamed up with Carbonfound.org, which is an organization dedicated to reduce the carbon footprint caused by various different activities. Therefore, your website will run on a carbon neutral server.

Cons of A2Hosting

• Expensive hosting plans – This hosting company has high performance, professional staff, maximum security, but at what cost? It turns out that the prices at A2Hosting are significantly higher than average. We are not saying that you don’t get enough value for your money. However, if you are looking for affordable hosting plans, then this is probably not the company you should go for. After checking out their shared hosting plans, you will see that the cheapest one costs $4.90 per month. In order to lower the price, you can do so by signing up for their 1, 2 or 3-year contract. This can significantly reduce the price, making their Lite plan cost only $3.92 per month. If you consider the hosting plan and the features suitable for your website overall, then we can only recommend you to go for the 3-year plan. A2Hosting has some powerful hosting packages for sure, but it can be painful to pay for them month-by-month with a low budget.
• Limited low-end plans – Although you can find some promising cheap plans for your website at A2Hosting, they might quickly require you to switch to a stronger one. For example, the Lite plan limits you to a single website with 5 databases. This only indicates that these plans are not designed for long term. Well, they are, if you keep your website traffic and content low all the time. At least we can say that the Lite plan provides outstanding page loading speed. The other two packages (Swift and Turbo) are even faster. However, if you have the money then you should not shy away from the more powerful plans at A2Hosting. You won’t regret it for sure.

A2Hosting vs InMotion – Which to Choose?

InMotion Hosting is not the biggest company, but definitely a fast-growing one. They might not have as many data centers as their competition, but they invest a lot in providing high-quality services. It gets an abundance of positive feedback from both senior users and newcomers. They strive to provide users with the tools they need to become successful online.

At InMotion, every hosting plan is packed with useful features, not to mention that each of them provides an insane performance. What caters to their clients the most is their total independence as a company and their generous money-back guarantee. At InMotion, users don’t feel the pressure to commit to the service immediately. Instead, they take their time and try out all the cool features.

So why should you pick A2Hosting? The answer is simple. They obviously don’t care about advertising, marketing tricks or financial tricks. You don’t really hear about them, because they are busy providing top-performance for their clients and maintaining the quality of their services. They easily keep their uptime above 99% and provide outstanding security and backup. Which one sounds better? It is up to you to decide.