Kendra Schaefer

InMotion Hosting rocks my socks. Seriously. They rock my pants off.

After wading through a sickening miasma of forehead-slappingly horrible hosting services, finding InMotion was like coming home to a basket of warm, buttery, PHP5-enabled muffins. It’s like the part at the end of the book where the whole adventuring party is back in the same tavern they started from, and the thief is all, “This story may be over, but our adventure has only just begun!”

Why do I love them? Let me count the ways:

1) Online support, billing and sales chat. Unlike Siteground, with their oh-so-reachable staff who magically teleport out of space-time the moment you pay for services (please to check out our online knowledge base kthanksbye!), InMotion has live phone and text chat with reasonable business hours. Everyone’s really nice, they mostly know what they’re talking about, and if they don’t know what they’re talking about, they go find out for you.

2) Enough security hoops to jump through that your sign-up is secure, not so many security hoops that you can’t effectively register a domain. The last – and final – time I registered with Siteground, they asked for my driver’s license, credit card and faxed signature. Well, I was living overseas at the time, and there was no fax in the house. So I took a picture of my signature and emailed that. Not good enough. I sent a picture of my passport. They wrote back that the bottom numbers were blurry. They asked for a birth certificate. No, I’m serious, they called me, verified my information, then asked me for my birth certificate. I asked them why I was having to beg to do business with them, and the account was miraculously approved.

Listen, people, if a thief wants my identity that bad, freakin’ take it. “Welcome to Kendraland. Hope you know Photoshop, or you’re about to get a bunch of irate phone calls.”

3) InMotion uses CPanel. I may heart InMotion, but I heart CPanel more. GoDaddy may be cheap, but what on God’s earth were they thinking building their own little special howdy-doody backend / site manager? Why do I have to open 4 billion different windows to find my email settings? Why do 12 different links with different names take me to the same location? And why, oh WHY, do I have to wait 5 minutes for every page to load? You guys just had to have your own special-wecial one, didn’t you? CPanel, please!

4) InMotion does Instant… stuff. While I’m on the GoDaddy tangent, let me pose yet another question: why does it take 5 hours to implement simple changes that should be a click-and-use affair? 4 hours to update my email settings? Are you freakin’ serious?

5) Great uptime. ‘Nuff said.

6) Everyone speaks English. While I’m the last person who’s likely to complain about multi-culturalism, being that I spent the last 7 years as an immigrant myself, the fact remains that if you’re offering web hosting to the American market, you have to actually speak English to deliver your services. I recently discovered that a friend of mine is hosted with IX Webhosting, whose tagline is “Please to be to our sites we like”. Okay, no, but it should be.

The web was once peppered with rave reviews for IX hosting. And then somewhere in the last year or so, the reviews changed their tone. “Used to be great, now it’s awful! What happened?”

What happened, as it turns out, is that the site is run entirely by a Russian support staff who take 15 minutes to respond to any question, and when they do get around to answering, it’s usually, “Must to speak with our more favoried high techers. Wait on the email, please.” I like to imagine IX was bought out by a cigar-smoking Moscow mob boss with lots of pomade, who says stuff like, “Vat iz dis web buziness, eh? I hyave too many vomen to care about zees”. Oh, come on. It helps me get through (the many) conversations with tech support.

7) They talk to techies like techies, and newbies like newbies. When I tell my mom “All you have to do is call and ask for Business Class hosting, Joomla 1.5 enabled”, and she calls me back all, “Okay, now what?” like it was the easiest thing ever, I know I’m referring people to the right place.

Go sign up. You won’t be sorry.