MilesWeb Review 2024: Good Support, Weird Terms of Service

Indian Hosting With a Choice of Data Centres

MilesWeb is a relatively new hosting company in India. It’s less than ten years old, and has a crisp, modern interface that is much easier to use than some of its competitors. Support is provided in English, and you can sign up even if you don’t live in India.

MilesWeb also has a broader range of data centres than other Indian hosts. You can host your site in India, the USA, Canada, Singapore, or the UK.

There are quite a few different hosting services available, including shared hosting, managed WordPress hosting, VPS, cloud hosting, reseller accounts, and dedicated servers.

MilesWeb looks good on the surface, but while hosting my own test site, I found some weird quirks that you need to know about.

Good Plan Features, Poor Backups Policy

I signed up for the cheapest shared hosting plan, which is called Tyro. It’s marketed under the heading “unlimited hosting plans”, but the only thing that’s unlimited is the bandwidth.

You get 1GB disk space, three databases, and 10 email accounts. Mailboxes are limited to 5GB in size, or 50GB total per domain. The plan also gives you 1.5 CPU cores and 2GB RAM, which is better than the cheapest managed WordPress plan.

You get Cloudflare integration, the Softaculous one-click installer suite, and free migration from your old host, as long as it also has cPanel.

I also noticed that my plan included both SitePad and SitePublisher, so if you love using site builders, you’re going to have hours of fun here. Some people play sports, some play video games, but there’s nothing wrong with trying out new software for fun.

There’s a backup tool, but MilesWeb automatically deletes all cPanel backups on Sundays. Download your backups or you could wind up having problems later.

There are few other cool features in this implementation of cPanel:

There’s a Virus Scanner, Like on Windows

Within cPanel, you’ll find a nice virus scanner tool. The whole thing is pretty simple, and there’s not much to say besides “hit the button and it does the scan”.

My site was virus-free, thankfully, so I can’t show you the whole process here, but I can show you what a successful scan looks like:

Free SSL is Always Fashion-Forward

MilesWeb gives you free SSL on all plans, and that’s good news. SSL is responsible for ensuring that you get the little padlock icon in the URL bar of your browser, and also encrypting everything that goes on between your website and your users. And it will help to build confidence with your visitors, as well as giving you a little ranking boost in Google search results.

It’s all handled by Let’s Encrypt, and should be pretty self-explanatory. Choose the domain you want protected, and hit the blue Issue button.

There are SEO Tools Too

MilesWeb has MarketGoo, an automated analysis tool, within cPanel. I’ve seen something similar at Hostinger, but it’s not that common a tool for hosts to have.

The tips it gives you aren’t going to compete with a real SEO consultant, but this tool will help to get you into the right mindset as you develop your site.

Let’s look briefly at what you don’t get with MilesWeb:

• There’s no free domain with the Tyro plan. Some of the other plans come with a free domain, though.
• On shared hosting, there are no free backups, no server-side caching, and no WordPress features like staging. These are available on the managed WordPress plans, but you’ll pay more for them, and the resource limits are lower on those WordPress plans.

Remember, kids: there’s always a tradeoff.

Well, it’s not Hard to Use…

MilesWeb has a clear, modern website that’s generally pretty easy to navigate. I hate the excessive sliders and pop-ups, but I’m being picky. It’s fine, really.

Once you’ve signed up, actually managing your hosting isn’t too bad, thanks to the efforts of MilesWeb’s own designers and the standardized experience provided by cPanel. The bulk of learning how to use a web host always comes from learning how “hosting” itself works. The rest is just finding the right button to do the thing you want.

Installing WordPress

It’s really easy to install WordPress through the Softaculous installer, which you’ll find in cPanel. Once you’ve got Softaculous open, find WordPress, and click the Install Now button.

Softaculous asks you to fill in a form and configure some basic settings, like your website name and the username and password you want. Once that’s done, click one button (Install Now) and the script gets to work setting up your new WordPress site for you.

