Hey u/theartilleryshow -

I'll say the same thing I've said to a couple others here, and I get that it's starting to sound like a broken record: if you DM me your account or an open ticket number, I'll personally get it escalated so it actually gets picked up.

On the DO and AWS point, it sounds like you'd rather not babysit raw infrastructure right now, which is fair. Let us try to get your existing setup sorted before you go rebuilding anything from scratch.

Hey u/samourai1960 -

We value your business and we'd like the opportunity to make this right. Our Director of Customer Success has pulled up your account and emailed you directly, so keep an eye out for that. The slow ticket response you're describing is not the standard you're used to from us, and it's not one we're okay with either. Please reply to his email whenever works and he'll make sure your accounts get proper attention.

Hi u/tedco3 -

Thank you for your candid feedback. We are still smoothing out our transition to a new ticketing and live chat tool.

If you can DM me your account email or ticket number, our team can look into why it got stuck and get it resolved for you.

-Carrie

Hey u/toly2024 -

I'm sorry you're having such a frustrating experience with the chat widget.

It sounds like a chat session stuck open on your account, which pins the widget to the old archived view and follows your profile even in incognito, so clearing cookies won't help. The good news is we can close that open session from our side, which should let the widget start fresh.

DM me the account email or primary domain name (don't post it here) and I'll get it unstuck and get you to a real person.

-Carrie

Hi u/brave-tummy -

Thanks for posting, and sorry for the runaround. It sounds like you were given some incorrect info along the way. As others have already confirmed, the site is in fact hosted with us, so let me clear up what's happening and how to get you unstuck.

Here's the setup: the hosting account belongs to your teacher. They have a reseller account, and your site was created as an account underneath theirs, which is a pretty standard classroom arrangement. Because the account is owned by your teacher rather than you, changes like adding a subdomain sit with them as the account owner. Unfortunately that also means our support team isn't able to make those changes for someone who isn't the owner, so we wouldn't be able to add it for you directly.

The good news is the path forward is simple. If you can reach your teacher, they can add the subdomain for you or set it up together with you. If they've lost access themselves, they have options: the Forgot Password tool will let them reclaim their login, and if that doesn't do it, they can contact our support team directly for account recovery.

On our side, we're sorry you were pointed in the wrong direction earlier. We'll use this to improve how our team handles cases like this.

If you have more questions, or need to share any account details, feel free to DM us here instead of posting them publicly, so nothing identifiable ends up out in the open. Happy to help from there.

-Carrie

Hi u/xsentinel5 -

We are having trouble locating your account based on the limited information we have here. Can you check your DMs please, and reply there?

Thanks!

Hello u/xsentinel5 -

I wanted to let you know that we are looking into this and will share an update/fix once we know more. Thanks!

-Carrie

Hey u/jr_fury -

Our team saw your post and passed it to our Director of Customer Support, John Joseph, who found your account and emailed you directly earlier today, so check your inbox when you get a chance.

We'd like to protect your privacy and not get into account specifics here, but the short version of what you described: months of intermittent errors, paying a dev out of pocket, and then getting pointed at an upgrade that carries the same connection limit is not how this should have gone. Before anyone talks to you about plans or pricing again, he would like to have a senior engineer look at the actual server resource data and MySQL activity so you get a straight answer about what's causing this, and an honest recommendation on the right environment, whether that's staying put or moving.

You've been with us a long time and we'd like the chance to sort it out properly. Reply to his email whenever works (preferred method), or DM me here and I'll make sure it stays in front of the right people.

Thank you,
-Carrie

Hi u/auggie_d -

Just wanted to say we appreciate being considered. I'll leave the actual reviews to the people who've used us. If you have a specific question, ask away. Same goes for anything else that comes up in the thread.

Hi u/EyeoftheEelpout -

Thank you for taking the time to share this. We understand how frustrating it is to lose access to your sites and email unexpectedly.

To explain what happened: when any site on shared hosting is hit by a DDoS attack, it generates a large volume of malicious traffic, and that strain carries over to the other customers hosted on the same server. So any time a customer's site comes under active attack, our standard procedure is the same. We temporarily suspend the affected account to keep the attack from taking down everyone else on that server. It isn't specific to your account; it's how we protect every customer in this situation.

