InMotion Hosting Vs GoDaddy: Shared Hosting Comparison

I thought that if I’m going to compare InMotion Hosting and GoDaddy, I’d better be a client myself so that’s what I did.

I’ve now got my InMotion Hosting account as well as my GoDaddy account too so let’s compare both.

Both web hosts offer affordable shared hosting plans. InMotion Hosting has two classes of shared hosting packages: Personnal / Cheap Web Hosting and Business Class Hosting.

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InMotion Hosting’s Personnal Web Hosting plans are available from $3.00 to $5.00 per month while their Business Class Hosting packages are available from $6.95 to $18.95 per month.

Take note that InMotion Hosting offers only Linux Hosting while GoDaddy offers both Linux and Windows Hosting. So if you need ASP and ASP.Net support, you’ll have to go with GoDaddy.

InMotion Hosting Vs GoDaddy Website Hosting Features

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to include all InMotion Hosting packages because of display issues so I have included the packages that compares best to GoDaddy’s plans. For a complete list of InMotion Hosting packages, click here.

A quick note on this comparison grid: InMotion Hosting Basic Plan is part of their Value Hosting packages while the Power and Pro plan are part of their Business Class Hosting.

Features

In terms of storage and bandwidth, InMotion Hosting is obviously giving you more resources for your money. As of lately, InMotion Hosting has been offering unlimited disk space and bandwidth with their Business Class Hosting plans.

While unlimited features like this can be appealing, one must not base his choice on this. Most websites will never grow to use many gigabytes of web space and if it did, a dedicated server would be a better option.

As far as the number of websites to be hosted on a single account, I think that InMotion Hosting should increase this because the possibility to host only 6 or 16 websites isn’t much considering this is business class hosting. But if you need to host only one website, this isn’t a consideration though.

Both GoDaddy and InMotion Hosting support the same scripting and programming languages (PHP, Perl, CGI and Server-Side Include) but InMotion offers only one MySQL database with their Basic plan whereas GoDaddy will give you 10 databases with their Economy Plan.

While MySQL available on both providers’ hosting plans, GoDaddy’s database servers are only accessible from the web servers, making it impossible to connect directly from another computer. This can make things difficult if you’re a developer (like me) who use ODBC to connect to MySQL servers.

Control Panel

GoDaddy has recently made some changes to their custom control panel by solving some usability issues. Their customer control panel is different than their web hosting control panel, making things a bit confusing sometime.

Their customer control panel is overloaded with ads, auctions, banners and whatnot, making it feel like they’re trying too hard to sell you extra stuff.

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It would be nice if GoDaddy’s users wouldn’t have to go through the customer control panel to access their web hosting control panel. You also need to know your customer account number to login so it’s kind of irritating to retrieve your customer number every time you use a different computer. I guess this is to prevent security issues but having a user name instead of an account number would make it easier to remember.

On the other end, InMotion Hosting provides cPanel as their web hosting control panel. cPanel is a commercial control panel and you might find many web hosts using it (click here for a cPanel Hosting list). They use the X3 cPanel theme which is very fast in terms of usability. I like the fact that cPanel automatically builds a list of shortcuts based on the functionnalities you use most.

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I also think that it’s a bit annoying that you have to wait like 5 minutes for processing when you create a MySQL database with GoDaddy’s control panel. Creating a MySQL database with cPanel is instant.

If you’re less experienced with web application installation (ie.: blogs, shopping carts, content management systems, etc.), you’ll be happy to find out that GoDaddy and InMotion Hosting both provide script installers. InMotion Hosting has Fantastico Deluxe integrated with cPanel while GoDaddy uses their Go Daddy Hosting Connection. Both script installers are easy to use but GoDaddy’s Hosting Connection requires more time to install an application than Fantastico Deluxe does.

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Pricing

I would like to see InMotion Hosting come up with short term contracts on cheaper hosting plans. Personnally I like to try a web host for a month or so before getting a long term contract. Fortunately they have a 90 day moneyback guarantee so its not much of an issue.

I haven’t found any moneyback guarantee on GoDaddy’s part but I’d be really surprised if they didn’t had a 30 day guarantee at least.

Other than that, InMotion Hosting gives you more disk space and bandwidth for the price.

Conclusion

I prefer using InMotion Hosting since I’m a developer and I really need to have direct access to MySQL servers. I also prefer using cPanel a lot more than GoDaddy’s custom panel since it is a lot faster and intuitive.

I also think that GoDaddy’s statistic tool is pretty useless if you’re serious about analyzing your website’s stats. InMotion Hosting provides AwStats and Webalizer which are way more complete statistic tools. I’ve asked GoDaddy if its possible to access the server log so I could use AwStats but it’s not.

I also found InMotion Hosting web servers to be faster than GoDaddy although I haven’t made any scientific benchmark tests. I have a somewhat huge RPC server list in my WordPress blog and submitting a post often makes GoDaddy’s server timeout.

InMotion Hosting

• Pros: great control panel, fast servers, toll free number, scalibility, awesome 24×7 customer support.
• Cons: some hosting plans are only available on 12 months contracts or more.

GoDaddy

• Pros: cheap hosting plans, cheap domain names, scalability.
• Cons: slow and confusing control panel, slow web servers.

Links:

• InMotion Hosting Reviews
• InMotion Hosting Website
• GoDaddy Reviews
• GoDaddy Hosting