When is an Uptime Guarantee Not an Uptime Guarantee?

I set up a real website with MilesWeb. It was live for around three months on my test domain name: www.autonomous-shoes-india-b.in. I tested it using GTMetrix, the Sucuri Load Time Tester, and UptimeRobot. If you want more information about how we test web hosts at Website Planet, this article explains it all in detail.

And now we’re diving into the details of the tests, so read on if you enjoy statistics. If you’re not a stats nerd, no worries. You can skip ahead to see why I like MilesWeb’s support.

The test site has since been taken offline to make sure we have a complete set of results from a real-life hosting account, without the risk of the host interfering with the settings.

Let’s take a close look at my site’s performance:

GTMetrix

MilesWeb did great in this test, with an average loading time of 1.6s, and eight out of nine tests coming in at under two seconds. Since “under two seconds” is exactly what you want to keep users around, this is fantastic.

The fully loaded time, measured from the Mumbai server, was really good. The best time was 1.1s, and the slowest was 2.4s. For comparison, it was almost as fast as competitor HostingRaja, and miles ahead of many other Indian hosts.

It’s a really good result for MilesWeb, and it should give you some reassurance if your target audience is in India.

Strangely, MilesWeb did a worse job at compressing the page compared to other hosts that were slower. The site was around 1.4MB originally, and you can see that it’s only slightly smaller in the test result.

And yet that somehow didn’t adversely affect the actual loading time. Huh.

Sucuri Load Time Tester

Sucuri results were poor. Globally, the average response time was 4 seconds.

Over nine tests, I saw poor speeds in North America, including a loading time of 7 seconds in San Francisco, and 6.6s in Montreal. But then in one test, the Singapore data centre aced it with a loading speed of 0.8s.

Three out of nine tests didn’t return any scores at all. This could be an issue at the data centre, and isn’t necessarily indicative of a problem with MilesWeb’s servers. It does mean we have less data to work from, though.

UptimeRobot

My site measured 99.92% uptime over 30 days. The figure over two months was even better, at 99.97%.

Remember, MilesWeb does not have an uptime guarantee. It might say it does on the website. But its Terms of Service literally say this: “although we offer 99.95% uptime, we cannot fully guarantee this”. That’s a little bit naughty.

MilesWeb’s Support is Speedy and Efficient

MilesWeb support is available in English. You can contact the team using phone, ticket, email, and live chat, and the support department is open 24/7.

Before buying a plan, I tested out the live chat and asked a few questions. The responses were quick and accurate. The helpdesk agents are quite keen to get hold of your personal details, but they aren’t too pushy.

I then asked for help installing a WordPress theme, and the support here was great. Zaki actually sent me screenshots so I could see exactly what I should do. For many support teams, this is practically going above and beyond.

When I needed help with my domain, Pratik stepped in and fixed the issue immediately.

MilesWeb’s support team is really good – they are responsive, friendly, and I’d happily trust them with my site.

Cheap Pricing but Tricky Refunds

MilesWeb is one of the cheapest Indian hosts I tested. Some plans don’t have a monthly payment option, so you might need to sign up for a year or longer. For the best prices, you’ll need to sign up for three years.

You can pay for your hosting with credit or debit card, PayPal, cheque, bank transfer, or RuPay.

Most plans don’t have a free trial, but this varies. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee, but if you cancel, your refund may be given as an account credit. It depends on the way you originally paid.

If you quickly realise you don’t like the hosting, you might be stuck with a huge credit balance and nowhere to go. Be aware of this before you sign up.

MilesWeb Cancellation

The Miles Web cancellation procedure is much the same for any host that uses cPanel.

I like to cancel my domain renewal first. I don’t want to get invoiced for a domain I don’t want any more. The procedure for this is pretty easy: click Domains, click the gear icon, and then turn off auto-renew with the ominously red button.

To cancel the hosting, just click Hosting, then follow the same steps. You’ll need to give a brief reason for the cancellation.