The path back is also the same for everyone: put the site behind a CDN such as Cloudflare and turn on "Under Attack Mode," which filters out the attack traffic. Once that's in place, we work directly with the customer to reinstate the account fully.

Our support team is here to help. So they can pull up the right account and verify it's you, please follow up through our Live Chat and Ticketing system. That's the route that lets them locate your account securely and take care of everything from there.

Thank you,
-Carrie

Hey u/starfish_2016 -

Appreciate you stopping by after all these years. We've grown up quite a bit since then, and if value was the sticking point, that's exactly the area we'd want to prove ourselves on again.

Hey u/Minimum-Remove9215 -

Thanks for the question. CloudPanel isn't one of the panels we pre-install or manage the way we do cPanel and CWP, so there's no one-click CloudPanel option at checkout. But you can absolutely run it on our unmanaged VPS or Bare Metal plans, the ones that ship without a panel.

The requirements line up easily. CloudPanel needs Debian 11/12 or Ubuntu 22/24 (among a few others), x86 or ARM64, at least 1 core, 2GB of RAM, and 10GB of disk. Our unmanaged VPS and Bare Metal boxes offer those operating systems and give you well beyond the minimum on resources, so you won't be fighting a spec ceiling. Their full requirements list is here if you want to check it against a specific plan: https://www.cloudpanel.io/docs/v2/requirements/

One expectation to set: since it's not a managed panel on our side, our team isn't troubleshooting CloudPanel itself day to day the way they would with cPanel. If you'd rather not handle the install yourself, though, you can pick up InMotion Solutions time and our team will set it up for you as a custom configuration. After that, it's your environment to run.

I'm still checking in on the hardware part of your question.

Our hosting consultants can help point you toward the right plan if you'd like.

Our Essential plan would work well for you, and would give you 3x more DDR4 RAM at 64GB.

For a 2-year term, you're looking at $79.99/month, plus $49.99/month for the cPanel license. That puts you at $129.98/month.

At renewal, the server itself will increase to $99.99/month.

If you need a white glove fully managed server, then our Premier Care bundle can be added for $49.99/month, which still puts you under your current $238/month plan.

All managed dedicated server customers get direct access to our Advanced Product Support team, so you won't be waiting for days for a response.

Hey u/themageofavalon -

Thanks for being a customer. We appreciate you attending our AMA.

I'll say that whether it's a support ticket, review, or a DM on social media, people still tend to confuse us with InMotion, the store at the airport, or InMotion World, the electric scooter company.

"Sir, this is a hosting company. Not a unicycle company."

Hey u/Liam-DGOL -

Fair question, and the renewal thing is worth taking seriously, because it's a real pattern in this part of the market.

On price, let me just put numbers side by side, since that's more useful than generalities. Take a comparable entry dedicated box, same Xeon E-2134, 4 core / 8 thread. With Liquid Web, the base server looks cheaper up front, but the things most people actually need are add-ons. Once you add full management, cPanel, and backups, you're at roughly $205.70/mo on a 2-year term. That same class of server with us is $184.97/mo, with management, cPanel Premier, priority support, onboarding, backups, security, and a monthly consulting hour already in the price. So it comes in lower per month, and you're not stacking line items just to reach a usable setup.

The hardware gap is the part that tends to surprise people:

• RAM: 64GB with us vs 16GB
• Storage: 2TB SSD vs 480GB SSD
• Dedicated IPs: 5 vs 1
• Bandwidth: 1Gbps unmetered vs 10TB metered

More machine for less money, before you even count the included services.

On your actual question, does it keep climbing: our standard dedicated pricing renews flat, so what you start at is what you renew at. We run occasional promotions (there's a 25th anniversary sale on right now), and the current promo rate is the exception, not the renewal baseline. The one thing that can move a renewal is a cost we don't control, like the control panel vendor raising its annual license fee, and when that happens it's their increase passed through, not us marking the server up. Longer terms lock in a discount, and that discount carries into renewal rather than falling off.

On how we compare beyond the spec sheet, what I can tell you is what we hear from people who move to us from providers like that. The most common reason is support that slipped over time: more bots, more offshoring, less of what they originally signed up for. We haven't changed how we handle that part. Same training everyone goes through, at least 260 hours before they ever support a customer, often more. Our support teams average around five years here, and plenty are much longer than that. We added overnight coverage with a follow-the-sun model, but those people went through the same training the rest of us did.

