For the past couple of years, I’ve been a Dedicated Server customer of Inmotion Hosting for Yakezie.com and FinancialSamurai.com. Previously, I was with MediaTemple for a year and a half with a Virtual Private Server until I got fed up with the number of downtimes and lack of service. MediaTemple definitely has its positives. I just felt they got too big, too fast and therefore fell off in terms of attentiveness to customers.
Inmotion Hosting and I have certainly had our ups and downs over the years, but what I realized is that no matter what hosting service we use, there will always be datacenter outages and hacks (GoDaddy’s hack is a recent example) at some point in time. The only thing that a data service company can 100% control is their customer service and responsiveness. This is where Inmotion Hosting excels.
LET’S DO SOME MATH TO ILLUSTRATE A POINT
You see hosting companies claim 99% uptimes or greater as part of their advertising. 99%+ up time sounds fantastic and something all of us bloggers and business owners need in order to receive traffic and generate sales.
In a 30 day month there are 43,200 minutes. With 99% up time, you get 42,768 minutes of uptime but 432 minutes of downtime! 432 minutes of downtime equals 7.2 hours a month where your site says “Error Establishing Database Connection” or simply doesn’t come up. On a weekly basis, that’s roughly 1.6 hours of downtime for your site which can get quite aggravating if it occurs during high traffic periods such as Monday morning.
Let’s take the step further and see what happens if there is just 0.1% downtime based on a 99.9% uptime claim. 0.1% downtime means that your site is down 87 minutes over a two month time period. If your site so happens to be down for 1.5 hours right after a product launch or during a major consumer holiday, you are going to freak out! Yet, 99.9% uptime is an incredible feat with all that needs to go right!
After I understood this point and accepted the ways of the hosting world, I began to relax and look on the positive side of things. Web hosting has never been more affordable, and I’m doing what I love.
WHY I’M A INMOTION HOSTING CUSTOMER
1) Customer service is excellent. It doesn’t matter when I call Inmotion Hosting (1888-321-4678), there is always someone to pick up the phone to help me trouble shoot if my site is down. I’ve called at 3am when I was jetlagged and in the middle of the day and there is always someone who gets on the line within 5 minutes of waiting on average. I cannot stand being re-routed through a maze of option buttons and when you call their number, it’s either Press 1 for Sales or Press 2 for Support. Easy.
2) Online support on the go. If you so happen to be traveling overseas and don’t want to pay the exorbitant international voice charges, you can easily log onto inmotionhosting.com and open a Chat Session on the upper right hand corner. I didn’t discover this option until early 2012, but it is awesome! When I was about to board my ship in Amsterdam at 11:30am (2:30am PST), I noticed Financial Samurai was down. I used the ship terminal’s free wifi and immediately got a tech representative to live chat with me, trouble shoot, and reset the server within 25 minutes!
3) Comprehensive support e-mails. After each conversation or online chat, per your request, Inmotion will send you an e-mail highlighting the issues they’ve found during the trouble shooting process so you can optimize and fix the problems. They’ve pinpointed which database and tables of mine have errors, the number of MySQL connections being hit, and where any attacks are coming from. This information helps me root out any bugs to increase uptime. I can also send them an e-mail at support@inmotionhosting.com for questions, and go to http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/.
4) They aren’t the biggest webhosting company. In fact, I don’t think Inmotion Hosting is even in the Top 25 webhosting companies as measured by the number of domains in the world. As a result, there is a much more hands on, concierge type service to its customers. I left MediaTemple because I felt like just a number and could not get a response.
5) They are reasonable when things go really wrong. When Inmotion Hosting got hacked by Tiger M@te, there was a lot of pandemonium. Everything went back up the same day and they could have chosen to ignore all customer requests for credit. Instead, Inmotion gave me a month’s worth of free hosting credit, apologized, and invested more money to optimize and protect their company. Better to go with a company who has experienced some downs and are doing everything they can to make sure it doesn’t happen again, than a company who has never had anything happen to it.
THE INTERNET IS A DANGEROUS PLACE
The ideal situation is for all webmasters and online business owners to never have to speak to their hosting company since their sites are always up. Unfortunately, the internet is full of hackers and spammers who are figuring out ways to implant trojans, steal identifies, and cause havoc.
We have to realize that 100% uptime is impossible. 99%+ up time is fantastic, but we should also expect our sites to go down. The main differentiating factor is getting someone live to help you out and resolve your problem as quickly as possible. In my two+ years with Inmotion Hosting, they’ve consistently proven they are willing to do whatever it takes to resolve my issues. I’ve sent them unpleasant e-mails before and spoken in a terse voice, and they’ve never once responded in kind. They’ve been helpful all along the way, and I can tell they are really trying to make things as good for their customers as possible.
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100% agree with you on service, but also on security. I think that the webhosting company should be actively involved in security on their customer’s servers, since it helps the whole datacenter as a whole.
I enjoy learning about technical stuff, but it tends to stress me out at the same time because it can be so darn complicated. Having a hosting company that you can count on makes a big difference because who wants to stress about whether their site is going to be up or not. I find servers and all of the behind the scenes aspects of blogging fascinating but there’s still a ton I don’t know. I had a weird DNS issue with my site once that took about two weeks to fully figure out and I really should have just called my hosting company from the beginning and saved myself a lot of time. It really helps to have knowledgable customer service!
I’m assuming that this an affiliate link?
Indeed! Thanks for your insights.
My hosting company hasn’t been meeting all of these lately, which is just a matter of bad timing. They actually were great across the board, but the last couple of incidents they’ve seemed a bit snarky, so I’ll probably look around. This will be one I’ll look at. Thanks.
Sounds good MB. It really is about good customer service for me. I understand that crap happens all the time, which often is outside the control of the hosting company. It’s the service support a company provides afterward, without the snark which makes all the difference to.
I’m willing to pay up for service. I think millions of people are as demonstrated by Apple’s user base as well. If a product is commoditized, then service is the key differentiator.
I’ve been an Inmotion customer for the past 6 months and so far so good. Good point on 99.9% up time!
I like their online support the best from their homepage where you don’t even have to talk to anybody. Very handy!
Hey There. Very sorry to hear you had a poor experience with (mt) Media Temple. I am especially surprised to hear you felt like just a number because we definitely take every support request seriously and try to help everyone the best we can. We’ve made a lot of improvements recently, so if you ever feel like giving us a second shot my name is Drew J and you can reach me on Twitter 24/7 or any of my coworkers on phone and chat, also 24/7.
Drew J
(mt) Media Temple
@MediaTemple
Thanks for reaching out Drew. You guys grew very fast and it was inevitable that some of your clients fell through the crack. Too bad one of them was me. I gave it a go for six months back in 2009 until I didn’t want to complain any more.
I realize it’s hard to please everyone all the time. I just needed to make a change on my own, b/c I hate complaining. When it comes to the technical stuff, I do like to get my hand held and taken care of. That’s what Inmotion has helped me with as I’ve grown.
Regards, Sam
Ive been with inmotion hosting since day 1 and I love them. Very responsive….they provide twitter updates and are easy to get ahold of when something goes wrong!
Glad it’s working out for you! I had a MySQL issue the other night, and they were very responsive. It’s all about customer service!