InMotion has been in commercial since 2001, and has remained competing positively with large, publicly traded companies, despite being a privately owned company. Sunil shared with me what he see as the factors for the company's achievement, in addition to its latest offerings and plans for your future.
HostAdvice: You are a single holding business in the manufacturing. Despite your dimension (Ranked 20 from the US according to our research) you're privately owned.
Many years ago, when the hosting industry was still in its infancy, it had been hard competing against conglomerates such as EIG or the advertising budget which GoDaddy entities had. But over time, we stuck toward what left us succeed in the first place, which was our focus to client services. We know how saturated the hosting space is and here are a lot of companies out there whose service isn't up to par with the customer's expectations. InMotion Hosting was formed beneath the rule that clients come first, and over the years clients have spread the word about us letting us attain our 15th year of operation, since our beginning in 2001. So we believe being an independent, employee owned and operated firm is actually an advantage, as consumers these days don't like being a client of a publicly traded company whose objective is to appease their shareholders.
HostAdvice: What is behind your approach to concentrate on Linux servers - why not cater to a programmer that prefers .Net and wants a Windows server?
Our choice to proceed with Linux servers needed to do with stability and scalability. Since 2001, we know that .NET has come a long way and is significantly more stable than previously, but we've been happy with the choice to be Linux specific through recent years. What's gaining momentum and which is losing speed, and , in your view?
WordPress hosting (WP) remains the largest, but it's losing some momentum to the site builders on the market, as consumers really need an all in 1 solution. Hosting and WP are seen as pieces of this puzzle, rather than the true solution, so we've seen a decrease in that CMS space. InMotion Hosting is attempting to close that gap by producing a WP net builder which turns your WP install into a drag-and-drop builder; it is named Boldgrid.com. That is something we launched this past year and have tens of thousands of customers on it building sites quicker and more readily. Drupal is gaining greater momentum on the Enterprise level and has a great foothold with .edu and large business clients. This is based on conventions and word of mouth in the business.
HostAdvice: You don't offer hosting. A. What are the advantages of using your VPS hosting vs hosting? B. If someone insists on cloud hosting, which service would you recommend (AWS, Google, Azure, etc.)?
Really, perhaps this could be the first announcement for this, but we're close to launching a pure cloud product. We have listened to our customers and are producing the product as we speak. We just released the brand new Higher Availability VPS servers in February of 2016, which gives higher end platform tools to the masses on a VPS. We're the first to do this just like we were the first to provide free SSDs with our VPS. Within the next few months, we'll be introducing a pure cloud merchandise, so we'd let clients to return to us in the not too distant future.
HostAdvice: Where is your customer service situated (US/outsourced) and what are the principal advantages of that?
We are pleased to tell our customers that our support isn't just 100% US based, but they are our workers, trained by us and operates within our office; not a third party hired because a telephone center. Each one of our employees is trained in-house and managed internally. No one is outsourced.
HostAdvice: Where's the customer service situated (US/outsourced) and what are the principal benefits of this?
As stated earlier, we had been the first ones to place free SSDs on VPS platforms. What we did was attentively do some advertising analyses and a client survey to see what attributes are the most wanted. We listened and created a product in line with our clients' needs. Since that revamp this past year, we have kept before the game, and are constantly updating the stage to find the men and women exactly what they need. The greater Availability is just one of those upgrades. And moving forward, we will have that cloud product as well to handle everyone's needs. We have managed to remain ahead by listening to what our customers desire.
HostAdvice: What is your marketing strategy focusing on?
Product. We've lacked a product team internally for several years, but only a couple years ago we created a staff specifically to figure out what the customers want and aligned our products accordingly. Among the initial projects for that group was that VPS revamp, and that has been a massive success. So we are continuing with producing better and bigger products for our client base to utilize.
HostAdvice: what's your marketing strategy focusing on?
HostAdvice: It's been 15 years since you began Inmotion Hosting. What would you do differently today, when awaiting?
Use better hardware. There was one time in the very beginning where we'd tried to spare a few dollars by going with a less costly hardware vendor for some'similar' products. Ever since that time, we've always utilized the cover of the line Dell servers and parts. However, if we could go back in time, we would not have gone with an alternate hardware solution for our clients. We will never make that mistake again and we are glad we learned that lesson very early on.
