Review of Inmotion Hosting, HostGator and VentraIP



Originally posted 2017-11-20 16:09:16.

business website design kariongAs I mentioned in my last blog post ‘How do I pick a great host for my website?’ I have finally decided to take the pain of remaining with HostGator and moving to a better host. I did a lot of research and settled on using Inmotion Hosting. Also as part of my last article, I nearly fell off the chair when I saw the new VentraIP plans so I’ll talk about that as well. If you signup to inmotion hosting via the link below I will get a small commission.

Inmotion First Impressions

Well firstly, how did inmotion match my selection criteria in my last post?

  1. Not owned by EIG – check
  2. Seems to have adequate disk space on the lowest VPS plan I selected
  3. SSD – check
  4. Free SSL – check
  5. Ticketing and live chat – check and I’ll talk about this below
  6. Latest software – check – runs latest cPanel, WHM, Apache and also the Php version has no security issues.
  7. 2FA – yes they do offer 2FA in WHM and cPanel, however one negative is that they don’t offer it in the customer portal and if you can get in there, it’s a one click unauthenticated leap to WHM and cPanel. Their live chat representative said they are working on implementing 2FA in the portal soon.
  8. All unlimited databases and domains – check

So it fulfilled the criteria.

I’d like to talk about their support. I have never had support that is so good. In all these contacts, I have not waited more than 30 seconds to be connected to a rep and it was LATE there so they seem to have staff there all the time and they actually know how to help and want to help.

First contact: I was having an issue signing up as the terminology on the form for the credit card was foreign to me – it was asking for the authentication code – I should have worked out it was asking for the CCV number. I asked a couple of other questions about the 90 day guarantee and signed up. They were helpful, friendly and polite. 10/10

Second contact: I just couldn’t log in and access my new account. Turned out I needed to wait a couple of minutes – related to the auto SSL function needing time to get the certificates. The rep explained this and then sent me a support article to read about auto-SSL while I waited. Again, 10/10 and I was working in no time.

Third contact: I received a cryptic system message and needed some help working out what to do. This was really because the VPS requires more technical knowledge and skills and this is new to me. In any case I was on live chat for around an hour at midnight inmotion hosting time. Again, the assistance was excellent and as well as chat help I got links to some articles to help me get going. 10/10

Fourth contact: Having trouble with the custom name servers. The inmotion document on this was a bit cryptic and I hate to say it but HostGator has much better docs for this. 7/10

Fifth contact: Still an issue with DNS. Rep was pretty scripted and pretty much just referred me to the same article as previous. 5/10

Sixth contact: DNS still hadn’t propagated. Actually weirdly, one of my sites had briefly started accessing new host but then reverted back again. In the end there was an error and Inmotion Hosting had to ‘push’ the change again. When they did that I was immediately able to see the right IP address for the name server come up on a propagation checker and everything started working. 10/10

I then had a DNS issue again with a site I had setup and decided to lodge a ticket rather than using live chat. This was dealt with in a similarly efficient manner.

  
  

I then had an issue where WHM was not showing correct options and again logged a ticket. They fixed this almost immediately and then a little later they went away again and again were fixed via the ticket system with no delay. It’s not good that this happened but the support was great. 10/10

I also keep getting emails where they are proactively reaching out to see if there is anything they can help me with. Excellent. I received 2 hours of on boarding with the package and I am planning on using that to run through some of the more technical aspects of VPS hosting.

I cannot fault the service so far.

So what improvements with Inmotion Hosting vs HostGator?

One of the things I have done is to run a ping test at different times of the day and on different days. If I ping the server for inmotion hosting, from Australia, I’m getting a ping time of roughly 160ms. If I ping the HostGator server this is around 210ms so around a 25% quicker response. It’s harder to judge the overall speed of sites and load times but it seems quite snappy to me.

VentraIP

Well firstly, how did VentraIP match my selection criteria in my last post?

  1. Not owned by EIG – check
  2. Seems to have adequate disk space on the lowest shared (starter) plan I selected
  3. SSD – check
  4. Free SSL – check
  5. Ticketing only
  6. Latest software – check – runs latest cPanel, WHM, Apache and also the Php version has no security issues.
  7. 2FA – yes they do offer 2FA in WHM and cPanel, they also have 2FA in the customer portal.
  8. All unlimited databases and domains – check

When I saw the new SSD plans at VentraIP, I decided to switch my other hosting with VentraIP over to the new plan. My old plan was in the middle of their Economy range and gave me 5GB Cloud Storage Space, 500GB monthly bandwidth, 10 addon domains, unlimited emails and unlimited databases. The new plan is the base level plan with 5GB SSD, unlimited everything else! Roughly comparable BUT here’s the thing – the new plan is cheaper and they have a 40% coupon right now for new hosting so I grabbed a 3 year plan at a 40% discount and they gave me a full credit for the previous plan so I won’t be paying for hosting there for a VERY long time.

By way of contrast to the ping speeds above, I’m getting a ping response to the server (both the old one and the new one) of 18ms! There’s a benefit in using a server near your customers!

By way of the support – well I have been with them for a long long time and rarely have I ever needed support however unfortunately there were some glitches with the migration and I became very frustrated and they did not bother to actually read my ticket and just assumed they knew what the problem was. Eventually they had to escalate the problem to level 2 support and they fixed it and apologised but still, compared to inmotion….. I have to say the pre-sales support wasn’t that great either… Additionally, they didn’t set the DNS for 3 of the 4 domains which was also supposed to have been done in the migration. Again, not ideal but I don’t anticipate needing much support ongoing just as I have not in the past.

I am planning on migrating my Zuver account (where this site is hosted) to VentraIP in the next month or so.

One of the things that really bugged me with HostGator was I frequently found my sites were inaccessible – and this was only when I was actually looking. Makes me wonder exactly what king of uptime they actually had. No such problems ever with VentraIP and inmotion hosting is too early to tell but looking good so far.

Hope you have found this helpful.

As a post-script to the setup issue

I got a phone call and email today apologising for the problems I have had and promising re-training of staff. They also credited me with 3 months of hosting which was a nice touch. However, I did actually port from Zuver today and had the same issue with the mail that I had yesterday and unfortunately, got the exact same run around as yesterday. I guess training takes time. Yeah. Not good.



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