MilesWeb review

Established in 2012, MilesWeb is a relatively new and “100% independent” web hosting company from India. It was founded by Deepak Kori, Chetan Mahale and Chinmay Dingore with a clear and simple aim, and that is “to deliver quality services round the clock at affordable prices”. From its humble beginning, MilesWeb has become one of the fastest growing companies in the industry. In addition to a variety of hosting types, they provide domain registration, website security, SSL certificates and similar essentials. They claim to have more than 20.000 happy customers at this moment.

MilesWeb’s data centers are scattered all over the world, so customers can choose whether they want to host their websites in the US, the UK, Canada, Singapore or (obviously) India. Their main website feels fresh and pleasing to the eye. With its modern interface and user-friendly layout, finding your way around feels straightforward. When you arrive at the landing page, you’ll be warmly greeted by an Indian “Johnny Bravo” (MilesWeb’s idea of a good-looking mascot) and presented with an ongoing discount, all with a ticking timer.

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Like many new and modern hosting providers, they have an official blog and a pretty stylish one to boot. Along with up-to-date articles there is a “Video Library" leading to their YouTube account which features a great deal of tutorial-like videos. As far as we can tell, they are in English, done in directly-to-the-point manner and quite helpful.

As for other social networks, MilesWeb is currently active on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and (curiously enough) Instagram. The profiles on these platforms are functional and seem to be active on a day-to-day basis.

Plans and pricing

MilesWeb offers quite a number of different hosting services, starting with basic shared hosting all the way to managed WordPress, cloud, reseller, VPS and dedicated server hosting. With most hosting types, customers are free to choose which operating system they would like to use (Linux or Windows) and this (commendably) doesn’t seem to affect the pricing. The number of presented plans depend on the hosting type, but the minimum is three.

The most affordable shared hosting plan goes by the name “Tyro” and, at this moment, it starts at extremely cheap $0.60 (but only if you choose to commit for three years) per month. This will get you one free domain registration (for the first year), unmetered bandwidth, 1GB of SSD disk space and free SSL certificate. Yet, automated backups will cost you extra cash. Even though it is labeled as one of the “unlimited hosting plans'' (together with the other two), the only “unlimited” feature it offers is its bandwidth, while both email accounts and disk space have clear limitations. For more demanding businesses, there is a bare metal hosting option as well and it goes up to $290 on a monthly basis. 

Although MilesWeb offers a standard 30-day money-back guarantee, some refunds might be given in the form of credit, which might depend on the payment method you originally opted for.

For MilesWeb’s products, you can choose to pay with credit/debit card, PayPal, direct bank transfer or via RuPay (basically, an Indian version of PayPal), which is more options than we normally see.  

Ease of use

One of the things we kept noticing on the MilesWeb’s website were some of the questionable marketing methods which completely lack any subtlety. For instance, there is a table at the bottom of the landing page that compares them with some of the popular web hosting providers (Hostgator, Bluehost, GoDaddy and BigRock in particular). As one would expect, MilesWeb is shown to be better than its competitors by every parameter. Well, that’s definitely not the type of self-promotion we were hoping to find.

Another peculiar thing we encountered on MilesWeb’s website was a sort of timer that popped up with a “warning” about a soon-to-expire offer to register a free domain in five minutes or less. And we witnessed this more than a few times while searching the website. If that was supposed to be a joke, it went over our heads. If not, it simply isn’t true and simulating the state of urgency doesn’t seem like the best way to “catch” new or even less experienced customers.

Fortunately, when we decided upon a hosting plan, the process of purchasing it was rather uncomplicated, although we had our worries. After registering a new domain, transferring an old one or using it as it is, you’ll proceed to choose a billing cycle. There, you might notice that a free domain is excluded if you want to be billed for just one month. Additionally, that month will cost you $3.00, while committing for a year would drop the price to $1.50 and $0.60 for three years. In any case, website migrations are cost-free options as is SSL certificate.

As for servers, two are available for the cheapest shared hosting plan: one is located in New York and another one in Mumbai, India. Before proceeding, double check for any unwanted additions to your chart (as there were a few in our case), since they can raise the total price significantly.

