Are you having trouble deciding between SiteGround vs InMotion? To help you make the right choice for your website as well as your wallet, we’ve compared how SiteGround and InMotion fare against other web hosts and, above all else, against each other.
What we’ve found is that each of these two popular web hosting providers stands out for different reasons, and we describe these reasons in detail in this SiteGround vs InMotion comparison. As always, we recommend you read this article from start to finish, but feel free to skip to the parts that interest you the most.
Getting Started with SiteGround and InMotion
Before you select a web hosting plan and spend money on it, you should get to know the company behind it so that you know what you can expect. More specifically, you should learn as much as you can about the company’s history, find out how many customers it has, where it’s based, and what its mission is.
You may prefer the stability of a large multi-national web hosting provider with servers in many different countries and a broad range of web hosting options on offer, or you may be attracted to smaller web hosts that focus on customer service and cater to the unique needs of their customers.
Who is SiteGround?
“People are what makes SiteGround unique,” states SiteGround on its website. “Smart, open-minded, hard-working, friendly people with an eagerness to overcome challenges; that’s the type of people that work at SiteGround and service your website.”

And judging by reviews on Glassdoor, a website where current and former employees anonymously review companies, all those smart, open-minded, hard-working, and friendly people couldn’t be happier to work at SiteGround, saying that it’s a great environment with a friendly atmosphere and great company culture and values.
Did You Know?
SiteGround is one of the few web hosts that has passed WordPress’s stringent measures to become one of their recommended web hosts! SiteGround’s WordPress web hosting includes auto installation and helpful plugins to get you started.
It might then surprise you to learn that SiteGround isn’t some aspiring startup with venture capital behind it, but a mature web hosting company founded in 2004 by a few university friends. Of course, a lot has changed since SiteGround first launched, and the company now services more than 1,800,000 domains worldwide and employs over 500 people, who are spread globally to better serve local customers.
InMotion
“Our goal is to thrill every customer with our expertise, professionalism, availability and honest desire to see them succeed,” states InMotion. While statements like this are dime a dozen in the corporate world, we think that it’s safe to say that InMotion wouldn’t be here anymore if the company didn’t manage to thrill quite a few customers since it was founded in 2001.

In fact, InMotion ranked #20 in terms of market share in the United States in 2015, so they must be doing something right. One hint of what that might be is provided right on its website: all InMotion web hosting experts average 4 years of professional hosting experience, and the company’s management team is composed of technology experts who average 10+ years of web hosting expertise.
In other words, InMotion seems to understand that businesses are made up of people, and it’s always looking for talented professionals—whether in marketing, human resources, or systems administration—who would like to join its family of around 150 employees.
SiteGround Vs InMotion: Pricing
What good is a web hosting provider if it doesn’t offer the hosting services you want to purchase? Well, you know the answer. Here’s a quick comparison of SiteGround vs InMotion hosting plans and their prices:
SiteGround offer a wealth of hosting services, as well as their affordable shared hosting, they also boast cloud hosting, dedicated hosting, and WordPress hosting, as well as Enterprise hosting.
SiteGround Hosting Services:
-
Cloud Hosting From $80/month
SiteGround's cloud hosting plans include Entry ($80), Business ($120), Business Plus ($160), and Super Power ($240)
-
Dedicated Hosting From $269/month
SteGround's dedicated hosting plans include Entry ($269), Power ($349), and Super Power Server ($729)
-
WordPress Hosting From $6.99/month
SiteGround's WordPress hosting plans include StartUp ($6.99), GrowBig ($9.99), and GoGeek ($14.99)
InMotion Hosting Services:
-
Business Hosting From $6.39/month
InMotion's business hosting plans include Launch ($6.39), Power ($8.49), and Pro ($14.71)
-
VPS Hosting From $21.04/month
InMotion's cloud VPS plans are $21.04 per month, with the option of managed VPS plans from $29.19 per month
-
WordPress Hosting From $5.99/month
InMotion's WordPress hosting plans range from $5.99 per month to $107.99 per month depending on resources
As you can see, SiteGroud and InMotion offer similar hosting plans at similar prices. While you won’t be able to find an equivalent of InMotion’s Business hosting among SiteGround’s plans, that’s only because this web hosting option is just rebranded shared hosting.
The same can’t be said about SiteGround’s cloud hosting, which is marketed as a high-performance alternative to shared hosting that provides fantastic scalability and easy management. The closest thing to SiteGround’s Cloud hosting is InMotion’s Cloud VPN hosting.
The problem is that InMotion’s Cloud VPN hosting is unmanaged, while SiteGround’s Cloud hosting is fully managed, which means that you don’t have to worry about the IT aspects of cloud hosting and can focus on other more important business issues.

