The seemingly never-ending saga of good web hosting continues … regular readers might remember my moving GBMINI from 1and1 to PowWeb (because of repeated outages with 1and1); then when PowWeb in turn failed repeatedly, I moved once again to InMotionHosting …
Now I know that web sites sometimes fail (even MINI2 failed recently) but there is occasional failure and then there is repeated failure – and there is also a difference between responsiveness and silence … both 1and1 and PowWeb failed repeatedly and handled the issues very poorly.
So tonight, GBMINI went down. I tried to visit the InMotionHosting support page but that was down too!
So I phoned their support number … and immediately got through to a REAL PERSON; he told me that they were aware of problems and were working on them. He then asked for my name & phone number and said he would call back to confirm when everything was sorted out.
Everything was sorted out, and he did call back – that is the sort of outage response that those other hosting companies should aspire to.
There is a great web site, FindMyHosting, which helped me find InMotionHosting – for every hosting company they have a detailed feedback page and uptime statistics. They show InMotionHosting to be reliable and well rated. My experience also shows them to be excellent for tech support.
M&I / GBMINI 
As I am sure you know, even Google went down the other day… For 15 minutes, but even the mother of all web sites went down. Of course, there was speculation written that they were hacked. But still. I think the experience you reference above is pretty good… Getting a live person (and a call back) in this digital age is indeed impressive.
Yea, the downtime isn’t so bad if the support is good. I have downtime issues with my current host. They have the stats page and are quick with the emails, but when there is an outage it seems to last for like a week. I’ve already switched hosts for the club and my personal site to VizaWeb and I’ve been very happy with them so far. dbmini gets the move later this month.
Inmotionhosting is okay if you are hosting a simple site (no server-side code or database requirements) but they do seem to be down a lot. 99% I guess means once every hundred days? My experience with them was probably 95%. For a non-business, simple site, they are really cheap so the price is right.
If you are looking to run a business site with dynamic pages, like a VPS situation, Inmotionhoting is probably a poor choice. A member of their management team told me directly that they are not permitted to open a shell (no command line ability) and they consider anything that requires a commandline as being “advanced”. I remember once it took an entire week to get cURL and IMAP installed together because of a “configuration” problem; They called it “advanced” – yikes. I also remember that after taking a close look at phpinfo that they had Versioning enabled AND Zend Optimizer running together…. which, for PHP folks, is big non-no and means conflict with no optimization. Tech support was mostly friendly but since they only had access to WHM and VPS software so if they couldn’t “point and click”, there was a problem…. scarey.
Debra – surprising; nothing like my experience with them. Maybe they’ve changed since I left them. Thanks for the update.