After this, to finish creating your MilesWeb’s account, you have to provide them with some standard personal data, as well additional information about what type of SMS notifications you want to receive. Then you can create a password, select a payment method, complete your order and wait for further instructions.

Once your website shows up, managing every aspect of it will be a rather comfortable experience, as a result of a user-friendly interface and famously easy-to-operate Linux-based cPanel. With the Softaculous installer, WordPress is one click away and so is a great deal of popular applications. If you would prefer to use a website builder, you will be given one with plenty of free templates and straightforward drag-and-drop functionality.

Speed and experience

Since MilesWeb proudly declared itself as the “highest rated web host”, it is only natural that we should expect the highest performance to support the statement in question. Fortunately for them, the results of the speed test provided by GTmetrix were almost perfect, which is something we seldom see. The time it took to completely load the page was 2.1 seconds, which looks perfectly fine compared to the average result of 8.1. Additionally, the whole process took 80 requests, while the average is 89. Taking this and everything else into account, GTmetrix rated MilesWeb’s website performance with an A (97%), which is almost as good as it can get.

MilesWeb claims that availability of their customer’s websites is their primary concern, hence the uptime should never fall below 99.95%, all thanks to their “cutting-edge” Tier-3 and Tier-4 data centers. After performing an uptime test (made possible by UptimeRobot) on their main website for more than a month we recorded one instance of downtime which continued for 14 minutes (resulting in 99.96% of uptime), which pretty much corresponds to what they promised.

Support

The first thing we noticed is that MilesWeb has a decent amount of self-help options, which is, unfortunately, not commonly found with competing providers. Together with a stylish knowledgebase, there is a “Video Library” packed with plenty of tutorials on various topics. There is a support forum as well, and while it hasn’t been much active over the previous year, all the questions were answered accordingly and by MilesWeb’s support team as far as we can tell.

Users are able to browse the knowledgebase with the help of a search box or by choosing one of the relevant categories followed by subcategories and so on. There is a sufficient quantity of articles and they seem to be updated almost day after day.

Apart from self-help, MilesWeb provides all the expected types of customer support and, importantly, in English. Customers can get in touch with them via telephone, live chat, ticket or e-mail. All the above mentioned options should be available round-the-clock throughout the year.

The competition

Although Strato is based in Germany and MilesWeb in India, they share equally high hopes and determination to conquer the international market. That being said, Strato’s lack of user-oriented cPanel, limited selection of available apps and unavailability of live chat customer support makes them hard to recommend in place of MilesWeb.

Considering that MilesWeb previously declared itself a better web hosting provider than Bluehost, we have been compelled to gain a deeper insight into the subject. Although things stated on MilesWeb’s website could be considered true, Bluehost’s most budget-friendly plan offers everything MilesWeb does (well, except for a free .COM domain) and a generous 50GB of SSD storage. To be fair, both are highly competent, but MilesWeb’s marketing tactics seem a bit unprofessional.

Hostgator is yet another host targeted by MilesWeb‘s marketing campaign. Hostgator may not be as cheap as its critic, yet all of its plans offer both unlimited bandwidth and disk space, free domain and website transfer, a magnanimous 45-day money back-guarantee (with MilesWeb it’s valid for 30 days), about $100 of Google Ads and Bing Ads credit and (despite the claims by MilesWeb) their customer service is available 24/7/365 via telephone or live chat.

When compared with MilesWeb, Leaseweb looks like a long-standing veteran in this line of work. While both hosts provide a myriad of hosting-related services and a global network of data centers to choose from, Leaseweb is more geared towards advanced users and large businesses while MilesWeb tries (and succeeds) to find something for everyone. 

Final verdict

The range of hosting solutions MilesWeb’s offers is nothing but impressive, as well as their ability to satisfy the requirements of every type of website. However, certain ambiguities about some of the features as well as somewhat distasteful marketing practices might make some people consider other options. 

Ultimately, MilesWeb’s popularity is on the rise (particularly in India and the US) and for a good reason: their services are all-inclusive, affordable and reliable, and their customer support is diligent, well-versed and helpful. If you are still not certain that MilesWeb has everything you are looking for, well-established providers such as Hostinger, Bluehost and Hostgator always present an excellent alternative.

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