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iPage.com vs InMotion Hosting – Which Hosting Provider is Best?

Home » Hosting Comparison » iPage.com vs InMotion Hosting – Which Hosting Provider is Best?

Today we are going to make an important comparison. We are going to decide whether iPage or InMotion Hosting is the better provider after reviewing the pros and cons of each one. We are going to go through the main selling points and bring up some of the common feedbacks that users say about these companies.

Even if both of them turn out to be good alternatives, you will know exactly which one to choose by the end of our article. After all, every business and personal website has its own needs. Maybe one of the providers suit your website’s needs more than the other one.

We will talk about some key points like prices, security, user experience, customer support, performance and free features. The reason why InMotion and iPage are comparable companies is because they are both huge names in the industry right now with many years of experience. Therefore, the question commonly rises up: Which one should I choose?

We are here to provide you a thorough review you can rely on. First off, the main idea behind iPage is completely different from what InMotion Hosting is about. At InMotion Hosting, what users like the most is their customer support service and consistent uptime. iPage on the other hand, has one of the best money-back guarantees in the industry while offering great deals for domain names and bandwidth.

Two huge companies ruling the web hosting scene, each with a different personality. Which one is better? Let’s find it out!

InMotion Hosting – A Strong Reputation in Hosting

InMotion is a company with services that cater to many different types of audiences. Whether you are a developer, a blogger, a local business owner or someone who wants to start an eCommerce website from scratch, there is definitely a solution available for you at InMotion.

In a market where companies usually have a strict target audience, InMotion stands out as a versatile alternative. Since 2001, it has accumulated a significant amount of loyal individuals and businesses that gladly host their websites on its servers. As many of its competitors, it only offered shared hosting services at the start. Then, as the company started to grow, they expanded their services and offered more.

Now you can choose from business hosting, VPS, dedicated hosting, reseller hosting and WordPress-optimized hosting. Besides these options, you can choose from numerous other tools and services that can come in handy, such as domains, web design services and other hosting tools. As you can see, InMotion pretty much became an all-round solution over the years. No matter what type of website you want to start, you will surely find a suitable web hosting package for it on their page.

Pros & Cons of InMotion Hosting

InMotion Hosting Pros:

Money-back guarantee – If you sign up to an InMotion plan, they won’t apply any pressure on you whatsoever. You will have 90 days to try out their features and if you are not satisfied, you can leave with your money at any time. They are absolutely confident in their services, which is why their money-back period is one of the longest in the industry.
Freebies – With InMotion, you not only get a powerful web hosting package, but a free domain name for your website as well. Besides that, there are free credits included in the plan for Yahoo, Bing and Google AdWords, allowing you to advertise your website on these search engines. When it comes to security, your website data will be secured by free automatic backups. In case things go wrong, you can go back to an older version of your website right away.
Unlimited features – As hosting companies usually do, InMotion also offers a few resources with no limit on them. Depending on your website’s needs, these resources might come in handy. This provider offers unlimited disk space and unlimited data transfer. To get these features, you only need to sign up to the cheapest plan. If enhanced disk space and data transfer is what your website really needs, then InMotion will be a huge bargain for you.
Professional customer support – Website owners want to focus on their own business, which is creating content and selling products and services online. Most of them are not really tech-savvy, nor do they want to spend their time on fixing website or hosting issues. This is why good customer support is required, and InMotion indeed has a team of experts you can rely on. Whenever you face a problem, you just need to contact them via live chat, email, phone or their ticket system. They are available 24/7 with quick response times. Other than that, InMotion has community support as well. This is basically a knowledge base where you can find quick solutions in the form of articles, video tutorials, FAQ and guides. In case a common issue comes up, you will probably find a quick fix there.
Server uptime – This is the term that most businesses look for when searching for a reliable web hosting provider. If you want to establish a serious business, then you definitely don’t want your visitors to find your website offline. InMotion is one of those companies that successfully keep their server uptime above 99%. The provider didn’t shy away from investing into high-end hardware and software. Their infrastructure guarantees that your website won’t be offline during crucial moments when customers come and go. At InMotion, there is a complete team monitoring the performance of their servers. This greatly reduces the chance of any downtime, as they are ready to resolve the smaller problems before they turn into bigger ones.
Hardware – The better the software, the better the hosting experience. However, the performance of a server still mostly depends on the hardware. In the web hosting industry, there is a huge competition between providers to invest into the latest hardware and ensure top-notch performance. Fortunately, InMotion is in a pretty good spot in this competition. Fast SSD drives, strong CPU and RAM are all important if you want to ensure high-quality user experience for your visitors. After all, people don’t want to wait more than 3 seconds until your pages load. If your site is slow, they are simply going to leave. InMotion currently has 2 data centers in the USA and both of them provide excellent page load speeds.
Security measures – We didn’t mention in the freebies that you also get a free spam filter. It is time to read only the real emails and move the fake ones instantly to the trash. When it comes to updates and malware protection, InMotion provides you with Patchman and Sucuri which are both highly popular and effective security software.
Hosting with green energy – We all know that there are tons of servers running in data centers, powering thousands of websites around the clock. That requires a lot of energy, and hosting providers need to prefer energy sources that preserve the environment. InMotion is one of the companies that run servers on green energy, thus reducing the damage done by such activities.