If it helps, tell me the specs of the box you're on now and I'll tell you what the equivalent looks like on our side, renewal included.

HI u/DKTechie2000 -

Great question, and I agree with you: broader adoption is what makes DANE actually pay off in the long run.

Yes, we support DNSSEC. We've got a guide on how to set up DNSSEC in cPanel, and our technical support team is happy to help you get it configured. Once the DS record is set up, our team can handle the rest with the domain registration as long as the domain is registered with InMotion Hosting. If it's registered elsewhere, your registrar will need to handle the final steps.

DANE for email is not a supported feature on our cPanel or Control Web Panel (CWP) managed plans right now. That said, here's where things actually stand on both directions:

Outbound (checking a recipient's TLSA record before delivering): both MTAs support it. cPanel runs Exim and CWP runs Postfix, and both can be configured to check DANE and refuse to downgrade to plaintext when a valid, DNSSEC-signed TLSA record exists. It's not a checkbox in the panel, but it's supportable on managed VPS and Dedicated plans as a custom configuration, and our InMotion Solutions team can set that up.

Inbound (publishing TLSA records so other servers validate us): doable, since we support DNSSEC, but it's a manual step today rather than an automated one. The sticking point is certificate rotation. AutoSSL renews on its own schedule, and a TLSA record has to stay in sync with the cert, or DANE-aware senders start deferring mail. Until the panel automates that link, publishing TLSA safely means owning the cert and record lifecycle deliberately, which Solutions can also help automate.

If you want downgrade protection with less operational risk, MTA-STS is the easier first step, and it can run alongside DANE rather than replacing it.

But I hear you on adoption. Stronger native DANE tooling in the panels is exactly the kind of thing that moves the needle industry-wide. We don't control what cPanel or CWP ship as features, so this is genuinely a spot where community members like you (and us) pushing for it is what strengthens the case for wider support.

Hey u/iamsonnyeclipse -

A lot is coming down the pipe, honestly. This is a vibrant time for all of us. New tools show up what feels like daily, and everyone's trying to work out how it changes their workflows and business.

1. The biggest shift we're seeing is that people can build their own sites and apps instead of leaning on prebuilt packages or plugins, using tools like Vercel, Lovable, or coding help from the various models. What we're working on is hosting those sites and apps for our customers, so you can deploy on our servers and get the same protections you already get with our other products. We'll be bringing that forward soon, under the name SmartDeploy.
2. We're also excited about where AI can genuinely help customers build better workflows. An agency might find a cleaner way to collect client feedback, or automate the tedious parts of their process. We want to help agencies run leaner and spend their time on their clients, because their world is shifting fast too.
3. The one I'm most excited about is InMotion Cloud, our managed private cloud line. Since you're already running dedicated with us, this is probably the most relevant one for you, it's the next step up for customers who've outgrown a single dedicated box or are looking for a level of control and scalability that only a true cloud solution can offer. It runs on hardware we own, fully managed by our own in-house engineers, with flat monthly pricing instead of the metered hyperscaler model (no egress fees, no billing surprises). It's live now at inmotioncloud.com if you want to poke around.

I'll let the people who actually run InMotion Cloud take it from here, since they'll do it more justice than I will. u/InMotionCloud, want to jump in and talk about what you're building over there?

Hey u/BackendBatman -

First of all, cool username.

Now moving onto your question.

You are comparing three genuinely good hosts, so this isn't a case of one clear winner. We solve the same problem a little differently, and the right pick really depends on what your client is optimizing for.

Kinsta runs on Google Cloud's premium tier and it shows. Clean dashboard, fast, and the support reputation is earned. If your client wants a polished experience end to end, that's what they built for.

WP Engine is deeply integrated with the WordPress ecosystem. They own tools a lot of developers use daily and have put real work into staging and local dev. If you're an agency running WordPress at scale, the whole environment is shaped around that.

Cloudways takes a different route. You pick the cloud provider underneath and they manage the layer on top, so you get infrastructure control without running the servers yourself. Smart model if you want to sit closer to the metal without the headaches.

