InMotion Hosting vs Hostinger – Which Hosting Provider is Best?

Hostinger and InMotion Hosting are the two companies we wanted to compare for a long time. Now the time has finally come and we can post you this detailed review about the advantages and disadvantages of the two. However, we are not here to tell you which company is better.

Since every hosting provider is different, we can’t clearly declare a winner here. Instead, we are here to help you determine which provider is better for your own purposes. By the end of this article, you will be able to easily make the choice based on the details we are about to share.

We will talk about the prices, uptime, customer support, hardware and the free features you can get by subscribing. Despite being a smaller company in the field, InMotion provides excellent customer support and performance based on the latest hardware.

Hostinger, on the other hand, has great reputation in providing easy-to-use services that inexperienced users can sign up to. While being beginner-friendly, their services are also reliable and fast compared to industry standards. Without further ado, let’s delve into the details!

About InMotion Hosting

There is usually a significant difference in the opinion of senior users and newcomers when it comes to web hosting companies. This is definitely not the case with InMotion, as they provide rather convincing hosting packages for both customer groups.

They were always good at carefully investigating the needs of their customers. The company was very small at the beginning. In 2001, two guys decided to dedicate their time to working in a tiny office. All they had was a single dedicated server and a phone.

The two of them took care of the maintenance while providing support to their customers and taking care of the whole business. While they had only a handful of users on the server at the beginning, the company got so popular that thousands of users sign up to their hosting packages today.

InMotion provides excellent customer service, high-end hardware and many useful features in the form of online software and applications. After almost two decades in the industry, they have managed to become one of the best hosting companies. Let’s see what makes InMotion such a great competitor in the web hosting market.

Pros and Cons of InMotion Hosting

Pros of InMotion

No commitment – At InMotion, you don’t need to immediately commit to your hosting package. If you don’t like it, you can get your money back as long as you cancel your subscription within 90 days. Compared to other hosting providers, we can say that their 90-day guarantee is quite a generous offer. Most other companies give you 60 days, but 30 and 15-day guarantees are not rare either.

Valuable hosting packages – InMotion differentiates itself from the competition by offering a couple of unlimited features in each of its packages. These include unlimited transfer and unlimited storage. Both of these features are highly useful for various types of websites.

If data transfer and disk space are particularly important for your website, then you will be satisfied with an InMotion hosting plan for sure. The provider includes these features even in their most basic plan, allowing you to start with a tight budget.

Useful freebies – The provider is willing to give users a lot of stuff for free. First off, you get a free domain name no matter which hosting package you choose. This domain can be obtained during the process of registration or site transfer.

This is great news, as your domain will be the foundation of your website. Secondly, you get free credits that can be used for promoting your site online. InMotion gives you credits for Bing, Yahoo and Google AdWords, allowing you to drive additional traffic from these sources.

But that’s not all! InMotion also protect your data with automated backups for free. When things go wrong, you can easily go back to an older version of your website data.

Proficient support – You don’t need to be an expert to buy a hosting package and build up an online brand. However, you certainly need a proficient customer support team that has your back. Although InMotion provides outstanding service, things in the tech world can be quite unpredictable at times.

Their customer support is ready to respond whether you need advice or a quick fix to a problem you have ran into. You can reach them through various channels, including phone, live chat, and email or by filling out the form on their website.

InMotion might be smaller than the other top companies, but they surely know how to provide outstanding customer support. On top of that, you can visit their comprehensive knowledge base. Lots of helpful guides, FAQ, video tutorials and articles are available for users that need a quick fix.

High-end hardware – If your web hosting provider uses the latest technology for its servers, then your website will surely load at lightning speed. InMotion is one of the companies that didn’t shy away from investing into high-end hardware.

It is all about the speed of communication between the server and your website. There are a couple of more factors that determine loading speed but if the hardware is not powerful enough, then nothing else will be able to help the situation.

InMotion has only 2 data centers, which may not sound that convincing, but at least those two are full-featured and fully reliable.

99% uptime – The servers at InMotion are up and running more than 99% of the time. This is a crucial factor for businesses, as even an hour of downtime can result in significant loss of revenue for them. In fact, ’high uptime’ or ’reliable uptime’ are among the most-searched terms when businesses want to find a web hosting alternative for their website.

Their servers are based on high-end technology. They use Dell servers with Linux operating system running on them and Cisco components installed. These three names speak for themselves, as it would be a shame for these advanced technologies to let the servers down.

Despite such a reliable set of hardware, InMotion also employs a group of experts. They ensure continuous running time for the servers and fix every problem possibly before they even become visible to the user.