When we compared the most affordable plan offered by SiteGround with the most affordable plan offered by InMotion, we noticed two things: First, SiteGround starts cheaper but gets more expensive with the first renewal. Second, the most affordable plan from SiteGround includes 10 GB of storage space and 10,000 monthly visits, while the most affordable plan from InMotion is largely unlimited.

All InMotion customers get a free domain name, but SiteGround customers don’t. However, SiteGround customers do get something else for free, and the value of this bonus may even exceed the cost a domain name: free professional migration. If you have an existing website hosted by someone else, you can ask SiteGround to migrate it for you, and you won’t have to pay a single cent for the service.
The migration will be performed by a real human being and not just some clever automated script. SiteGround also has a handy WordPress migration plugin, called SiteGround migrator, that makes it very easy to migrate any WordPress site with just a few clicks. InMotion encourages its customers to migrate their WordPress websites using the All-in-One WP Migration plugin.
It’s also worth noting that SiteGround is an official WordPress host, so its WordPress plans should theoretically give you the problem-free WordPress experience.
Overall Pricing Winner
Although both hosts offer similar pricing plans in terms of cost, InMotion's initial sign up prices and renewal prices are cheaper than SiteGround's, and on their lower plans they offer almost unlimited resources whereas SiteGround offers 10GB storage and 10,000 monthly visits.
SiteGround Vs InMotion: Features
Let’s start with a feature that everyone can appreciate: SSD storage. Both SiteGround and InMotion provide SSD storage on all their plans, and InMotion even goes as far as to make it unlimited. Compared with traditional hard drives, SSDs are faster and more reliable because they don’t have any moving parts. If you’ve ever upgraded a computer from a traditional hard drive to an SSD, you probably know just how huge the difference in performance can be.

Another feature that you can enjoy regardless of whether you choose SiteGround or InMotion is a website builder. SiteGround’s website builder is provided by Weebly, one of the easiest site builders out there. Weebly is packed with a multitude of different design layouts, making it effortless to create anything from an online store to an online CV.

InMotion selected BoldGrid as its site builder of choice, which is an easy drag-and-drop site builder built on WordPress. One advantage of using WordPress as a content management system is its incredible versatility. Around 75,000,000 websites are using WordPress right now, including TechCrunch, BBC America, The New Yorker, Sony Music, Variety, and others. It doesn’t matter if you want to create a simple personal blog or a sophisticated website for your company—WordPress can do it all.
Yes, you don’t need BoldGrid to create a WordPress site, but being able to quickly build websites with content using an easy drag-and-drop editor is much more convenient than coding them from scratch. BoldGrid even has a build-in staging environment, allowing you to experiment on your site without the risk of breaking it. WordPress staging is also supported by SiteGround, but it works slightly differently.

Both InMotion and SiteGround use the cPanel control panel for hosting management. cPanel is designed to simplify common administrative tasks, such as creating email addresses, managing SSL certificates, or uploading files using FTP. If you would like to see how each of the web hosting providers implemented cPanel, you can play with their cPanel demos.

