review of Inmotion Hosting. So I was with Inmotion Hosting – the hosting company and it was absolutely the worst experience of my web life. I really do not know how and why this company is still in business and having just gotten free of them, I feel so much better. It’s taken a while to recover my wits and calm down enough to write a balanced and fair assessment of my experience being hosted there. To give you some context, I had a VPS account where I was paying over $80 a month for hosting. This was their mid tier VPS plan and should have been more than enough to host a site that (at that time) was getting approximately 1000 to 2500 visitors a day. I could go into detail about all the problems that I had but I thought it would be better to tell you the Top 10 reasons that I don’t use Inmotion Hosting for my website or business.
1.Data Loss
Toward the end of my term there, they lost a full site backup I had done the night before. The sysadmin looked for it but couldn’t find it but he acknowledged that he saw it the night before. That was the last straw for me and I knew that I had to get the heck out of there.2. Unacceptable Downtimes
I use Montastic to monitor my websites. When my site goes down for up to 5 minutes, I get an alert emailed and sent to my phone. I lost track of how many times my website went down in 8 months. I would get alert after alert after alert about outages for 20 minutes at night or 15 minutes here or 10 minutes there. Never explained or accounted for. Naturally this led to:3. No Peace Of Mind
Part of the fun of being a blogger is the flexibility of it all. being able to go to Vegas on a moments notice and your business is still up and running. When you have an unreliable host, IT SUCKS! You get paranoid about travel and are always wondering about whether your site is up. You know what website outages lead to?4. Loss of Profits
On a successful website, going down is equal to losing money. No question. This company has lost me hundreds if not thousands of dollars over 8 months. Apart from the money, an unreliable webhost can lose you..5. Loss of Search Engine Rankings
The GoogleBot hits your website and oh, you’re not there. Not a reliable website huh? Maybe you shouldn’t be at the top of the search engines for your keyword. That’s fun. I especially liked the day that Inmotion took my website down because they said and I quote “Oh GoogleBot was crawling your site too aggressively”. Nice. Which leads beautifully into the next reason..6. Poor Notifications of downtimes
So these rocket scientists do this: They take your website down and send you a notification 10 minutes later via email. Everything with this company is drama and the biggest excuse they give is “your site is consuming too many system resources”. BULLSHIT. I am on Hostgator now on a CHEAPER plan and my site has run like a charm with even more traffic. Must be because of their:7. Unreliable Servers
Seems like for a hosting business, their VPS Servers are really really sensitive. Any small thing and they freak out. Oh my God you’re doing a backup during the day – they shut the site down. please do it at night. I run the same backup at 2am, they shut the site down – still using too many resources. Umm OK. Whatever…with their whacky…8. Expensive Plans
Believe me, for the services that they9. Unable to protect your website from Hackers
I don’t need to go to deep in this one. I blogged about it here. This was really telling. A LARGE section of their customers were down for HOURS and these guys were clueless before they issued a fix. I found out early and fixed my site only because A) I know WordPress REALLY well and B) and this is important – the Hackers were not malicious. This hosting company only avoided a MAJOR disaster because the hackers were just having fun. They could EASILY have done 10000% times more damage if they wanted to. Nice to know my websites future is in the hands of benevolent hackers. and finally..10. Long Wait Times on the Phone
Why are there long wait times on the phone with web support for a company? BECAUSE EVERYONE IS CALLING IN AT THE SAME TIME. Oh how many times my wife had to see me on the phone at midnight with Inmotion. Here’s the typical pattern with them:- They take your site down
- You notice an hour later (if you’re lucky) and you call
- You hold for 10 minutes
- Level 1 tech answer call and takes your details and checks your ID (5 minutes)
- Puts you on hold (5 to 10 minutes)
- Comes back on and tells you to continue holding (5 to 10 more minutes)
- Comes back and connects you to Level 2 Tech (5 to 30 minutes)