InMotion Hosting Cons:

A bit expensive – Although there are plenty of cheap packages available at InMotion, the prices can be surprisingly high if you take a look at their most powerful VPS or dedicated plans. On the other hand, when we compare the prices among other big providers, it turns out that you can find a handful of providers where you pay less for similar services. At InMotion, you can either sign up for a one-year plan or pick a longer period. There is no month-by-month option; however, a longer period can ensure you some discounts. Of course, you can take advantage of their 90-day money-back guarantee, but we can conclude that the one-year minimum does not suit everyone’s needs.
Limited features – As we already mentioned, you can find a couple of unlimited features at InMotion. Unfortunately, they have some limited features that can be quite unpleasant for website owners. With a basic plan, you are allowed to run up to 2 websites with 2 databases, and that’s all. The truth is that if you kick start your business with this InMotion plan, you will quickly outgrow it. Unless you are running a low-traffic blog, the basic plan can quickly force you to buy a more expensive plan and continue from there. Many other hosting providers offer packages that can support your website for a significant amount of time until you run out of resources and switch to a more powerful one. This is definitely not the case with InMotion.
Time consuming setup – Nowadays, you might expect these hosting companies to guarantee you a quick setup for your hosting account and your website. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. At InMotion, it can be quite time consuming to get your website up and running. You actually need to go through countless pages until your hosting plan finally becomes active.
Backup limitations – InMotion claims to offer regular automatic backups, which is true, but it has its limitations. You get free backups as long as your website data doesn’t exceed their 10 GB limit. Once it is larger than that, then the service is no longer available. On top of that, you can only go back as far as 4 months in time. Any versions older than that will be deleted. If you want a better backup service, then you can get it for an additional fee.

iPage – Affordable and Secure Hosting

If you have gone through a few reviews so far looking for a good hosting provider, then you might have read about the Endurance International Group. This is the name of the company that runs numerous web hosting companies as subsidiaries. One of these is iPage, but others like FatCow, HostGator, SiteBuilder and Bigrock are also part of the group, just to mention a few.

We can only recommend the providers under the EIG in case you are looking for a good domain registrar, reseller hosting plan, web hosting, or website builder. These are all highly popular companies with an abundance of positive reviews on the Internet. Instead of talking about EIG as a whole, we are going to introduce you to iPage, a strong competitor in the web hosting industry.

iPage established its data centers in 6 locations, targeting the regions that need their hosting services the most. The company provides resources for millions of websites at the moment. Unlike InMotion, iPage allows their clients to pay their hosting packages on a month-to-month basis.

