InMotion VPS Hosting First Impressions

Why pay for an upmarket InMotionHosting.com virtual private server website hosting plan when hosting can be found elsewhere at minimal cost?

InMotionHosting.com provides a highly rated very attractive VPS hosting plan with two static IP addresses, 512MB/1GB burstable RAM, 750GB/Bandwidth per month and a cPanel back office at a competitive monthly cost. Because VPS also provides fast page load times, secure hosting not shared with other sites that can cause issues and is highly reliable.

Like most new website owners it took me a while to appreciate the value of a more expensive hosting plan.

I moved to godaddy.com last year after my previous provider exited the business. My godaddy.com shared hosting experience was less than satisfactory, details about this will be appended to the end of this post. Godaddy.com is currently advertising their shared hosting plans for business owners on TV.
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Why invest in VPS Hosting?

 

Because good VPS hosting that can be found with providers like InMotionHosting.com will protect your website investment. Add any content, pictures, social apps, plugins, links and multimedia and your site structure becomes larger, more complex resulting in slower page load times.

For WordPress websites this can be managed with a cashing management plugin like W3 Total Cashe and with careful management of post revisions, spam comments and subscribers. However the big issue with shared hosting is that however well you manage your own site/s you will be negatively affected by other lower quality sites on your shared hosting plan.

Other sites can hog the hosts resources with large amounts of spam comments and can also introduce malware/trojans that affects the performance of your site and take it down.

Google now evaluates websites on their hosting and if you happen to share an IP address with a other lower quality sites this will also affect your site rankings and visitor traffic. Fast page load times are important for both Google ranking and for attracting and maintaining visitor traffic. Page load/refresh times should be under 3 seconds especially during high traffic periods when you could be missing out on attracting new high quality visitors to you’re site. This can be checked using pingdom.com

If you want to secure your website investment then not being able to afford to invest in good high quality hosting is an issue.

 

InMotionHosting.com VPS First Impressions

 

Hosting moves can be fraught with difficulties and it’s a good idea to take the time to get to know the new hosting website features and back office before moving your sites to the new plan. Inmotionhosting.com has its share of “quirks” which take a while to get used to.

There is a 50MiB maximum limit for importing SQL databases which I found an issue with this websites database. Inmotionhosting.com will temporally increase that limited if requested through their online support. The information and support pages could be improved.

I put in a support ticket to ask that the Support Center pages can be accessed directly from your back office cPanel. Currently you are taken to a support page where you have to log back in again using your hosting plan ID and Password to be able to access their community support center.

There is “no quick start” information available for new users. What information that is available is not easily located. For example updating your website wp-config.php there is no readily available information on the sites database host name. Hosting details with DNS information can be found in the AMP page in the Details link under the Actives Subscriptions Admin column.

My SQL importing issues had to be worked around after a number of unproductive sessions with the 24/7 chat support with an email to the support manager. Note: Don’t expect hosting related root issues to be resolved outside normal working hours. Currently I’m still working through import issues on two of my eight transferred sites. However, I’m getting good comments into this blog by users impressed with my website page load times and the back office is a lot more productive and reliable in terms of adding and editing pages and posts and saving changes to my databases.

 

InMotionHosting.com Summary

 

I would award InMotionHosting.com three and a half stars for my initial getting started experience.

The new user experience could be much improved with some quick start guides in the user account management panel (AMP) landing page. The information that’s currently available is fragmented and has to be searched for. Typically in a website transfer situation the move has to be made quickly and simple questions can quickly turn into road blocks that can be costly. This said I’m very pleased with the new hosting.

The support is the best that I have used with 24/7 online chat and email access to the support manager who I have found will have ongoing issues resolved within an hour or two. The back office is great with no issues about updating the database with new content and clearing out the unwanted content. Page load rates are consistently 75 percent faster than most other websites.

 

Comparing My Web Hosting Company Experiences

 

The cost my new hosting is twice that of my shared hosting at www.godaddy.com. Where my page load times even on my new websites with minimal content and with few plugins were regularly in the 11 to 12 seconds. The back office was miserably slow with many 505 errors saving to the database and 90 second wait times on saves.

My sites were taken down with 50 million other domains for a couple of days due to godaddy hosting issues. This site was also taken down for another 24 hours due to a malware/trojan imbedded files/file changes made in hosted site folders which should have been secure? I found a site folder trojan file with Norton after downloading the files to my PC.

Additional negavites are that godaddy.com support is only available with a long distance phone call and they don’t include site traffic logging with their hosting. The move to godaddy.com came about because my previous shared hosting company exited the hosting business after having their hosting taken down due to spam and maleware issues created by a number of hosted low quality sites.

The back office was also slow saving updates and the page load times were not great. I have also used IX Web Hosting for my html sites for the past six years and have found them to be very reliable. Their VPS host plans however are not competitive with InMotionHosting.com.

It turns out that the value of having high quality website hosting is “priceless”.

 

Best Wishes,

 

Mark.

PS: I’m currently working on the BlackBerry 10 smart phone to be released shortly and gave the BlackBerry 7″ 32GB PlayBook as Christmas gifts to family members. It’s the best featured tablet for the price today with many of the features that will also be available in the new BlackBerry 10.