An independent host with a 90-day refund window

Most of the big-name shared hosts you can buy in 2026 belong to one of two or three holding companies. InMotion Hosting does not. It marked 25 years of "independent, founder-led operation" in a July 7, 2026 press release, and its about page still describes it as "a privately-owned, independent technology company" run by its founders, Sunil Saxena and Todd Robinson, out of Virginia Beach. It claims 170,000+ customers and a 300+ person team, and it also owns the VPS brand RamNode.

That independence shows up in one policy above all: a 90-day money-back guarantee on shared hosting, three times the 30 days most rivals give you. It also shows up in what InMotion will not do. The shared hosting page says outright that "InMotion does not use LiteSpeed", the web server that Hostinger and A2 Hosting build their speed pitch on.

The catch is the price. The number on the banner is real, but it buys the weakest plan on a long prepay, and the plan it buys is missing things you would expect to be standard.

Pricing: read the renewal column first

InMotion's shared lineup is Launch, Power and Pro. These figures were checked on InMotion's pricing pages in late September 2026; the cheap $2.99 "Core" plan some comparison sites still list is no longer on the page.

Two things in that table are easy to miss. The one-year intro price is twenty cents lower than the three-year price, but it renews a dollar higher, so the "cheaper" option costs more from month 13 onward. And month-to-month Launch is $16.99, more than three times the headline. The $4.99 figure means paying $179.64 up front for 36 months, after which the same plan bills $13.99 a month.

The free domain only comes with 12, 24 or 36-month terms, covers the first year, and has a sting in the refund terms: if you cancel inside the guarantee window, InMotion deducts the domain's regular price from your refund. Domain fees are non-refundable.

See current InMotion Hosting prices

Skip Launch, buy Power

The comparison grid on the shared page is more honest than the banner. On Launch, the vCPU and RAM rows read "Not Included", which in practice means unstated. Support is "Chat and Ticket Only". And the "99.99% Uptime Guarantee" row is blank: the guarantee and phone support start at Power. Only Pro commits to actual resources, 2 vCPU cores and 4GB of RAM.

Power costs one dollar a month more than Launch on the three-year term, or $36 over the whole contract. For that you get phone support, the uptime guarantee, 200GB of NVMe storage instead of 100GB, 10GB mailboxes instead of 5GB, and a traffic guide of roughly 300,000 visitors a month against Launch's 50,000. Short of a site you expect to stay tiny forever, there is no reason to take Launch.

All three plans get unmetered bandwidth, unlimited email addresses and free SSL. "Unmetered" carries the usual fair-use limit: the acceptable use policy prohibits "excessive resource usage", and InMotion decides what counts. A dedicated IP is a paid extra on Launch and Power and included on Pro.

Speed, uptime and data centers

InMotion runs data centers in Los Angeles, Ashburn (Virginia) and Amsterdam, with Singapore listed as coming soon. That is a good spread for North American and European audiences and a weak one for anyone selling mainly into Asia or Australia today.

Without LiteSpeed, the speed work happens elsewhere in the stack. In May 2026 InMotion announced it had deployed TCMalloc, a faster memory allocator, across its entire shared fleet. We have not run our own benchmark. The most useful independent figure we found is from HostingProMax, which monitored a Power plan in Los Angeles for 90 days with UptimeRobot and recorded 99.97% uptime and a 267ms average time to first byte. That TTFB is respectable for shared hosting. The uptime is fine in practice, but it sits below the 99.99% InMotion advertises.

The chart above is InMotion's own comparison, putting its average response at 0.77 seconds against 1.19 for HostGator and 4.21 for Bluehost, so treat it as a vendor claim rather than a test. The 99.99% SLA, per InMotion's April 2026 explainer, is paid out in account credits and covers its network and infrastructure, "not application-layer issues". The credit amount is not published there.

Backups and the fees in the terms

Backups are where InMotion's shared plans fall furthest behind. Automatic daily backups with one-click restores come from Backup Manager, which is a paid add-on, and its product page shows neither a price nor a retention period. The terms of service are blunt about who carries the risk: "CUSTOMER IS SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR MAKING BACKUP COPIES OF ANY CUSTOMER CONTENT." Budget for the add-on, or set up your own off-site backups on day one.

The same terms, last updated August 17, 2026, list a $50 fee to reinstate a suspended account, up to $50 per wire transfer and up to $50 per credit card chargeback, and reserve the right to change prices "at any time". Refunds outside the money-back guarantee are not given for unused time. Note the wording on the guarantee itself: InMotion's support docs say "most of our plans" carry the 90 days. It is clearly stated for shared hosting; check before you assume it on a VPS or dedicated server.

Moving in is easier than backing up. Every shared plan includes a no-downtime migration, free for one cPanel or WordPress backup.

WordPress and VPS plans

The WordPress-branded shared plans are the shared plans with WordPress limits attached. WP Launch is $5.49/mo on a 2 or 3-year term, renewing at $14.49, for 2 sites and 3 PHP workers per site. WP Power is $6.49, renewing at $18.49, for 10 sites. WP Pro is $11.49, renewing at $25.49, for 40 sites with 2 vCPU cores and 4GB RAM.

The more interesting product is UltraStack ONE, InMotion's managed WordPress tier. The 2GB plan is $8.33/mo on a one-year term or $10 month-to-month, for 2 vCPUs, 50GB NVMe, 1TB of bandwidth, 8 PHP workers and a free dedicated IP. The page shows no renewal price, and white-glove migration costs $199. Larger tiers run to 8GB at $33.33/mo.

Managed VPS starts at $9.99/mo on a 24-month term, renewing at $16.99, for 4 vCPU cores, 8GB RAM, 160GB NVMe, 5TB bandwidth and two dedicated IPs. The 8-core plan InMotion marks as most popular starts at $19.99 but renews at $46.99, a jump worth reading twice. You choose cPanel, Control Web Panel or no panel, and picking either panel gets free site transfers and server setup through Launch Assist.

Support: what customers actually report

InMotion's pitch is "live, 24/7 expert human" support on every product, and on Power and above that includes phone. On Launch, remember, it means chat and tickets.

Customers mostly agree it works. On Trustpilot, checked on October 4, 2026, InMotion holds a 4.6 TrustScore from 3,006 reviews, with 75% five-star. The other end is not small, though: 16% are one-star, and Trustpilot's own summary of them points to "surprisingly long wait times and delayed responses", automated systems, account access problems and tickets left unresolved. A 75/16 split like that usually means most tickets go fine and the ones that do not go badly, which is when the phone line on Power earns its dollar.

Verdict: who should buy InMotion, and who should not

Buy InMotion Hosting if you run a small business site with a US or European audience, you want to reach a human by phone, and a 90-day window to change your mind matters more to you than the lowest bill. Buy Power, not Launch, on the three-year term, and add backups on day one.

Skip it if long-run cost is the deciding factor: at $13.99 to $17.99 a month after the intro term, Hostinger or ScalaHosting will usually cost you less, and Hostinger's LiteSpeed stack is the speed play InMotion has declined to make. If you need managed performance for a busy WordPress store rather than shared hosting, SiteGround, Cloudways or Kinsta are built for that job. And if your visitors are mostly in Asia, wait for Singapore to go live.

InMotion is an honest host with a misleading banner. Read the renewal column, ignore Launch, and it is a sound choice for the people it suits.

Try InMotion Hosting with the 90-day guarantee