One important feature that we can’t afford to neglect to mention are automatic backups. SiteGround keeps backups of customers’ Shared and Cloud hosting accounts for a period of up to 30 and 7 days accordingly, and it makes them available from the Backup Tool, which is located right in cPanel. InMotion makes backups and restorations simple to manage with its exclusive Backup Manager plugin for cPanel, which generates and restores full, partial, or individual file backups.
SiteGround gives its customers 30 days to try its services and features without any risk if they choose any of its shared hosting plans and 15 days if they choose cloud hosting plans. InMotion goes even further than that, offering a 90-day money-back guarantee on all 6 months and longer-term hosting plans for its Business, VPS, and Reseller Hosting packages.
Overall Features Winner
There's no doubt that SiteGround offers far better features than InMotion, and most other hosts to be honest. They've put an awful lot of time and effort into developing and creating their own in-house solutions to help speed up your website, make it more secure, and user friendly.
Which Web Host Performs Better? SiteGround or InMotion?
If you want your website to rank high in search engines, it’s paramount that you select a web hosting provider whose performance won’t keep your visitors waiting for the site to load. And if you would like to host a content management system like WordPress, you should also pay attention to response time and caching solutions, which help improve it.
Uptime
For this SiteGround vs InMotion comparison, we wanted to know what availability the two web hosting providers guarantee and if they are able to keep their promises. The first part was easy because SiteGround and InMotion both advertise the same 99.9% uptime guarantee with each hosting plan they sell.
Our testing has revealed that SiteGround websites have an average uptime of 100%, while InMotion’s uptime is at 99.95%. Considering that the industry average is 99.94%, we can say that both SiteGround and InMotion are doing great, but SiteGround is obviously doing quite a lot better.

Response Time
Because SiteGround has severs in the United States, Europe, and Asia, whereas InMotion has servers only in the United States, it should theoretically do a lot better in response time tests. It seems, however, that the two web hosting providers are neck and neck:
SiteGround:
US (W) | US (E) | London | Singapore | Sao Paulo |
10 ms | 45 ms | 277 ms | 377 ms | 158 ms |
Bangalore | Sydney | Japan | Canada | Germany |
294 ms | 176 ms | 131 ms | 61 ms | 147 ms |
InMotion:
US (W) | US (E) | London | Singapore | Sao Paulo |
2 ms | 61 ms | 140 ms | 173 ms | 167 ms |
Bangalore | Sydney | Japan | Canada | Germany |
301 ms | 159 ms | 115 ms | 73 ms | 149 ms |
Both SiteGround and InMotion seem to perform best on the West Coast and worst in India. SiteGround is more responsive than InMotion when it comes to WordPress and other content management systems because it uses its SuperCacher caching solution, which combines several layers of caching to improve the performance of your web site.
Did You Know?
SiteGround create their own in-house solutions to help deliver the most powerful and safest hosting on the market, such as:
- SiteGround SuperCacher
- NGINX direct delivery
- SG Optimizer plugin
Overall Performance Winner
Not only do SiteGround improve their customer's speed and performance with their in-house solutions, their servers are simply more solid and offer better uptime (we've had 100% since 2020). If you're looking for a reliable web host, SiteGround are undoubtedly the best choice.
Are SiteGround and InMotion Secure?
Security should never be an afterthought. While installing a couple of WordPress security plugins is certainly a good start, you should always keep in mind that choosing the right web hosting provider is the key to keeping your site secure. Ideally, you want to select a web hosting provider that uses only the latest and most secure web hosting technologies and makes server security one of its top priorities.
SiteGround fits these requirements perfectly, while InMotion leaves something to be desired. More specifically, we don’t like that InMotion hasn’t yet set all of its servers to use only the latest PHP 7 version with the latest security fixes. Instead, it allows its customers to run three different versions of PHP (7.0, 5.3, 5.4), and this functionality is available by default only to shared cPanel hosting customers who are on servers that use PHP 5.3.

