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ScalaHosting is an experienced Dallas-based provider with 18 years of experience and one of the best web hosting companies in the business.
ScalaHosting’s range includes everything from shared cloud hosting for simple sites, and VPS for more demanding business projects and ecommerce stores. Support is excellent and can help you set up customer server environments for a range of businesses and uses.
ScalaHosting shared hosting
ScalaHosting’s starter shared hosting plans are not par for the course. The plans don’t come with a website builder and the most basic plan does not come with a free domain name. Instead the plans are optimised for speed and reliability. They’re comparable to NameCheap’s shared hosting in terms of features but ScalaHosting is a few dollars more a month but does come with daily backups for the last seven days. If I was budget conscious I’d go with NameCheap. If I was reliability and speed conscious I’d go with ScalaHosting.
The plans are mostly the same and only differ on performance. The entry level plan supports one website while the other two support unlimited websites, 10 to 100 GB NVMe storage, SSL certificates, and unlimited emails and databases. The Start plan gives you real-time malware protection, Advanced gets you priority support, and Entry Cloud gets you a dedicated IP address, blacklist monitoring, improved inbox delivery, OpenLiteSpeed Caching, scalable storage, sub-users and collaborators.
From the Start plan onwards you get a free domain but I don’t recommend using it. I would suggest using your own from one of the best domain registrars. Just because it can save you some hassle in the long run.
The shared hosting plans start from $12.95/mo and go up to $20.95. There are some very good intro deals with 50% being saved on some plans over 36 months.
ScalaHosting WordPress hosting
ScalaHosting’s WordPress plans look identical to its shared range, with the same features (as we discuss above) for the same price (from $2.95 a month). But that’s not necessarily a problem, because these are decent shared plans, and there are some useful WordPress-related features, too.
The company says it will migrate as many sites as you ask for free. Many providers limit you to one, a few don’t offer free migration at all.
ScalaHosting’s servers are optimized for WordPress performance, with custom security rules to block ‘99.9% of the web attacks.’
The support team go beyond the usual server problem-solving to help you with more WordPress-specific issues, such as troubleshooting plugins.
All plans get daily backups covering the last 7 days (something we don’t always see with budget WordPress offerings), while malware scans and removal keeps your site and visitors safe.
If you’re looking for WordPress hosting ScalaHosting has you covered on the hosting side of things but if you need website builder tools or want to really learn how to use WordPress then I suggest trying Hostinger or Bluehost instead.
ScalaHosting VPS hosting
ScalaHosting’s VPS (Virtual Private Server) plans give your website more resources than shared hosting, significantly improving load times, and avoiding the slowdowns you’ll often see with shared plans.
Prices look high at $49.95 a month for a 2 CPU core, 4GB RAM, 50GB SSD system, but you’re getting a lot for your money when it comes to features. With the powerful sPanel as part of the plan you can save a lot of money. For example, a similar plan but but with less resources at Liquid Web starts out as only $5/mo but when you add management and the hosting panel the price works out to closer to $90 a month.
If the standard four plans don’t suit your needs, you can build your own by choosing whatever mix of CPU sores (2-24), RAM (4-128GB) and storage (50GB-2000GB) works best.
There’s even the option to host your VPS with Amazon AWS, instead of ScalaHosting. They’re more expensive, but have far larger networks and can host your server in data centers around the world.
These aren’t plans for casual users or bargain hunters, but if you’re working on a heavy-duty project for medium to large or business-critical sites, ScalaHosting almost certainly has a VPS for you.
Read our full SPanel review
How fast is ScalaHosting?
We assess website speed by using a tool called GTmetrix to calculate how long it takes to load and display the main content of a page (a figure known technically as Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP). The lower the LCP value is, the faster your site pops up in the browser, and the snappier and more responsive your site feels.
ScalaHosting delivered an LCP of 0.730 seconds. That’s fractionally slower than average, but still within reach of big names including GoDaddy (0.667 seconds) and GreenGeeks (0.692 seconds), and much better than budget providers such as Domain.com (1.5 seconds) and iPage (1.6 seconds.) Overall, ScalaHosting’s shared hosting delivers decent performance which should cope with small to mid-range personal and business sites.
Reliability is another important element of hosting performance. Your website might download almost instantly, but if it’s regularly down, your visitors won’t be happy.
We assess reliability by using Uptime.com to check a test website every 5 minutes for 14 days, logging any passes and fails. Scala Hosting’s result was easy to calculate because it had no failures, scoring a perfect 100% uptime. That’s what we’d expect for a short test, but it’s a good start. We’ve left the Uptime.com test running, too, and will update this review from time to time with longer-term results.
How easy is ScalaHosting to use?
