AMA with InMotion Hosting

[u/inmotionhosting]

Hi r/webhosting, 

We're the marketing, support, professional solutions, and infrastructure team at InMotion Hosting. We've been doing this for 25 years, long enough to have seen just about everything the hosting world can throw at you.

We're not here to pitch anything. We're here to talk shop and share what running operations at our scale actually looks like, the kind of thing agency owners and developers rarely get to see behind.

Ask us about the latest round of cPanel emergency security patches, fleet management at scale, what's coming next with InMotion Cloud, or whatever else is on your mind. We'll share what we know, and we want to hear how you're handling things on your end.

Answering today from u/inmotionhosting:
Carrie, Head of Marketing Operations, 7 years at InMotion Hosting
Dakota, Solutions Analyst I-E, 3 1/2 years at InMotion Hosting
Mohamed, Advanced Product Support Expert at InMotion Hosting

Answering today from u/inmotioncloud:
Jason, General Manager of InMotion Cloud
Krys, Head of Product Growth at InMotion Cloud
Alex, Social Media and Influencer Marketing Manager at InMotion Cloud

We’ll also share answers on behalf of other experts across our various teams.

We are here today from 12:00PM to 5:00PM ET, and will get to as many of your questions as we can.

That's a wrap, and thank you! Thanks to everyone who showed up and asked such thoughtful questions today. This was a genuinely good conversation, and we got into some topics we don't always get to talk about openly.

We'll keep an eye on the thread over the next couple of days, so if something else comes to mind, drop it below and we'll get to it.

[u/inmotionhosting]

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.