Fortunately, this is really the only problem we have with InMotion when it comes to security. Both SiteGround and InMotion offer reliable DDoS protection, automatic backups, SSL certificates, and proactive malware monitoring provided by Sucuri, a leading provider of malware and blacklist scan services.
SiteGround’s malware scanner is called SG Site Scanner. When you activate it, it begins to automatically scan all the links that are accessible from the website home page on a daily basis. When it detects a problem, you will receive an immediate notification mail with the recommended course of action. InMotion’s malware scanner works pretty much the same, and we have no reason to doubt its capabilities since its also powered by Sucuri.

While we like that Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates are supported by both SiteGround and InMotion Hosting, SiteGround’s implementation is far more user-friendly since all that users have to do is go to cPanel, click on the Let’s Encrypt icon in the Security tab, and select the domain for which they wish to install a new Let’s Encrypt certificate. With InMotion, installing a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate involves logging to your server via SSH, entering a whole bunch of complicated commands, and then manually renewing the installed certificate every 90 days.
To be fair, InMotion has its own free SSL service that supports autorenewals and is accessible directly from cPanel. We just wish the web hosting provider would improve its implementation of Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates to make more user-friendly. Until that happens, SiteGround will remain the winner of this chapter of our SiteGround vs InMotion comparison.
Overall Security Winner
SiteGround don't just include a free SSL certificate with their shared hosting plans, they also offer automatic backups, SG Site scanner to protect your website, DDoS protection, and plenty more to keep your website safe and secure.
Do SiteGround and InMotion Stand Behind Their Customers?
It’s impossible for a web hosting provider to be truly excellent unless it stands behind its customers and offers first-class customer support. Even if you choose the most reliable web hosting provider in the world, you can bet that you’ll, sooner or later, run into technical issues that you won’t be able to solve on your own. When that happens, the last thing you want is to contact customer support and discover that they either don’t understand your problem in the first place or couldn’t be bothered to help you solve it.
SiteGround’s Customer Support Service
As anyone who has ever had the pleasure of dealing with SiteGround’s customer support service would happily tell you, there’s hardly anything to criticize because customer support is one of SiteGround’s top priorities.
SiteGround’s customer support agents are available 24/7 for phone, chat, or ticketing support, and they answer so fast that you will barely have enough time to organize your thoughts. Even customer support tickets typically receive the first reply within just 10 minutes, which is truly amazing considering that most web hosting providers answer customer support tickets in 24 hours.

There are several things SiteGround is doing differently than other web hosting providers to answer in such record time. To start with, the company overstaffs all shifts so that there is always someone to pick up the phone or online chat. All members of SiteGround’s customer support team are evaluated on a regular basis, and an in-house issue tracking and load balancing system evenly distributes incoming requests to minimize delays.
SiteGround employs only highly trained professionals who can provide help with everything from CMS installation and migration to plugins and templates to highly specific application-related issues. When you get in touch with someone from SiteGround’s customer support team, you can see the person’s profile, complete with a picture, specific areas of expertise and interests, and technical background. This way, you always know who you’re talking or chatting with, making communication more human, pleasant, and transparent.

Because SiteGround has wisely made its knowledge readily available to anyone through its tutorials, webinars, and detailed knowledge base, you should be able to solve many problems by yourself and perhaps even learn something new and useful while you’re at it.
Overall, SiteGround’s customer support service could be used as a benchmark for other web hosting providers. We have encountered zero problems while dealing with the company’s Bulgaria-based customer support staff, and online customer reviews clearly tell us that we are not alone.
InMotion’s Customer Support Service
InMotion provides customer support via its US phone number, Skype, chat, and the InMotion Hosting Community Support Center, which is basically a public discussion board monitored by the members of the InMotion Hosting Customer Community Team, who answer customer support questions between 9am–6pm ET, Monday – Friday.

