MightWeb Review

Company: MightWeb

Background: MightWeb hosting is owned by the Relander Group and is a relatively newer operation having only started up in 2015. Since then, the company has expanded slightly in part due to a merger with ImbaHost.

Starting Price: $3.95

Currency: USD

Visit Online: https://mightweb.net/

Review Summary & Ratings

4

It might not be the most longstanding host out there, but the company seems to have built a fairly strong reputation based on quality and transparency. While it may not be the largest web hosting operation in the market, nor the longest serving, this hosting provider has a solid offering both in terms of features as well as quality of service. Definitely one to take a closer look at.

Pros

• 99.9% Uptime guarantee (Run and tested)
• Rate A+ at Bitcatcha Speed Test
• Host up to 500,000 inodes at shared hosting
• LiteSpeed server
• Flexible subscription terms
• Free migration service
• DDos protection and other features

Cons

• Server location only in United States
• Limited email accounts for Started & Advanced plans
• No live chat and emergency call customer supports

Pros: What I Like About MightWeb Hosting

1. 99.9% Uptime guarantee (Run and tested)

It’s worth taking note of that MightWeb hosting has a hardcoded Service Level Agreement term about their uptime, offering a 99.9% uptime that’s firm, or your money back.

As per their Terms of Service;

“MightWeb guarantees a 99.9% uptime calculated on a monthly basis. If you find that your uptime is less than 99.9%, you may receive credit for the downtime. Credit is at the discretion of MightWeb. Every case of downtime is investigated thoroughly, so that any intermittent problems can be fixed. Note that third-party uptime monitors do not count as evidence of downtime, as they can report downtime due to bad routing or local DNS issues.”

They also have an in-house tool that self-monitors their status across the board, so you can check for yourself their track record.

It can be a useful first-line tool to see if there’s a fault in service, before you contact customer service for help if you think your service is down;

We signed up to MightWeb hosting and started tracking our test site since January 2018. The results were convincing so far – we have only recorded one outage (that lasted 7 minutes) in March 29th.

* Click image below to enlarge. 

2. Rated A+ at Bitcatcha Speed Test

Having run a fair number of tests on various hosts before, I was frankly a little surprised that MightWeb’s servers seem to live up to their promise of quality service. On and off again on occasion, I’ve had to re-run various tests (one or the other) to verify results, or sometimes even to try to stabilize quirky results.

MightWeb’s hosting plan came across as strong and smooth, performing at high standards despite re-tests several times. This came across even when tested from various locations in both the US and Asia. Naturally, their speeds show strongest results from US locations, since their only data centre is in Chicago.

WebPage Speed Test – from Singapore

WebPage Speed Test – from Dallas, Texas

3. Host up to 500,000 inodes at shared hosting

Given that, MightWeb is also very lenient with their resource usage terms, so it might be worth taking a closer look:

Use of more than 500,000 inodes on any shared account may result in termination of your services. You will, unless gravely exceeding this number, always receive several warnings prior to any action taken. Note that any one file (one image, one e-mail, etcetera) counts as one inode.

Normally, web hosts that allow more than 250,000 inodes in shared accounts are already considered decent.

4. LiteSpeed server

MightWeb however, does offer some variances from other hosting companies, including that they are one of a growing handful of web hosts that are using LiteSpeed Web Server.

Growing from an almost non-existent market share in the early 2000’s, LiteSpeed is a drop-in Apache replacement that now has grown into the fourth most popular web server choice with a 3% market share.

5. Flexible subscription terms

You can subscribe to MightWeb hosting on monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, annually, biennially or triennially basis. Of course, the longer you subscribe, the cheaper price you get.

6. Free migration services

It is also one of a few which offer free migration services, which can be phenomenally important in helping the on-boarding process for any website owner.

This is a feature that is often overlooked by many who are seeking a new web host and should not be underestimated. I’ve run into some web hosts before which don’t offer this for free – and in fact want to charge fees starting easily from $100 and above, depending on the complexity of the site.

7. DDos protection and other features

It’s also good to know that they do use SSD storage even for their entry-level shared web accounts. Clocking in at a mere $3.95 per month for that, it does provide more incentive for the interested buyer.

Also, if you’ve considered two things – (1) that MightWeb has DDoS mitigation and (2) their server performance is speedy, this is an interesting paradox.

Look at their data traffic flowchart at your right. The centre portion looks to be an internal process rather than reliance on a CDN such as Cloudflare for DDoS mitigation. What’s interesting is that this process does not seem to hamper their server performance, with them returning TTFB quickly. However, how effective exactly this system will mitigate a true DDoS is questionable, since these are brute force attacks designed to overwhelm defences.

However, they also thankfully offer a solid backup ecosystem with R1Soft – for all accounts, even the lowest level shared hosting accounts. Backups are done onto a RAID 6 array on a separate server hourly with a 24-hour retention. Backups are archived and kept for 7 days incrementally.

Note: If your web hosting account sizes up to more than 25GB, backups are guaranteed, so you should consider an enterprise grade backup system instead.

Cons: What's Not Great with MightWeb Hosting?

1. Server location only in United States

As you can see, the server location of MightWeb hosting only located in United States. It might affect the performance of the hosting especially those users stay far away from United States.

2. Limited email accounts for Started & Advanced plans

MightWeb's capacity for email accounts is rather limited. You can only host 10 and 25 email accounts at Starter and Advanced Package.

3. No live chat and emergency call customer supports

MightWeb hosting uses a regular ticketing system to support its customers. Overall, they have stated that they try to respond to all tickets within an hour and boast an average turnaround time of 35 minutes for each ticket.

Unfortunately, that seems to be the extent to their support services, with no chat, emergency call (scheduled calls only) or forum help. While this could be a deal-breaker to some, I think that a 35-minute technical support ticket turnaround is actually above par for what many offer, so that in itself would be good enough.

MightWeb Hosting Plans and Price

MightWeb hosting offers almost everything you could want from a web host. From the standard shared hosting plans all the way to dedicated servers, they have it all – at decent prices.

The plans are fairly standard, with the low end targeting the individual blogger / small websites owner up to what they call the ‘Enterprise Package’ which offers what seems to be unlimited amounts of everything.

However, this should be taken with a pinch of salt, since ‘unlimited’ resources on a web host is almost always never so. (See our article: The Truth About Unlimited Hosting)

Shared Hosting

Starting at $3.95 and going up to $8.95 per month on shared plans, I would say that MightWeb has priced itself as a regular budget web host.

The prices are on par with what is being offered and the company offers solid customer support.

VPS Hosting

There are 3 type of VPS hosting which Linux VPS, Windows VPS and Managed. It ranges from $5.56 per month up to $79.96 per month that extends their budget shared hosting space.

Of course, for those who need real firepower, you can contact them about your needs for a dedicated server and they will quote based on your requirements.

Verdict: Do I recommend MightWeb Hosting? 

Overall, while I would say that MightWeb seems to be the run-of-the-mill web host, if you read between the lines, all the most important ticks are in the right check boxes, and then some.

Personally, I would consider that they have hit on the right mix of features and concentrated on the key ones which are really important.

Despite their limited server locations, performance seems to be above and beyond what many web hosts are capable of. Factor in their solid uptime SLA guarantee and you should have no worries about performance.

Also important is their customer support. Despite making no grandiose guarantee and promises, they have offered a standard ticketing system and kept turnaround time to an impressive average of 35-minutes. Take it from me, that not something that you’ll easily find out there today.

To me, MightWeb is a winner and if you’re in the market for a good web hosting provider, this is a good place to look.