Why open standards are essential for the internet of the future
Identity provider Okta’s choice of open standards for its new integration service is the right choice for the modern cloud.
Because there’s such variability among plans and offerings among hosting providers, it’s hard to get a good comparison. I’ve found that one of the best ways to see how a provider performs is to look at the least expensive plan they offer. You can expect the least quality, the least attention to detail, and the least performance from such a plan.
If the vendor provides good service for the bottom-shelf plans, you can generally assume the better plans will also benefit from similar quality. In the case of InMotion Hosting, the quality was quite reasonable.
How pricing really works
For the series of hosting reviews I’m doing now, I’m testing the most basic, most entry-level plan a vendor is offering. In the case of InMotion Hosting, that’s what they call their Launch Plan. To get pricing, I simply went to the company’s main site at InMotionHosting.com. If you want to save some money, though, read to the end of this section.
Like nearly every hosting provider in the business, their offering is somewhat misleading. There is no option to just get billed $6.39 per month.
While it looks like you can get the Launch plan for $6.39 per month, that’s only if you prepay for two full years, which means you’re actually paying $153.36. If you want only one year, you’re charging $89.52 to your card (which is $7.46 per month).
There’s a gotcha, though: When you renew, you’re going to pay more. This, too, is not uncommon for hosting plans and is a practice I strongly wish the hosting industry would stop. Fortunately, InMotion’s renewal surcharge doesn’t increase as much as many. Instead of paying $153.36 for two years, you’re paying $191.76, which is about a 25% increase.
I’ve seen hosting providers ding their customers at two and three times their original rate, and InMotion doesn’t do that.
By the way, if you want to save some money, use the Sales Chat button at the top of the InMotion site before you place an order. Just as soon as I asked for clarification, the agent offered me that same two-year plan for $143.76. Hey, 10 bucks is 10 bucks.
Here’s another way to save money. If you come in through the affiliate link in CNET’s hosting providers directory, you get access to prices that are substantially lower.
Be careful reading this, though. Even though you can get a great deal through that affiliate link, when your initial period ends, you’ll still be expected to pay the full renewal price — which, after the better-than-posted discount for the first period, is nearly double the price of the first period.
I harp on high renewal fees in my coverage of hosting vendors for two key reasons. First, it’s a really nasty feeling suddenly getting a bill that’s hundreds or even thousands of dollars (depending on the plan) more than you expect. Second, switching from one hosting provider to another hosting provider can be a very time-consuming and possibly expensive job, fraught with hassles and potential points of failure.
Unfortunately, while not a universal practice, at least half of the hosting vendors I’ve looked at over the years do these promo deals, with big jumps in renewal fees.
What the base plan includes
Support responsiveness
In a word (well, five words): Way better than I expected. During testing, I had two reasons to reach out in just getting information for this article, and then one standardized test I use across hosting providers to both gauge support and learn about their backup offerings.
The first contact was via chat. I suddenly couldn’t log into the AMP and kept getting error messages. I reached out through Sales Chat and was transferred to a tech support chat operator, who asked me to try a different browser. It turned out to be a Chrome issue. Clearing cookies solved the problem. That chat took less than a minute to connect.
My second attempt was trying to find out if there was a multi-factor authentication option for the main dashboard, and I just couldn’t find it. That one took 10 minutes to connect. Sadly, that one also told me there was no MFA.
The third attempt was via voice. I was initially concerned that there wasn’t any phone support, because sometimes chatting and ticket systems can take forever. As it turns out, while there isn’t a phone number to call, there are Skype accounts to connect to. I reached out to inMotion-support, and much to my surprise, I was connected in less than two minutes.
The agent I spoke to had some reasonable answers. My first question was “How often do you backup my account?” His answer: Daily, but each new day overwrites the previous day’s backup.
My second question was “Do you backup my databases? How do I set up daily backups for both files and databases?” For this, he sent me to the cPanel backup option and offered to send me a description of how to set it up.
Unfortunately, cPanel doesn’t offer an automatic, daily, incremental backup (so you can restore from last Tuesday, for example). He was unable to tell me how to do that, or even refer me to some scripts to do so.
There are actually a ton of options. I use the ManageWP.com service from GoDaddy to backup my WordPress sites, but there are also WordPress plugins that do the same thing.
The agent did mention it might be possible to setup a cron job to do such an automatic backup, but didn’t share any resources for getting the job done. Here’s one way to do it, just for the record.
Overall, especially for the cheap seats plan offered by InMotion, I thought support was just fine.
Overall conclusion
You never want to get your expectations too high for a bottom-end plan. The economics of running such a super-cheap offering is that the provider has to make it up on volume. Professional and enterprise hosting plans with lots of traffic and performance must, out of necessity, cost more.
The only way to truly know what it’s like to use a service is to run a live website on it for a few years. That said, I was quite pleased with InMotion’s offering. The basic tests I performed indicated a well-equipped service with attention to upgrades and support.
Combine that with a 90-day guarantee, and I can’t think of a reason not to recommend you try it out.
You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.
Disclosure: ZDNet may earn a commission on services featured on this page. Neither the author nor ZDNet were compensated by InMotion for this independent, unbiased review.
Networking
VPN providers pull Russian servers as Putin’s ban threatens to bite
5G security: Europe worries about backdoors into its networks
Cisco bungled RV320/RV325 patches, routers still exposed to hacks
How to buy a router (CNET)
Hiring kit: Network administrator
(Tech Pro Research)
Related Topics:
Networking
Digital Transformation
Data Centers
CXO
Innovation
Storage