ScalaHosting review

ScalaHosting is an experienced Dallas-based provider with 17 years of experience and one of the best web hosting companies in the business.

ScalaHosting's range includes everything from shared hosting for simple sites, and VPS for more demanding business projects, to custom-built managed clusters (a group of servers handling the same site) with the power to manage even the largest websites.

• Want to try ScalaHosting? Check out the website here

ScalaHosting shared hosting

ScalaHosting's starter shared hosting plans are pretty par for the course. 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.

ScalaHosting have four shared plans. The Mini plan does not come with a free domain name and the most expensive plan, Entry Cloud, does not come with cPanel but rather ScalaHosting's own SPanel.

Apart from that they're basically all the same offering one to 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 $11.95/mo and go up to £34.95. 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 there 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, for instance. 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 to learn WordPress, or use it to build a small personal or business site, ScalaHosting's range more than covers the basics for a very low price. But if you're more interested in features than rock-bottom prices, WordPress, IONOS and A2 Hosting have powerful specialist plans with more powerful WordPress tools and valuable business and other extras.

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 relatively 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.

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.

 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