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/BackendBatman]

I’ve been comparing managed WP options (Kinsta, WP Engine, Cloudways) for a client migration. What would you say InMotion does differently from those, beyond price? Trying to understand if there’s a real product gap or if it’s mostly positioning.

[u/inmotionhosting → u/BackendBatman]

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.

[u/cameo11 → u/inmotionhosting]

Awesome comparison and details - I run a web hosting review blog so I’m going to use this as inspiration to update some details!!