InMotion Hosting Vs GoDaddy: Shared Hosting Comparison

June 11th, 2008 · 9 Comments

InMotion Hosting Vs GoDaddy 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.

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.

DEVELOPMENT
	GoDaddy Economy Plan	GoDaddy Deluxe Plan	GoDaddy Premium Plan	InMotion Basic	InMotion Power	InMotion Pro
Storage	10gb	150gb	300gb	150gb	Unlimited	Unlimited
Bandwidth	300gb	1,500gb	3,000gb	1500gb	Unmetered	Unmetered
Domain(s) Included	0	0	0	1	1	1
Domains Allowed	1	Unlimited	Unlimited	2	6	16
Email Accounts	100	500	1000	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
CGI	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
PHP	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Perl, CGI	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
SSI	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
MySQL Databases	10	25	50	1	25	50
WEBSITE MANAGEMENT
Control Panel	Custom	Custom	Custom	cPanel	cPanel	cPanel
Script Installer	Custom	Custom	Custom	Fantastico	Fantastico	Fantastico
Web Statistics	Custom	Custom	Custom	AwStats / Webalizer	AwStats / Webalizer	AwStats / Webalizer
SSL	Optional	Optional	Optional	No	Shared SSL	Shared SSL
Shopping Cart	Choice of 2	Choice of 2	Choice of 2	No	Choice of 3	Choice of 3
Website Builder	No	No	No	Standard	Premium	Premium
PRICING (per month)
Monthly	n/a	$6.93	$14.86	n/a	n/a	$19.95
2 Months	$4.25	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
6 Months	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	$19.95
12 Months	$4.04	$6.58	$14.12	n/a	$9.95	$18.95
24 Months	$3.82	$6.23	$13.37	$4.00	n/a	n/a
36 Months	$3.61	$5.89	$12.63	n/a	n/a	n/a

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.

Click to enlarge screenshot

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.

Click to enlarge screenshots

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.

Click to enlarge screenshots

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:

9 responses so far ↓

1. Response by : Mike on Jun 26, 2008 at 1:55 pm

I don’t know about inmotion but I suggest cpanel hosting over godaddy anytime

2. Response by : Josh on Jun 28, 2008 at 12:25 am

I have the Premium GoDaddy hosting service right now and I can tell you that if you have forums, forget about it! I have a very small enthusiast site that gets maybe 50-75 hits a day while other sites get similar traffic and my most popular sites are very slow to load and sometimes fail to load at all.

Also, GoDaddy’s support is short, not terribly helpful (they typically blame the problem on you or your site and then if you press them they will investigate to see if there is a server side problem). After modest traffic gains and user complaints about the speed of the site I inquired to GoDaddy as to why the sites were so slow.

First they blamed the amount of content I have on the pages. They are simple magazine style WordPress blogs and forums so content shouldn’t be an issue. After I insisted they investigate the problem on the server side they finally admitted that they only offer 50 concurrent connections to your account (all sites) regardless of whether you are on the “Economy” or “Premium” plan.

I emailed InMotion to see if they have a concurrent hosting limit but I can tell you that if they don’t I will be leaving GoDaddy so quick.

GoDaddy is great if you are going to do a one off static site with low traffic expectations but if you plan to have forums or anything that might draw a crowd, save yourself the trouble (and money) and don’t use GoDaddy.

3. Response by : wba on Dec 24, 2008 at 1:44 am

I can’t handle Godaddy. Too self-centered. I’m so happy with Inmotion so far. Clean and professional, serving you, not the other way around.

4. Response by : ev on Feb 12, 2009 at 12:28 am

Thank you for this comparison. I have always wondered which one is better. It seems like GoDaddy is more popular, or at least i hear that name more often. I am an Inmotion hosting client and I am happy with them for the most part.My only problem is recently I have been looking into awstats a lot for a project I am working on, and it seems like they don’t update it every 24 hours, sometimes it take 1.5 days maybe more. This probably doesn’t matter for most of us but just wanted to share.

5. Response by : The Web Hosting Hero on Sep 25, 2009 at 8:15 am

@ev: perhaps you may want to read this http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/tutorials/access-awstats-outside-cpanel.html

Then you’ll be able to update your stats manually

6. Response by : kiki on Dec 5, 2009 at 9:33 am

Has anyone found out the number of concurent connections inmotion allows? Any hosting company out there that offers 200 or more silmultaneous connections to mysql database? Someone PLEASE say.

7. Response by : The Web Hosting Hero on Dec 5, 2009 at 1:07 pm

Did you try to contact InMotion Hosting’s support?

8. Response by : marc on Jan 20, 2010 at 9:22 am

thanks to webhostinghero for the comparison. the material is not very recent, but it supports what it claims (and what i wanted to hear) very well. it’s really hard to choose between so many hosts isn’t it!?

i just came off an instant chat with brian c. at inmotion to see how they handle the issue of ‘heavy traffic’ to a website they host.

i am trying to see if i need to get a ‘business class’ or ‘vps’ (virtual private server) package with them ($6-18 and $40-150 per month) and asked at what usage level it would make sense to jump to the ‘vps’.

his answer was “20-30 concurrent users”. that is a pretty commercial level and i cannot imagine that my site will produce such results anytime soon so i will hang in the launch-power-pro area of their business class for a while first.

before i switch over i will read the terms & conditions and small print.

any advice on what else to look out for? i’m running a site offering tour guide services using wordpress with e.commerce. in the future i’d like to get it wacked into shape for i.phone/smartphone browsing.

9. Response by : shalini aggarwal on Mar 11, 2010 at 1:55 am

I have a news website and is often going down / put on hold by the hiosting service provider, and I am planning to move it on some reliable hosting provider. After reading a lot, I tried godaddy hosting for one month but I am not satified as the response. The website looked so slow, the control pannel took a long of time to open and other issues not beuing solved by them. Now I am planning to shift thye news portal to inmotion hosting. I have read about other webhosts like bluehost etc, but the problem with them is you cannot expand the website in futue like if you need VPS or dedicated hosting