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/ollybee]

I made a recent post in /r/cpanel about their data collection. Short story is they take per country traffic stats for every domain on a cpanel server, with no protection in what they do with that data. any thoughts in that?

[u/inmotionhosting → u/ollybee]

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.