Security software – InMotion gives you a spam filter, which is a simple, yet highly effective tool that can save you a lot of time. Instead of manually selecting the important emails among the abundance of spam, the tool filters them out for you so that you can clearly see what is important in your inbox.

In addition, you get two highly popular security platforms including Patchman and Sucuri. Patchman, as its name says, keeps everything up to date, thus preventing your site from being vulnerable to attacks. The main goal of both of this software is to protect your data from malware and DDoS attacks, sort of supplementing each other in these tasks.

Environment-friendly – It is no wonder that data centers need a lot of energy in order to function properly. This usually means that such companies leave a significant carbon footprint, damaging the environment.

Today’s technology allows us to generate energy from renewable sources and thus use it for our daily lives while protecting the globe from pollution. It became increasingly popular among hosting companies to use green energy.

InMotion, being one of the most high-tech companies in the industry, also started to use green energy, allowing you to reduce the damage done on the planet by signing up to one of their hosting plans.

Cons of InMotion

Above average prices – We would advise you to carefully access the prices at InMotion Hosting. Of course, their basic plans might seem affordable, while they gradually scale their prices up to the most expensive dedicated servers. Pretty much all providers follow the same scheme.

However, it turns out that, overall, the prices at InMotion are higher than average if you compare them to similar packages offered by other companies. Another disappointing factor is that you can’t pay monthly, they want you to commit for at least a full year.

Their 90-day money-back guarantee is your only chance to painlessly cancel the subscription. The numbers say that potential customers decide to leave after glancing at the prices despite the generous guarantee.

Unnecessary limitations – Basic hosting plans are rather powerful at InMotion Hosting, but there are some strict limitations. The Launch plan gives you the most unpleasant one by limiting the amount of websites you can have to 2.

Although there are other nice features included, many users still can’t grow further just because of this limitation. InMotion basically forces them to upgrade to a more expensive plan, which might not be in align with their budget yet. Not to mention that you can quickly find a provider that allows you to run unlimited websites with a basic package.

Long setups and activation – InMotion has an unusual policy when it comes to setups and website verification. These tasks require an unnecessarily long amount of time to finish, whereas other providers let you activate your account and website much faster.

Strict backup policy – The automatic backup service provided by the company is a great thing at the beginning, but it can become an additional expense if you are not careful. Once the size of your website data exceeds the 10GB limit, you need to pay for the backups instead of getting them for free.

On top of that, backups are not available forever. From the time the backup is created, it is available for 4 months before it gets deleted. You simply can’t go farther back in time.

About Hostinger

Thousands of people sign up to Hostinger plans each day, adding up to a total of 29 million accounts so far. The numbers don’t lie; this provider surely provides an above-average service for its target audience. Now the only thing you need to find out whether you fall into that group of people or not.

We can help you by lining up all the advantages and disadvantages of the provider. According to their website, you get a completely user-friendly, fast and reliable service from them with top-notch security, proficient customer support staff and lots of freebies.

Sounds good, right? However, you always need to be a bit skeptical about these providers. Many times, these services are not nearly as good as they claim them to be. First off, let’s see some of the best features provided by Hostinger. Then we are going to show you some of the potential deal-breakers.

Pros and Cons of Hostinger

Pros of Hostinger

Powerful servers – Nowadays, if you want your website to be successful, you need to ensure fast page load times. If your website takes more than a couple of seconds to load, you can say good-bye to most of your visitors.

Fortunately, Hostinger ensures fast connection with their high-end servers and infrastructure. They have established data centers in Europe, USA and Asia, making their services available world-wide. Their equipment can guarantee a 1000 Mbps connection to the users.

Even if you use a demanding theme for your website, it probably won’t take more than 1 second to load. If speed is one of your priorities, then you can’t go wrong with Hostinger.

User-friendly – Hosting services can be rather complicated at times, especially for the inexperienced user. The main focus of Hostinger is to make it less frustrating for beginners to use a hosting service. They have made it sure that the lack of experience won’t be an issue for anyone who wants to register to their services.

The control panel at Hostinger is a bit different. It uses a minimalistic, colorful design with a layout that is easy to navigate. Each option has a small description written on it in case you don’t immediately understand what it does.

Within this smart control panel, you can find all the tools and options you need for managing your website and hosting account. There is nothing hidden or hard to find, you can reach everything with a couple of clicks.

Security and privacy beyond SSL – It is not such a big deal anymore when a hosting provider offers free SSL along with their plans. It is so crucial to have an SSL installed on your website that you shouldn’t even consider starting one without it.

You need more than an SSL to be completely safe on the Internet. Hostinger makes sure there are some additional security measures in action that protect your website data. No matter which plan you choose, you get a security platform called Bitninja that provides you with plenty of useful features.