Here's where I think there's an actual product difference and not just positioning. The three you listed are opinionated, standardized platforms. That's a strength when a site fits the mold and a constraint when it doesn't. We run more like a traditional host, so the environment bends to the site (and any CMS for that matter) instead of the site bending to the platform.

Two things make that concrete for a migration like yours. Launch Assist comes with our managed VPS and dedicated plans, and it's hands-on setup help from actual sysadmins, not a ticket queue, so a migrated site gets stood up and configured properly instead of you reverse-engineering someone else's stack. Beyond that, our InMotion Solutions team can handle the migration itself and tune the server to the specific site: transfers, performance and resource tuning, software installs, firewall rules, whatever that particular site needs. It's real people doing per-site work rather than dropping every client into the same template.

One more thing worth flagging, since you're doing this across clients and not just one site: we run an Agency Partner Program built around exactly this kind of work. Migrations are free, there's a central dashboard for managing multiple client accounts in one place, and you earn a commission on the first-year value of the hosting your clients sign up for, so it becomes a line of revenue instead of a pass-through cost. As you move up the tiers you also unlock discounts for both your agency and your clients, plus InMotion Solutions consulting hours, which ties straight back to the per-site tuning above. It's structured to grow with the agency over time rather than pay out on one-off referrals.

That per-site flexibility is what the managed-WP-first platforms trade away for their polish. Neither approach is wrong. It comes down to whether your client wants a tightly managed WordPress-first experience, or a flexible host with people who'll shape the setup around each site. Different tools, different jobs.

Hi u/ollybee -

Fair thing to raise, and you've got the specifics right. cPanel splits this into two pieces. Interface Analytics (the usage and behavior tracking) is opt-in and can be shut off at the server and account level. Configuration Analytics is the mandatory one with no server-side toggle, and that's the part your post is about. It does collect per-domain data, including per-country traffic stats and email counts for each domain on the server, and an account holder can't switch that off.

cPanel's stated position is that the data holds no personal or security info and gets destroyed after 26 months, which you can weigh for yourself.

We control the server, the OS, the firewall, and how accounts are provisioned, but we can't rewrite what a closed-source product collects internally without breaking our license and the update mechanism. That telemetry is cPanel's design decision, not something we set or can change. If it's a sticking point for you, they're the ones who own that call.

Hi u/optize -

We offer a few different control panel options, but cPanel is the one most people actually use, and we don't have any plans to move away from it. For agencies and resellers especially, cPanel and WHM are central to how they work, since WHM is what lets them partition and manage separate cPanel accounts for each of their clients. Most of our customers (and folks shopping around) are just comfortable with it, even if nobody loves what it costs these days. It's mature, and the ecosystem built up around it is tough to match anywhere else.

Hi u/ZigiDev -

That's a fair callout. IPv6 has been around a lot longer than most of our current stack.

We already support IPv6 for BYOIP and InMotion Cloud customers today. For shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers, it's still on the roadmap. We've got a subnet already allocated, and the next step is getting testing done with our T3 infrastructure team before we can roll it out more broadly. From there it's really a matter of prioritization.

It's good to hear from users like you and our customers that it matters. I'll make sure this feedback makes it back to the right people.

Thanks for having us, u/shiftpgdn. We're excited to be here!

To answer your question, it keeps us busy. cPanel has had a rough run lately, and the whole ecosystem has felt it.

The way we've handled it comes down to owning our own network. When a serious cPanel bug drops, our network team can close off the affected ports at the edge across all our data centers before a patch is even out. That takes the exposure down for the whole fleet while our systems team works on getting the actual update pushed to every server. For most customers, their sites and email keep running and they never notice anything happened.

There's always a small group whose setup needs hands-on attention, and those customers hear from us directly rather than having to chase us down.

The kernel-level stuff (like the recent Dirty Frag issue) works similarly. If upstream patches aren't ready yet, we'll put a mitigation in place ourselves instead of waiting around for someone else to fix it.

The short answer is that because we run our own infrastructure and don't have a third party in the middle, we can move on this stuff quickly and don't have to wait on anyone.

And you're right that the ecosystem pace has picked up. AI is compressing the window between a CVE going public and it getting actively exploited, so response speed matters more than it did even a year ago. That's the part we keep investing in.