ScalaHosting
ScalaHosting is a web hosting company that offers a wide range of hosting services, including shared hosting, VPS hosting, cloud hosting, and email hosting. It integrates with a number of platforms, including AWS, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and WooCommerce.
What is ScalaHosting’s mission?
In its about us page, the company states that when it was originally founded in 2007 it set its sights on making VPS hosting “a resource that anyone (…) could use to build amazing things on the web”. This mission statement has since evolved to include the goal of providing 100% customer satisfaction, a goal that the company approaches through a commitment to always make the customer happy.
What services does ScalaHosting provide?
ScalaHosting provides a number of services, most popular being:
- Hosting Services
- Shared hosting
- Reseller hosting
- Email hosting
- SSL certificates
- Domain name registration
- Servers
- Virtual servers (Managed and Self-Managed)
- Dedicated servers
- SSD Storage
- Backup space
Key features and benefits of ScalaHosting
Uptime Guarantee
The company offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, detailed in their Terms of Service. This basically means customers are reassured that their website will be up and running almost all the time and, should they experience downtime, they can claim back some of their hosting costs.
This guarantee works on a tiered structure depending on how much downtime you experience, which ScalaHosting breaks down as follows:
- 99.9% – 0% credit
- 99.8% – 10% credit
- 99.7% – 20% credit
- 99.6% – 30% credit
- 99.5% – 40% credit
- 99.4% – 50% credit
- 99.3% – 60% credit
- 99.2% – 70% credit
- 99.1% – 80% credit
- 99.0% – 90% credit
- Less than 99% – 100% credit
Free Migration
ScalaHosting offers a free migration included with every plan. This means that if you have an existing website hosted elsewhere, ScalaHosting can help you transfer your data to their servers without any downtime. This can be quite helpful to small businesses, given that website migration services can easily go wrong or be too costly.
Secure Hosting
ScalaHosting claims to take security seriously, offering a number of features to help protect websites from hacking and other security threats. That claim seems to be validated by Jerry Low, founder of WebHostingSecretRevealed.net, a popular hosting reviews site. In his review of ScalaHosting’s security features, he assessed that ScalaHosting was “a great choice”.
Among the security extras, you can find a free SSL certificate and default ClamAV protection (an open-source antivirus engine).
The company also utilises its proprietary custom security solution, SShield, as part of its services. ScalaHosting describes SShield as being AI powered and claims to block 99.998% of web attacks.
Finally, the company runs daily backups and snapshots, which offer yet another layer of reassurance should things go wrong.
Customer Support
ScalaHosting offers 24/7 customer support via phone, email, and live chat. Their response via chat is typically instant while their ticket response takes an average of 15 minutes.
Their customer support goes beyond just helping its customers, though. ScalaHosting has published an extensive knowledge base of helpful articles and tutorials across their blog and YouTube channel in particular.
Pricing
The ScalaHosting prices can vary greatly depending on what features you are looking for and what type of hosting service you choose. The company puts a strong focus on managed VPS services, and those packages are definitely the most cost-effective when you compare Features and Prices.
The rates for the managed VPS deals on their site are as follows:
Price in $USD | $29.95 /mo | $63.95 /mo | $121.95 /mo | $179.95 /mo |
Duration | 36 months | 36 months | 36 months | 36 months |
Number of CPU Cores | 2GB | 4GB | 8GB | 12GB |
RAM | 4GB | 8GB | 16GB | 24GB |
NVMe SSD Capacity | 50GB | 100GB | 150GB | 200GB |
Automatic Offsite Backups | Included | Included | Included | Included |
Bandwidth | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
Where is ScalaHosting headquartered?
ScalaHosting is headquartered in Dallas, Texas in the United States of America. The company also has offices in Sofia, Bulgaria, where the majority of its staff is based.
