Worst Hosting Options – Read this first

Techie Mamma is reader supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. As an Amazon Affiliate I earn from qualifying purchases. I only recommend products and services that I think will help you on your Mompreneur journey and all opinions expressed here are our own. You can read my full disclaimer here.

Share or save for later

If considering InMotion WordPress Hosting, proceed with caution. Some things are too good to be true.

Background Story

I recently wrote about my experience with ShortPixel Hosting, and loved the simplicity and transparency. In a search for a host to host some client accounts and some sites that are low traffic and resources, I continued to look at the copious of options out there.

InMotion came up in a number of articles as a good solid host. In theory, it looked perfect. They had WordPress Hosting plans starting at $5 / month that was still managed and based on a VPS but did not have the price tag of most managed hosting plans. I decided to take a gamble and started playing with their setup.

The InMotion WordPress Hosting Plans include a playground area which essentially is a space where you can build something out before payment and presenting to a possible client. The idea is really great for those of us who are constantly taking on projects and want a space to get things setup. This worked alright but when I was happy with it and wanted to start paying for the space, they took my money happily, but the site never fully published, I did not have information for DNS and after 7+ attempts to contact support, I still didn’t’ have a live site. Most definitely not something you want to deal with when trying to get a client site up live.

Quickly I decided that the plans would not work out for me and requested a refund. At the time of this writing it is now 20+ days later and I still have not received a refund. I am beyond frustrated, this has truly been the worst experience with a host I have ever had. I have had some poor experiences with Bluehost and others but this tops the cake.

Find Out More

What Is InMotion WordPress Hosting?

From their website, the InMotion WordPress Hosting is described as Premium WordPress Hosting Built for Speed to experience a new way to WordPress. Build, launch, and manage high-performance WordPress sites through one powerful dashboard.

Features

Features mentioned on the website include Next Generation of WordPress Hosting (not sure what that means?!), which includes High-Performance VPS, All-In-One WordPress Dashboard, Playground Environments, WordPress Snaps, and Automated Maintenance. In addition they list additional features on every plan:

Fully Isolated Server
Transparent Pricing – No surprise pricing backed by our 30 and 90 day money-back guarantee. (Why is it 30 OR 90?)
Use Any Plugin
Free SSL and Dedicated IP
Advanced Security
Website Backups
One-Click Playgrounds – Spin up a playground environment for staging, testing or new site builds.
Manage Core, Plugin & Theme Updates
WordPress Pre-Installed
No Plugin Blacklists
Site Health Monitor
Multi-User Access Management
SSH and Root Access
Git CLI Ready
Live State Snapshots
Cloud-Based VPS
Triple Failover Redundancy
WordPress Optimized
PHP 7 & 8 Supported
NGINX Reverse Proxy
Brotli Compression
Dedicated OpCode Cache Pool
Compatible with All CDNs
Fully-Isolated Production Environment
Managed Security Updates
Single Sign-On Authentication
Web Application Firewall (WAF) by Modsec
Brute Force Protection
DDoS Protection
PCI Compliant Compatible

Pros / Cons

[affiliatable id=’157937′]

My Testing

I honestly did not have the account for very long (I have waited MUCH longer for a refund) but from what I could tell their list of features does not include friendly support and that is the one thing I did experience. I was not able to test speed since I did not have a site that was ever live after hours of trying to contact someone at support that could help me.

Bottom Line

In theory, the InMotion WordPress Hosting is the best of all worlds. They promise a VPS (single server space as opposed to shared hosting) that is optimized for WordPress. They boast about WordPress tools and features, and have great pricing starting at $5 / month. In reality I found these promises to be too good to be true. Looking at their shared hosting plans, they start $3.99 / month (2 year contract), you can rename a product but at it’s core it is going to be the same thing and at the end of the day you get what you pay for. Poor support, clunky portals that don’t work, documentation that references features you don’t even have.

All in all, from 10+ hosts that I have worked with or purchased in the past 20+ years, this has been the worst experience I have ever had. It is so unfortunate, I thought I had found the golden ticket of hosting. If one were to ask me today, after this experience, over speed and all the features, I would say reasonable, friendly, knowledgeable customer support is the most important thing when looking for hosting.

My verdict – if you are looking for hosting, proceed at your own risk if considering InMotion WordPress Hosting.

[affiliatable id=’154524′]

Cousett

Known as THE Techie Mamma, I am a boy(x2) mom, and love technology. As a former Educational Technology academic turned Mompreneur, and super passionate educator, I am on a mission to empower Mompreneurs to build, and grow their business to live the Mompreneur Life they want.