MilesWeb is an India-based web hosting company with a worldwide presence. Lower costs and variety of choices have been their main highlights.
Although they offer different types of hosting packages, this review is mainly about their Unlimited Web Hosting Plan. We will hopefully look into other choices later in another post.
After reading this review, you will be able to decide if MilesWeb is right for you or not. You will also find how they perform in the real world, and whether the low costs affect their quality of services?
Top Features
First, let us see what MilesWeb has on offer.
Choice of Datacenters
After testing using online tools, I could find that MilesWeb uses cloud platforms like DigitalOcean and AWS to host their sites instead of their own data centers. It has both advantages and disadvantages.
See also: How to Host WordPress on DigitalOcean
On the plus side, these popular cloud service providers are tried and tested. So, they can offer a more reliable and better infrastructure.
On the other hand, the hosting company may not have direct access to the hardware. So, if something goes wrong, they have to rely on third-parties to sort it out.
So, while purchasing a hosting plan, they allow you to choose one of the three regions as your data center location.
- US
- India
- UK
As you might have expected, cloud providers have data centers in these locations. They do not specify the name of the city, though.
However, the Asia-Pacific region (e.g., Singapore) is missing from the list. It is available only when you buy VPS or Cloud plans.
Availability of cPanel
For shared hosting, MilesWeb gives the usual cPanel dashboard to manage your account. That’s a great thing as most of you might be already familiar with cPanel.
One-click Apps
With Softaculous, you can install a wide variety of apps without knowing much about the technical details. Installing WordPress is also super simple.
PHP 7.3 Available
PHP 5.6 is currently the native version for Shared accounts. However, you can upgrade it to the latest version from cPanel.
In my performance tests below, you can see that PHP 7.3 has helped to improve the speed of my test WordPress installation drastically.
So, upgrading will be a wise choice.
Let’s Encrypt SSL
One-click SSL with Let’s Encrypt is highly sought after feature on web hosts. MilesWeb offers that too. So, you don’t need to spend extra on SSL certificates.
You can enable it with a few clicks – no need to mess with keys, signing requests, or certificate files.
Moreover, you don’t have to keep reminders about SSL renewals either. It renews automatically every three months. That’s the main advantage of having Let’s Encrypt support.
SSH Access
With the help of public and private key encryption, SSH allows you to communicate safely with your servers.
MilesWeb offers SSH access on its hosting plans. However, it may not be enabled by default. I had to submit a support ticket to get it working.
Performance
To find out the loading times, I set up a WordPress website with the default Twenty Nineteen Theme. To replicate a real web page, I uploaded two images, a favicon, and added some dummy content.
Here are the results I got after testing with GTMetrix.
Loading & Response Times
| Response Time | Onload Time | Fully Loaded | |
|---|---|---|---|
| With PHP 5.6 | |||
| No Caching | 593.6ms | 1.10s | 1.22s |
| With Caching | 209ms | 0.62s | 0.73s |
| With PHP 7.3 | |||
| No Caching | 453.1ms | 1.03s | 1.1s |
| With Caching | 223.76ms | 0.79s | 0.88s |
As you can see above, the speed of WordPress improved considerably with PHP 7.3. However, when I enabled caching, PHP 7.3 didn’t show any benefits over 5.6.
Uptime
Load Tests
In the first graph, the green line shows the number of concurrent visitors as I increased it from 1 to 50 over a period of one minute. The blue line shows the response times.
As you can see, MilesWeb could handle all these loads without causing any server errors (shown as 400/500 under Response Counts). However, there were a couple of timeouts as the maximum threshold I set was 20s.
Performance Summary
According to my tests, the performance and speed have been excellent so far. Future analyses will reveal if they can perform consistently.
However, my only concern is the fluctuations in response time. As you can see in the uptime report graph, there are quite a few spikes within a 24hr timeframe.
Ease of Use & User Experience
The signup experience was as usual like most other hosts. There were not many upsells or complex multi-page forms.
I signed up from India, and they offered both PayPal and PayU payment gateways to complete the purchase.
They support most cards along with Net Banking. So no problem even if you don’t have a credit card.
After completing the purchase, the hosting account won’t be activated instantly. It took a few hours for the team to verify the purchase and activate it. In their confirmation email, MilesWeb said that they might take up to 6-12 hours for activation. However, I got it approved within half an hour. So, it was not an issue.
The dashboard is also straightforward and easy to navigate. After logging in, you can access the hosting account right from the Client Area.
Since they offer the standard cPanel, there won’t be any problem for beginners also.
However, there is one issue, which is a bit annoying in my experience. As I have mentioned above, response times are inconsistent.
It happens with MilesWeb’s site too, and not just the client sites. More than once, the site took too long to respond, around 10 to 15 seconds. Despite that nuance, the experience is good overall.
Customer Support & Reliability
MilesWeb offers Live Chat facility round the clock in addition to email, ticket, and phone support.
Out of these options, I have tried both chat and ticket system.
With chat, the first reply was almost instant, and the staff could answer my basic queries.
As I was looking forward to moving one of my WordPress sites to MilesWeb, I asked him how many visitors the shared host can handle without issues.
Of course, I know that such a question is vague. So I also gave more details about the site such as page size, no. of requests, and the site’s URL.
After waiting for more than ten minutes, I got a reply that the hosting plan can handle around 2000-3000 visitors per day.
The staff also said that the Unlimited Plan gives 5GB of RAM so that it can handle 10-20 concurrent visitors without problems.
In short, they are knowledgeable. But the responses could be faster. Waiting for ten minutes on the chat is a bit long.
I have also used the ticket system to solve an SSH issue, and a team member replied and addressed it in under two hours.
MilesWeb Review: Plans & Pricing
MilesWeb offers a total of six plans under the shared category. Starting from INR 100/mo for the Lite Plan, the price goes up to INR 715/mo for the Ultimate Plan.
But if you buy for a longer duration, such as one or more years, you can lock in a much lower price. In addition to that, they also offer generous seasonal discounts. So, the initial cost can be a lot cheaper. However, when you renew, you will have to pay the original amount without deductions.
Pros
- Generous discounts and offers for the initial billing cycle
- Above-average load speeds
- Supports a variety of payment methods
Cons
- Support can be faster
- Fluctuations in server response time
- Does not support HTTP/2 protocol
Conclusion
If you are looking for cheap shared hosting, then MilesWeb has some great packages to offer. With their generous discounts and offers, it is a better value for money.
The speed is better than most other hosts. Occasionally, I’ve experienced a few delays, but I haven’t experienced any downtime yet.
As a shared host, MilesWeb is worth considering for low-medium traffic websites like blogs and CMS. However, since they are running on cloud platforms, going directly with DigitalOcean or AWS may be the better choice when you need more control.
So, my overall experience with MilesWeb has been good so far. What was yours? Share it in the comments.
