InMotion Hosting vs. Liquid Web VPS Hosting

VPS Hosting Plans Designed with Your Business in Mind

Owned Infrastructure. Built for Performance.

We Build the Hardware. We Run the Network.

InMotion Hosting designs, owns, and operates its own servers and network infrastructure. There are no third-party cloud providers behind the curtain. When a configuration needs to change or a hardware issue needs to be resolved, the people who answer the phone are the same people who built the system.

Every managed VPS plan runs on our UltraStack configuration: NGINX as a reverse caching proxy in front of Apache, PHP-FPM for pool-based PHP execution, Redis for in-memory object caching, OPcache, and Brotli compression. NVMe SSD storage is standard on all plans from 8 GB RAM and up. No additional setup. No additional cost.

Liquid Web also operates owned data centers and the infrastructure quality is real. The difference is what you pay for it. At comparable specs on a one-year term, Liquid Web’s cPanel VPS starts at $47.70/month. InMotion starts at $40.24/month.

Real Human Support. 24/7.

280+ Hours of Training Before the First Call.

Every InMotion support engineer completes over 280 hours of technical training covering the LAMP stack, email systems, DNS, cPanel, WHM, and core Linux administration before working with a single customer. You reach a trained sysadmin, not a first-tier agent reading from a script.

Liquid Web is shifting away from their “Heroic Support” model by outsourcing support to reduce costs. Recent Trustpilot and Reddit feedback from long-time Liquid Web customers specifically flags a decline in support depth following the 2023 private equity acquisition.

InMotion’s Advanced Product Support (APS) team, included with Premier Care, provides direct access to senior sysadmins for complex issues: security hardening, server optimization, cPanel configuration, and custom migrations. No ticket escalation dance required.

Included Support Channels

• Phone:
  9 AM to 9 PM ET, Monday through Friday
• Live Chat:
  24/7, human first
• Ticket:
  24/7, documented history
• APS and Premier Care:
  Senior sysadmin direct access

Premier Care also bundles Launch Assist consulting, Monarx malware defense, and 300GB enterprise backup storage into one add-on.

Independent by Design. Accountable by Choice.

25 Years Independent. No Private Equity. No Exit Plan.

InMotion Hosting was founded in 2001 by Todd Robinson and Sunil Saxena and has operated under the same independent ownership ever since. No venture capital, no private equity acquisition, no parent holding company making decisions based on portfolio return targets. The people running InMotion Hosting answer to customers, not investors.

Liquid Web was acquired by One Equity Partners in April 2023 and now operates as a brand within CloudOne Digital, a PE-backed holding company that also includes Nexcess, StellarWP (rebranded to Liquid Web), Modern Tribe (rebranded to Liquid Web), and Servers.com. That is not inherently disqualifying, but it does change the decision framework at every level of the organization, including support staffing, pricing structure, and product roadmap.

For agencies building long-term infrastructure partnerships, the ownership question is not abstract. It determines who your vendor is accountable to, and what happens to pricing and support investment when the portfolio company targets a return.