ScalaHosting’s web dashboard is clear and intuitive. Log in and your hosting plan is displayed up-front. Common tools are easy to find, often just a click or two away. A ‘launch cPanel’ button gives you speedy access to cPanel’s many hosting management tools, and the company uses the excellent Softaculous as its 1-click WordPress installer, another usability plus. We’ve installed a lot of test WordPress sites, and Softaculous is faster, more configurable and reliable than anything else.
We did notice a surprising security issue. Although the dashboard’s ‘launch cPanel’ button logs you into cPanel, it doesn’t establish an encrypted HTTPS connection. It’s HTTP-only, which left our browser displaying a ‘not secure’ error. If we accessed cPanel via unprotected public Wi-Fi, that may allow others to intercept our communications and perhaps steal sensitive information.
This must be some temporary issue relating to our account, we thought, and opened a support ticket to ask. An agent replied in four minutes, but the news wasn’t good. The dashboard automatically uses a URL beginning hydra.vivawebhost.com:2082, and he explained we had to use hydra.vivawebhost.com:2083 to get a secure connection, before adding: ‘I will report that to our developers and they will check if this can be fixed so you will be redirected to a secure connection from your client profile as well.’
In other words, while you can securely log into cPanel via other URLs, try it from the dashboard and it creates an insecure connection as standard. Your browser should clearly warn you of the problem, so hopefully users will notice and try a different login route, but that really shouldn’t be necessary. Web hosts have access to some very sensitive data, and customers have the right to expect more attention to security details than we see here.
What is ScalaHosting’s support like?
ScalaHosting offers 24/7 support via its website, live chat and ticket/ email.
The web knowledgebase is smaller than average but the company makes up for it with its YouTube knowledge channel. For example, the Hosting section has only 304 articles to cover shared, VPS, and reseller hosting, domains, DNS, security, email and more. There is useful content here, but it’s mixed with generic ‘how to’ advice, and a weak search engine can make it tricky to find what you need.
Fortunately, if the website can’t help, accessing the support team is quick and easy. Our live chat sessions generally got a reply within a minute, and the agents gave accurate and helpful responses to our test questions.
Using tickets can make more sense for complex problems, and ScalaHosting performed well here, too. Replies were helpful and detailed, and arrived in anything from four to just under 40 minutes.
Final verdict
ScalaHosting’s shared plans aren’t the fastest we’ve seen, but they give you plenty of power for your cash, and could work for bargain hunters with personal or small business sites. The real highlight here is the company’s professional and highly configurable VPS hosting, which has the power to handle serious business-critical sites.
ScalaHosting FAQs
What payment types does ScalaHosting support?
ScalaHosting accepts payments via card, PayPal and bank transfer.
Does ScalaHosting offer refunds?
ScalaHosting are so confident with their product that they offer an unconditional anytime money-back guarantee.
If you’re unsatisfied with your service at any time you can receive a 100% refund for any pre-paid and unused hosting services.
Does ScalaHosting have uptime guarantee?
ScalaHosting has a 99.9% uptime guarantee. If your server has more than 0.1% unscheduled downtime over a month (around 45 minutes), you’ll receive 10% credit on your hosting fees for every further 0.1% your site is unavailable. So that’s 10% for 1:30, 20% for 2:!5, up to a 100% credit for a total 8:15 downtime.
Where are ScalaHosting’s data centers?
ScalaHosting have their own data centers in New York, Dallas, Sofia, Singapore, London, Sydney, Helsinki, Madrid, Amsterdam, Warsaw, and Stockholm.
That’s good news, as the more data centers a host has, the more likely you can choose one near your audience, improving speeds.
What is my ScalaHosting IP address?
Knowing your web server’s IP address can be handy when you’re pointing a domain managed elsewhere to your web space.
The easiest way to find the address is with cPanel, if it’s available on your account.
Log in to the Scala Hosting client area (https://my.scalahosting.com).
Find your hosting product in the My Services list.
Click Manage, Log Into cPanel.
Look to the right, and your server IP address is displayed as ‘Shared IP Address’ in the General Information box.
(There is no ‘General Information’ box? Find and click the Server Information link.)
What are ScalaHosting’s nameservers?
ScalaHosting’s nameservers are:
ns1.scalahosting.com
ns2.scalahosting.com
How do I cancel a ScalaHosting product?
Access your ScalaHosting client area (https://my.scalahosting.com).
Find the plan you’d like to cancel in the My Services list.
Click Manage, Request cancellation.
Choose a reason, decide whether you’d like to cancel the hosting immediately or at the end of the billing period, and click Request Cancellation.
ScalaHosting warns that ‘cancellation requests may take up to 7 days to be completed’, so if you’re looking to avoid the plan automatically renewing, don’t leave this until the last minute.
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