It constantly protects you against DDoS attacks, malware, brute force and all kinds of other attacks you can get from hackers. In addition, you get SpamAssassin, a spam filter that removes email messages you would move to the trash anyway. Another thing that proves that Hostinger takes security seriously is their free backup service.

Free website builder – Hostinger has a great advantage over many other providers with its website builder. You not only get a reliable and powerful web hosting plan, but you will also be able to seamlessly build up your website. Not a basic sloppy-looking website but one that looks truly professional.

The end result will be a unique website, not one of those that people mass-produce with other platforms. There is a wide range of website templates to choose from with an abundance of customization options in each of them.

Once you finish you brand new website, Hostinger will offer you the option to register a domain name for it for free. You need to pick the Business or Premium plan in order to get the free domain.

Impressive knowledge base – Hostinger is eager to share knowledge and provide their users with quick fixes and explanations related to websites and hosting in general. This is why they created their own knowledge base where you can easily find the topics you are interested in by using the search bar.

Numerous video tutorials, guides and helpful articles are available there for every user. It is a great opportunity for those who have no experience in web hosting to learn things fast. You can even use their live chat as knowledge base. Their support staff is trained to communicate with customers as teachers.

Affordable plans – At Hostinger, you can find rather powerful hosting plans even if you have a tight budget. If you compare it to some of the other top hosting providers in the game, it turns out their prices are quite low. Plus, you get a lot of free features with every one of their plans.

Now, we are aware of the fact that there are a few tactics in action that will cause you to pay a bit more, but that is pretty much the case with every company. They want to display the least information possible about their packages so that people sign up more eagerly.

Useful email tools – This might seem like a small bonus, but a pack of email tools can be very helpful for online businesses. Any Hostinger plan except the most basic one gives you unlimited email accounts without requiring you to pay an extra.

By creating a Hostinger account, you will be able to log in and manage your email account whenever you are. If you are working with a team, you can also give access to each of the members. You get highly useful tools along with the email accounts including auto responders, spam filter and email forwarding software.

Exceptional uptime – One of the things a hosting provider should be really good at is to keep your website online without interruption. In web hosting, there are many things that can go wrong both in hardware and software.

Hostinger has a great uptime record thanks to the high-end hardware and its ability to prevent problems before they become visible to users. They guarantee that your website won’t experience more than a couple of hours of downtime each month, which is more than 99.9% uptime.

Cons of Hostinger

Too busy customer support – Hostinger requires you to log in to your account if you want to connect to their customer support via live chat. This can be quite annoying at times. Their support team consists of experts who are highly experienced in their field. They are also very good at fixing problems and giving advice.

The downside here is that you need to wait a significant amount of time until you get that high-quality support. Once they finally get to you, they might ask you to wait some more until they find a team member or resource that is completely suitable to your current situation.

No cPanel – They wanted something simple, which led them to the decision to get rid of cPanel and offer their own control panel. This can be bad news for those users who already got used to cPanel and now need to re-learn how to navigate through the new platform.

All in all, their version is quite straightforward and self-explanatory, but still, there is a reason behind cPanel being so popular among hosting providers. There are also more experienced users that are used to complicated tasks and it can be annoying for them to operate with such an over-simplified control panel.

Unpleasant pricing tricks – It is common among hosting providers to implement a few tricks and convince clients that they have cheap prices and then eventually ask for more. Hostinger is definitely not an exception, so you should be prepared for additional expenses if you want to join.

There will be renewal costs, but you can get a decent price if you sign up for a full year or more. After all, the prices are quite affordable if you decide to host there long-term. Another downside is that there are no month-by-month plans.

Conclusion: Hostinger or InMotion Hosting?

InMotion might be one of the smaller companies on the top of the rankings, but it is definitely a fast-growing one. They take every problem seriously and strive to satisfy their customers as best as they can. This attitude is, sadly, not that common among web hosting providers. Furthermore, you get plenty of free stuff no matter which hosting plan you sign up to.

The company gives you a 90-day money-back guarantee, which is a lot of time to try out their services and determine whether you are satisfied or not. InMotion started providing services with a single dedicated server back in the day. Today it is a completely independent company that improves day by day.

Hostinger is highly recommended for beginners that want to establish an online presence and build up a strong brand. Their services are user-friendly, fast and you get a wide range of extras with each package. If you are prepared for the additional expenses that might come up along the way, then Hostinger is an outstanding choice. Now it is only up to you to determine which one gives you more value!

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David Cross

David is the chief editor at WebHostingMedia right from the beginning. He has a great passion for building and managing websites and creating helpful content. He is also interested in programming - currently learning python.