Pros & Cons of iPage

Pros of iPage

Cheap hosting packages – At iPage, you can get a basic hosting plan with great value for only $1.99 per month. Even if you can find a cheaper shared hosting package somewhere, it won’t be as valuable as this one. You don’t even need to sign up for the 36-month period if you want the cheapest price, as they offer it for the one-year period too. Although discounts can eventually expire, increasing the price a bit, there won’t be any significant increase. iPage is not the type of company that charges for additional stuff without mentioning it right at the start.
Skilled customer support – The customer support at iPage goes through an all-round training period where they learn how to be as effective as possible when clients have issues that need to be solved. You can reach them around the clock through phone, live chat and email. Besides resolving your issue, the staff will provide you with additional good-to-know tips in the form of links or plain text that will help you prevent similar problems in the future.
Third-party tools and services – With iPage, it is rather easy to add a payment gateway to your website. It only takes a couple of minutes to add PayPal and start accepting payments. It also allows access to Google Apps where thousands of useful applications can be downloaded. Additional freebies include Bing, Yahoo and Google AdWords credits that enable you to promote your brand for free on these search engines. If you already have a WordPress blog and want to continue working on it on the new server, you can do so with a couple of clicks. You only need to press the Import button in the dashboard and the website data will be transferred immediately.
Top-notch security – SiteLock is a popular choice among website owners and hosting providers for improving security. It basically scans your website data, searching for malware and blocking them once found. With iPage, you will be under the protection of SiteLock. Besides these regular scans, you will be provided with a firewall that prevents important data from being leaked and you will have access to the .htaccess file where you can manage the availability of the different sections of your website. iPage creates a backup copy of your website data every day, so that you can go back to a previous version if things go wrong. These backups are completely free.
Money-back guarantee – iPage gives you 30 days until you decide to fully commit to their hosting plan or leave. There is no pressure, you can freely try out their tools and features until the specified period runs out. Once you cancel your subscription, you get your money back in a blink of an eye. Yes, you can easily find a provider with a longer refund period, but their guarantee is completely free of any terms or conditions.
Wind energy – iPage is one of the proud partners of EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. Besides reducing environmental pollution, they also want to reduce the damage caused on people’s health on a daily basis. iPage is a huge contributor to this cause, using as many green energy sources as they can for powering their data centers. They invested a lot into wind energy generators. By signing up to one of their hosting plans, you basically contribute to a better, cleaner environment.
Unbeatable uptime – Their uptime record is 99.97% so far, which means that they are an outstanding option for businesses with high-traffic websites. With this number, iPage truly stands out in the competition and easily beats most of the providers. We can say that this is the part of their service that they truly focus on. Their servers are monitored 24/7, meaning that their staff can either prevent them from shutting down or instantly restart them when it happens.

Cons of iPage

Costly renewal plans – iPage is a perfect choice if you want to use it for the 12-month period. You get the cheap package and get huge value for your money. However, if you would like to renew your subscription, the prices will be significantly higher. On the other hand, there is a little twist in their money-back guarantee as well. Although you get a domain name for free, you will need to pay for it if you decide to leave within the 30-day period. This will be a $15 purchase even though you wanted to leave bare handed. Definitely not the kind of refund you would typically expect.
Slower web pages – There are numerous powerful features included in each iPage hosting plan, yet they still struggle to provide fast page loading times. The company falls a little bit behind its competition when it comes to performance, and it certainly doesn’t benefit the SEO of the websites running on their servers. This makes it harder for them to reach high positions in search engine rankings.
Lack of cPanel – cPanel is the most widely used control panel right now. It is beginner-friendly and convenient for those users who regularly switch from one hosting provider to another. Unfortunately, iPage decided not to include cPanel licenses in their plans. You will not only need to learn how to use their own control panel alternative, but the popular applications used by cPanel users also won’t be available.
Not really unlimited – If you visit their website, the unlimited storage space seems quite convincing as listed in each of the hosting packages. However, iPage only tells the truth in their user agreement document. In fact, you can have as much space for your website as you want, but uploading your own files is not allowed. This is mainly because uploading any other files might negatively impact server activity. Not to mention that these types of files get deleted automatically after each update.

InMotion or iPage – Which One is Better?

InMotion Hosting is all about growth. In the past few years, they strived to improve their services in many aspects. They not only want to provide simple solutions to their clients. They want all the solutions to be included in one package. That is why InMotion offers such a big number of tools and features in each of their plans.

They want to make you able to create huge, complex websites with lots of traffic. After all, that is how a successful website looks like. What make them a great alternative are their exceptionally long refund period and the wide range of hosting plans. On the other hand, what iPage wants to truly improve in is their customer support. Considering other aspects of their service, they are already on the right track.

They are not rookies in the web hosting business after all, and the abundance of positive feedback that the company receives from its customers speaks for them. A provider can offer the perfect hosting plan for you, but if their customer support has a bad reputation, it is definitely not worth it. This is why you should always look for high-quality support, and iPage surely knows the way around it.

One downside about iPage could be that the company is a subsidiary of a bigger one. However, if you take a look at all the other companies that are part of the Endurance International Group, you will see a lot of successful ones. Companies such as FatCow, HostMonster and BlueHost are all widely known and you can read tons of positive reviews about them.

InMotion and iPage are both great alternatives when it comes to server uptime. If that’s your main criteria, then it almost doesn’t matter which one you choose. Hopefully, all this information helped you to decide which provider is going to suit your website needs the most.

Last updated on: January 21, 2019

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.