Location and Coverage
ScalaHosting has servers in three owned and operated data centers, which are located in the United States of America and in Europe. It also has hardware in data centers owned by other companies, which are located in Europe (England, Germany and The Netherlands), Asia (India and Singapore) and North America (San Francisco, California, and Toronto, Canada). More recently, it started integrating with global cloud service providers AWS and DigitalOcean which enabled its customers to host their websites in 28 locations spread across the globe.
The company has roughly 50,000 customers from around 120 countries and hosts more than 700,000 websites.
Compliance and Regulatory
Audited annually and compliant with:
- SSAE 18 SOC 2 Type II PCI-DSS
- GLBA
- HIPAA
In addition, the company is ITAR and EU-US Privacy Shield registered.1
Company Timeline
Year | Milestone |
2007 | Company is founded |
2009 | Launch of the Dallas data center |
2010 | Launch of the Europe data center in Sofia |
2013 | Launch of SSD cloud hosting |
2016 | Launch of private cloud clusters in Dallas and Sofia |
2018 | SPanel is launched |
2020 | Strategic partnership with Joomla.org |
2020 | Launch of the New York data center |
2021 | Launched a dedicated backups & disaster recovery data center in Europe |
2021 | Strategic partnerships with Amazon AWS and DigitalOcean |
2022 | Ranked #1 for Web Hosting and Cloud Computing in Trustpilot |
What is SPanel?
SPanel is ScalaHosting’s proprietary cloud VPS management solution. It was launched in May 2018 after being in development for 3 years. The name is an abbreviation for Scala Panel, an amalgamation of “ScalaHosting” and “Control Panel”.
The solution was developed as an easy-to-use, secure, feature-packed, and cost-efficient alternative to cPanel/WHM. It capitalised on customer fears over frequent price-hikes by its main competitor, cPanel. SPanel, by contrast, is offered free of charge to all clients that use ScalaHosting’s managed cloud VPS hosting solutions.
In addition, users can request and vote for new features on the popular SPanel Features Request website, which ScalaHosting then prioritises into its product development cycles.
In the news: CPanel price hike and SPanel alternative
In early 2020, cPanel made waves among the web hosting sector and the wider community, with its sudden (and, some would say, drastic) increase in pricing. The shift from a “per server” pricing model to a “per account” pricing model, meant some partners could experience a price hike as high as 1,000%.
In a Yahoo article from April 2020 a spokesperson for ScalaHosting argued that its SPanel offering was a viable alternative to CPanel, stating “At Scala Hosting LLC, we can tell you that SPanel is just as good, versatile, and better in more ways than one while being more affordable. There is no reason for people to use Plesk or cPanel when SPanel helps you achieve a lot more. That’s why there are so many people moving away from cPanel and moving towards SPanel.“
Social Media Profiles
ScalaHosting can be followed on several social media platforms, including:
Awards in 2023
Award: |
TechRadar Best VPS Hosting |
Forbes Best VPS Host |
Best Cloud Hosting |
Neil Patel Best VPS |
HostAdvice Best VPS Hosting |
Quick Sprout Best VPS |
Guru99 Best Cloud Provider |
WPBeginner Best WordPress VPS |
Techradar Best UK Web Hosting Service |
ThemeIsle Best Cluster Hosting Provider |
HostingAdvice Best Cloud Hosting |
Digital.com Best Cloud Hosting |
WebHostingSecretRevealed Best VPS Provider |
Bitcaptcha Best VPS Hosting |
Websiterating Best Cloud VPS |
Webnus Best WordPress Hosting |
TechRadar Best Email Hosting |
Neil Patel Best VPS |
HostReview Best VPS Hosting |
FindBestHosts Best Hosting for February |
HostingTribunal Best VPS Hosting |
Cybernews Best Web Hosting Services |
WHTop Best VPS Hosting |
Screenshots of ScalaHosting Interface
Sources
- [1] This information has been taken in good faith from ScalaHosting’s website – as seen here – and has not been verified independently.