What we really like about InMotion’s customer support service is that it doesn’t force customers to jump between various customer support agents. If you stumble upon an agent who is unable to solve your particular problem, the agent will ask a colleague for help and tell you the answer. Not only does this save a lot of time, but it’s also far more convenient than having to explain the same problem to multiple agents.
InMotion almost always responds in just a few minutes, but it may take some time for your issue to be resolved because not all customer support agents are trained and experienced enough to answer all questions. Personally, we’ve always received satisfactory customer support service that hasn’t kept us waiting, but we know that many customers have recently started to complain, saying that the quality of InMotion’s customer support service has gone down considerably in recent months.=

What hasn’t gone down in quality, however, is InMotion’s knowledge base, which includes detailed product guides, email and website tutorials, as well as multiple educational channels that cover everything from cPanel to website design to WordPress.
Considering how legendary SiteGround’s customer support service is, it probably won’t surprise you that InMotion doesn’t quite live up to it. The main problem is that InMotion employs customer support generalists who often don’t know much about more complicated web hosting topics. But if you can look past the fact that the first customer support agent you run into may not be the one who can help you solve your problem, then you won’t likely have any reason to complain about the quality of InMotion’s customer support service.
What Are Real Customers Saying About SiteGround and InMotion?
If you’ve been hosting websites for some time, you should know that benchmarks and feature comparisons don’t tell the full story. It takes a while to really get to know a web hosting provider and become familiar with all of its quirks. What’s more, two people using the same web hosting solution may have two very different experiences because we all have slightly different expectations.
While we always strive to make our reviews as in-depth as possible to peel of the façade of marketing claims and reveal the truth behind them, we fully recognize that our experience may differ from the experiences of our readers. As a way how to support the claims made in this SiteGround vs InMotion comparison, we’ve decided to include an overview of what real customers are saying about SiteGround and InMotion on Trustpilot and Glassdoor.
Trustpilot
On Trustpilot, a consumer review website founded in Denmark in 2007 which hosts reviews of businesses worldwide, SiteGround has 5 stars while InMotion has just 1 star. To better understand why there’s such a huge difference between the two web hosting providers, let’s take a closer look at a handful of recent reviews, starting with SiteGround:

- “In the last few days I have found each encounter with SG’s reps and tech support folks extremely helpful. They have helped me immensely already, especially today. I think I have found a home and hope to learn as much as I can from the knowledge they so willingly, and effectively offer their customers.”
- “Diana T. is has given an awesome customer support from SiteGround. Very patiently handled my critical problem and solved it with high prudence. I am grateful for this premium free support.”
- “Veronika H. did a great and amazing job for me. She took her time to hear me out and solve my complaint. She’s awesome!”
- “SiteGround has the absolutely best Customer Support Service around. I am so glad I moved my site to be hosted with this company who proudly puts their customers first! I appreciate the service, which is prompt and thorough each and every time.”
- “SiteGround support is top-notch. They are very knowledgeable and easy to communicate with. They have always been able to resolve my issues within a matter of minutes. This is why I have them host my websites.”
Clearly, customers are delighted with SiteGround’s customer service and the fantastic team who runs it. It’s sad that many web hosting companies still don’t realize that customer support is just as important as prices, features, and performance. SiteGround has clearly made customer support one of its top priorities, and it now has around 2,500 positive reviews on Trustpilot as a reward.

