Class is in Session: How Unlock Math Keeps Its LMS Online with InMotion Hosting

For nearly a decade, online math curriculum provider Unlock Math has relied on InMotion Hosting’s Aspire dedicated server to keep its Learning Management System reachable for students across North America. Founder Matthew Blackwood shares why the partnership has lasted.

 

Introduction

For an online learning company, a website outage is more than an inconvenience. It is a classroom that suddenly empties. Unlock Math, an online math curriculum used by homeschoolers and charter school students across North America, has relied on InMotion Hosting’s Aspire dedicated server to keep its Learning Management System reachable since 2014. Founder Matthew Blackwood took the time to share why the partnership has lasted nearly a decade.

Unlock Math is hosted on an Aspire dedicated server.

 

The Story of Unlock Math

Unlock Math began as a conversation between Matthew Blackwood and his wife in the spring of 2013. She was a high school math teacher looking to move out of the classroom, and as parents who homeschooled their own children, the couple recognized a gap in the curriculum options available online. They decided to build their own. The first course launched in late 2014, and they have steadily added courses since.

Early growth came through Facebook advertising and homeschooling communities. Conventions opened a second door, leading to vendor partnerships with home study charter schools in California. That work introduced Unlock Math to administrators who encouraged the company to pursue formal academic recognition. In 2018, Unlock Math earned A-G approval from the University of California, an outside endorsement Matthew describes as a satisfying piece of third-party validation of the program’s quality.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought another wave of growth. Schools around the world were searching for online options, and Unlock Math fielded an inquiry from the Ministry of Education in Ontario. Today, Matthew’s wife teaches in every course video, and a second teacher supports students through online chat when they need a problem walked through.

 

The Challenge: Uptime That Students Depend On

For a software-as-a-service classroom, uptime is the metric that matters most.

The Unlock Math LMS was custom-built by a development team in Ontario and runs on InMotion’s servers. The company is currently building the third iteration of the platform, with a partial rollout planned for fall and a full launch next year if the fall target slips. Each release carries the risk that a code change pushed in one direction breaks something on the live site. Matthew is candid about it: every outage Unlock Math has experienced traces back to a change his team made, not the host.

Recovering quickly from those moments is where the partnership has earned its keep.

 

The Solution: Direct Access to a Long-Term Hosting Partner

Unlock Math originally landed on InMotion Hosting through the agency that built the company’s first website and LMS. When Matthew brought everything in-house in 2016, he reviewed the market and decided InMotion was the right place to stay. The Aspire dedicated server gives the team the resources to run the LMS and the headroom to keep adding courses without performance trade-offs.

Three things have kept Unlock Math on the platform.

1. Direct phone access to a real person. When something breaks at four or five in the morning, Matthew can call and reach a support technician who can help his team roll back to a previous state. The fact that someone picks up the phone has become rare in the industry, and Matthew points to it as a major reason the company has not seriously considered moving.
2. Owned infrastructure, not a reseller layer. Matthew has been pitched by providers built on AWS and other public cloud platforms. He has consistently passed. His preference is to work with a host that owns its hardware and runs its own network, rather than sit two or three vendors away from the actual data center.
3. Founder-led independence. Matthew runs Unlock Math as a family-owned business, and the appeal of working with another privately held, founder-led company is not abstract. Independent ownership means Unlock Math is talking to a partner that is not under quarterly pressure from outside investors.

“I’d rather deal with someone like InMotion where they’re not a reseller. You never know if a reseller is just a fly-by-nighter.” – Matthew Blackwood, Unlock Math

When the Unlock Math team has needed help recovering from a deployment issue, the InMotion support team has worked alongside their developers to revert to a previous state quickly. As Matthew puts it, the support has been “out of this world.”

 

The Results

Nearly ten years on the same platform, a custom LMS that has reached its third generation, and formal academic recognition from the University of California.

Unlock Math has scaled from a single course in 2014 to a math curriculum approved for college admissions credit. Over that time, the website and LMS have stayed online consistently enough that Matthew cannot recall an outage in the last four or five years that originated on InMotion’s side. When deployments have caused issues, the support team has helped his developers roll back and recover quickly, keeping students away from their courses for hours rather than days.

The company is now planning the rollout of its third LMS iteration, and Matthew expects the partnership to continue through that launch and beyond. As Unlock Math evaluates rapid traffic growth from larger school contracts, scaling is the next conversation on the table. InMotion’s privately owned cloud platform gives the team an option for elastic capacity without leaving the InMotion environment.

“We couldn’t have dreamed of a better partnership with a hosting company. We’re very fortunate to have chosen InMotion as our first choice, and happy to move forward with the firm ground of InMotion under us, to be able to build and scale without worrying.”

– Matthew Blackwood, Unlock Math

This Client Spotlight is a promotional feature based on an interview with the customer. The content has been prepared by InMotion Hosting’s marketing team in collaboration with the featured business. The featured business may have received compensation or other incentives in connection with this spotlight.

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