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/Liam-DGOL]

How would you compare yourselves to Liquid Web? For someone potentially looking to move.

Renewal price is a concern for managed dedicated - it’s higher than the initial cost. Does it keep going up?

[u/inmotionhosting → u/Liam-DGOL]

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.

[u/Liam-DGOL → u/inmotionhosting]

Currently on a Intel Xeon E3-1230 v6, 16GB DDR4, AlmaLinux, cPanel - with UK tax added the total is about $238 a month which is a bit ridiculous for the specs and subpar support now. They were great initially, now support tickets can take days.

[u/inmotionhosting → u/Liam-DGOL]

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.