If excellent customer service is the secrete behind SiteGround’s flawless Trustpilot rating, what could be the cause of InMotion’s 1-star rating? Let’s look at a few especially negative reviews to find out:
- “Would give a 0 or a minus if it was possible. WORST hosting company ever. They will start off nice with warm wishes, welcomes, and amazing customer support. Soon as there is an issue on there end, ALL THAT WILL GO DOWN HILL.”
- “I have been their customer for many years. They were good at the beginning, no doubt. But now they have so many problems. Sites become down. The customer supports do not have any knowledge.”
- “They were fantastic at first, really impressed me, answered really quick and gave a really awesome customer care but now, they simply don´t care about the customer. It´s been going down for some time now. Now they just ignore the customers and are simply rude and out of touch with reality.”
- “I have been a customer for many years. I had my stuff moved to another server and a headache started since then. Of course, they did promise the transition would be smooth. It wasn’t, but then fine, as long as they solved the arising issues. They just didn’t and the technical support became useless and amateur, apart from the fact that you could wait days for a response to come!”
- “All my websites got hacked and they “quarantined” my sites, which was basically a ploy to get me to sign up with their partner security company to get my sites back up. Sign up for their service and received no customer service besides some automated messages and no real support.”
This time, there’s no simple explanation for why InMotion has the rating it has. It seems to us that the web hosting provider no longer cares about its customers as much as it once did, which is evident from the decreasing quality of its customer support and the growing number of performance problems. We can only speculate as to why InMotion no longer delivers the same quality as before, but personal changes would be our first bet.
Glassdoor
Glassdoor is a website that allows current and former employees anonymously review companies. Glassdoors review can tell you a lot about what it’s like to work for a certain company and what its values are. When current and former employees of a certain complain about management prioritizing profits over people, there’s a good chance that that company doesn’t really care about its customers because it seems them as numbers. This would explain why SiteGround has such amazing customer support while InMotion doesn’t. With its 4.8 stars, SiteGround seems like a much better place to work than InMotion, which has just 3.1 stars.

- “Great company culture. Amazing colleagues. Always dynamic and fulfilling. More than adequate pay and benefits.”
- “Impressive management – flat structure – respects your opinion, not your position – excellent company branding – top-class salaries – allows good work-life balance (reduced working time).”
- “A modern company that is constantly pushing the boundaries of the hosting status quo. Not just borrowing, but developing new technologies is what is distinguishing this company from the slew of hosting providers.”
Indeed, SiteGround really seems to be a people-oriented company whose values we can respect.

Unfortunately, we can’t say the same about InMotion, and you won’t be able to either when you read what its employees have to say about it:
- “Management was terrible. Too many chiefs and not enough Indians. The workload was hard to maintain since the staff was always changing.”
- “The pay is beyond abysmal and several “promotions” see you with either no increase to pay or an actual pay cut, due to non-transparent bonus structures that even management can’t seem to adequately explain.”
- “When my father died unexpectedly, they gave me only 3 days off to deal with everything. That tells you everything you need to know about this company.”
Overall Customer Service Winner
SiteGround's customer service is absolutely top-notch, creating a benchmark that other web hosts should strive for. Not only that, their knowledgebase is extensive, their live chat is responsive, and people around the world rate SiteGround incredibly highly.
Conclusion
To summarize our SiteGround vs InMotion comparison, here’s what we like about SiteGround:
- Fantastic customer support.
- Custom caching solution.
- Excellent Let’s Encrypt integration.
- Latest PHP 7.0 version.
- Great uptime and performance.
- Free professional site migration.
- Broad range of web hosting options.
And these things we like about InMotion:
- 90-day money-back guarantee.
- WordPress-based site builder.
- Great uptime and performance.
- Broad range of web hosting options.
You can probably tell that SiteGround is the winner of this SiteGround vs InMotion comparison, but that doesn’t make InMotion a bad web hosting provider. When it comes to performance, for example, InMotion is right up there with the best web hosting providers in the world, and its broad range of web hosting options, great features, and affordable prices only make it more attractive. It’s just that SiteGround seems like a far more polished and modern web hosting provider that better understands what customers today want. We also can’t ignore the fact that SiteGround probably has the best customer support service in the industry, while InMotion’s customer support service seems to be universally disliked among its customers.
Other Hosting Comparisons
Looking for additional comparisons before making your decision about which hosting company is right for you? Check out these related articles: