ScalaHosting Review: Reliable & Scalable Hosting (In 2024)

Decent Shared Hosting, but Amazing Cloud and VPS Options

It’s easy to overlook ScalaHosting amongst the sea of other, more marketing-conscious hosting providers out there. I’ll admit I was initially put off by its somewhat dated homepage and modest advertising presence. But I wondered if ScalaHosting could be a hidden gem waiting to be discovered.

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After two weeks of meticulous tests, I found that ScalaHosting is worth your consideration for its fantastic service and superior performance.

Admittedly, its shared hosting isn’t that remarkable, even if it is competitively priced. However, ScalaHosting’s proprietary and easy-to-use SPanel – which isn’t available with its regular shared plans – makes it a particularly great option for non-techies looking to make the leap into cloud or VPS hosting from shared hosting.

The user interface (UI) has some kinks and while it might be accessible for anyone, it still takes some degree of technical experience to make the most of it. Still, the entry-level cloud plan offers outstanding support and plenty of tools to make the leap into cloud hosting easier.

Aside from English, ScalaHosting offers its services in Arabic, Azerbaijani, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Persian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Ukrainian.

Is ScalaHosting the ideal provider for you? Read on to find out.

A Full Suite of Powerful Hosting Tools at Your Disposal

ScalaHosting offers an impressive feature set any way you look at it. It’s not a matter of quantity over quality either. During my tests, I found that every feature’s quality at least matched (and often surpassed) that of similar hosts.

I should note, however, that while its cloud and VPS hosting plans offer exciting features such as access to the user-friendly SPanel and robust security, the shared hosting features are nothing to rave about.

In order to try the best that ScalaHosting has to offer, I conducted all my testing for this review on the Entry Cloud plan, which I found to offer the best value while remaining reasonably budget-friendly. Signing up for the entry-level shared hosting plan might have been cheaper, but this review would have been considerably shorter. Besides, if you’re just looking for the cheapest option, there are a few goodshared hosting options in our top 10 which offer lower prices.

Powerful Resources and a Well-Rounded Feature Set

As you might expect, ScalaHosting reserves its best tech for its cloud and VPS hosting plans. If you go for cloud or VPS hosting, you’ll get SSD NVMe storage, DDR4 RAM, and powerful Intel Xeon processing technology.

Besides all the standard stuff you’d come to expect from a quality hosting service, ScalaHosting also offers free assisted website migrations. That way, if you do decide to make the jump from shared to cloud hosting, you can ensure that the process will go as smoothly as possible. That’s just scratching the surface, though. Now, let’s get into the more exciting features.

Robust Security and Peace of Mind

ScalaHosting offers unlimited free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates, and protection against brute force attacks. It also includes the proprietary SShield Security system with all plans except its entry-level shared option.

SShield monitors all your websites and emails constantly. ScalaHosting claims that SShield is capable of blocking nearly any detected attacks; while we weren’t able to test this, customer reviews report a high degree of satisfaction with the service.

If you want a more human touch, on-demand security scans are included on all plans. You also get free daily backups of your site so if anything does happen, you can easily recover your information.

Additionally, you can also get access to professional spam protection and a dedicated firewall with any of the cloud hosting or VPS plans.

Unlimited Email Accounts

Regardless of which plan you choose, ScalaHosting lets you create an unlimited number of email accounts for each domain.

If you wish, you can set up automatic responses with any of your email accounts. As mentioned above, with the Advanced shared hosting plan and above, you get free, high-quality spam protection for all your inboxes.

Plenty of Tools for Collaboration

ScalaHosting’s cloud and VPS plans let you create unlimited sub-user and collaborator accounts if you’re working with a team. If you’re using reseller hosting, you can modify the back end to show your custom URL, company name, and logo.

The difference between sub-users and collaborators is that each has different levels of access and permissions. This means that if you work in a large team, you’ll be able to assign accounts that correspond to each member’s level of expertise or responsibility.

ScalaHosting Features at a Glance

ScalaHosting Takes Great Strides Towards User-Friendliness, but It Has Its Quirks

Ease of use is a big consideration for ScalaHosting. The client area’s simple navigation and easy access to useful information about what each section does tells me that accessibility was at the forefront of its design.

Even if you have little to no technical experience, ScalaHosting does its best to make cloud and VPS hosting accessible with features like its proprietary SPanel (more on that below). The VPS also comes in both managed and unmanaged versions.

That said, I found some pain points during my tests, like awkwardly designed submenus and confusing UI choices. None of it was bad enough to sour my overall experience, but I’d be lying if I said there’s no room for improvement.

Creating a New Account with ScalaHosting

The process of creating an account with ScalaHosting is remarkably straightforward. All you have to do is go to its site, find the hosting option you prefer, and click on Get Started. After that, you choose your billing cycle (which can go anywhere from monthly to every three years), data center location, and whether you’re going to want extra disk space or LiteSpeed web server (both for an extra fee).

If you choose yearly or triennial billing, you also get a free domain name for the first year – though I did find it a bit odd that there was no biennial payment option. Whichever you do choose, after registering your domain name, all that’s left to do is enter your details and select a payment method. You can pay with credit and debit cards, PayPal, or through direct bank transfers.

Connecting a Domain and Installing WordPress

You should be able to connect a domain name directly from the registration screen. But if you want to add a new domain name, all you have to do is go to your client area, click on My Domains, and select either Register a New Domain or Transfer Domains to Us.

The cloud or VPS plans require that you copy nameserver settings over manually to connect your domain name.

1. In SPanel, under Server Information > System Information, copy your nameserver settings.
2. Then, in the client area, go to My Domains > Manage for the domain that you want to connect.
3. Then, click Manage Nameservers > use custom nameservers and paste in the nameservers from SPanel. You may find it easier to keep two browser tabs open to do this.

As I mentioned earlier, the SPanel dashboard is very easy to use and intuitive. However, I wish ScalaHosting would let you connect your domain to your server without jumping back and forth from SPanel to the client area.

To install WordPress:

1. Go back to your SPanel dashboard and click on Manage Accounts.
2. Select your domain name, click on the Actions dropdown menu, and then on Manage.
3. Scroll down to the WordPress Manager tab, create your WordPress user, select the plugins you wish to add, and click on Install WordPress.

Another great thing about the SPanel is that it offers full support for Apache, NGINX, and OpenLiteSpeed server software, as well as an easy option for switching between them. This means that you can select the configuration that works better for your hosting without any fuss. ScalaHosting also offers support for LiteSpeed, but you will have to pay a little extra for it.

If you want to host a WordPress website, I recommend selecting the OpenLiteSpeed or LiteSpeed server software. That said, remember to install the LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress (LSCWP) Plugin on your WordPress dashboard to get the full performance benefits of LiteSpeed.

Make Server Management Easy With SPanel

You may already be familiar with cPanel, as most budget hosts provide this dashboard for you to manage your hosting options. ScalaHosting is no different, as it offers this standard control panel interface with its shared hosting packages.

However, ScalaHosting’s proprietary SPanel offers a similar degree of functionality as cPanel, but it’s optimized for cloud VPS hosting platforms. It’s the default dashboard for ScalaHosting’s cloud and VPS hosting plans, but you can also buy an SPanel license to use on other hosting platforms.

From SPanel, you’ll be able to set up and adjust your hosting settings, email accounts, or server instance(s). Its neat and well-organized design makes it so you always know what the options available to you are and how to access them.

Easy WordPress Management With SWordPress

Continuing a tradition of naming its proprietary technology with an “S” prefix, ScalaHosting includes the SWordPress Manager on all of its WordPress Hosting plans. SWordPress gives you access to full control over your WordPress account and site settings directly from SPanel, as well as giving you tools for activating or deactivating automatic updates and security locks.

Easy Access To Monitoring and Analytics Tools

From SPanel, you can access a bunch of useful statistics about your website, such as information about how visitors are finding your site, where they’re located, and even what browser and operating system they use. You can use this information to optimize your website to appeal to your biggest user bases, or to improve the experience for not-so-common requests.

Even if ScalaHosting’s analytics are pleasantly in depth, being able to check out website analytics doesn’t exactly make it unique. In fact, I’d dare to say that any host worth their salt lets you revise at least the most critical information.

That said, the tools SPanel gives you for website monitoring aren’t as common. From your SPanel, you can set up custom monitoring for your website’s uptime, average speed, SSL status and more.

For our performance reviews, we prefer to do our tests with a trusted collection of third-party systems. Still, if you’re looking to monitor various aspects of your online properties, ScalaHosting’s in-house tools can save you a lot of time.

Remarkable All-Around Performance

A web host lives and dies by its performance. ScalaHosting could have all the features in the world and it would still not be worth recommending if it offered sub-par results. Which is why I’m happy to say that ScalaHosting surpassed all my expectations when it came to performance.

Once again, I should note that I tested ScalaHosting’s Entry Cloud plan. Naturally, this means that it performed better than it would have with a budget shared hosting plan. Still, the results were impressive even when compared with other entry-level cloud hosting plans.

ScalaHosting has two proprietary data centers in the US and one in Bulgaria. While that might not seem like much, you can also choose from a wide list of integrated Amazon Web Services (AWS) centers across the globe. The list of AWS data centers includes 4 locations in North America, 2 in the UK, 2 in the EU, 3 in Asia, 1 in India, and 1 in Australia.

To assess the quality of ScalaHosting properly, my team and I ran it through the testing process we apply to all web hosts, which you can read about here. The short version is that we built a completely functional landing page with HD images, scrolling effects, and tons of text. Basically, everything that an average website would include. We hosted that landing page on ScalaHosting and then ran continuously monitored tests for two weeks.

Below, you’ll see how ScalaHosting performed across our different testing platforms.

GTmetrix

We used GTMetrix to test the local performance of our site. After selecting a source center in the US (one near our site’s New York data center), we set up GTMetrix to perform hourly speed tests for two weeks.

ScalaHosting surpassed expectations with a typical loading time of just under 1s, often dipping as low as 0.6s.

For reference, many top advisors on the web recommend that a page should load in under 2s to keep the bounce rate as low as possible. Top budget shared hosting providers often hover around 1s, so this is a respectable number for an entry-level cloud hosting plan.

I chose OpenLiteSpeed as my server software as it was the best possible option for a WordPress site without having to pay an additional license fee, and installed the LCSWP plugin. Other than that, however, I didn’t do anything to alter my testing results.

I should mention that while there were some peaks in loading time, there were only four brief occurrences during an entire week of testing. As a result, I didn’t really factor it into my results.

Sucuri Load Time Tester

To test ScalaHosting’s global performance, I ran my site through Sucuri Load time tester. The results might not seem mind-blowing at first, but considering I wasn’t using a content delivery network (CDN), the fact I was able to achieve speeds of under 3 seconds on the other side of the world is impressive.

You might notice more than a couple of failed tests, but these can likely be attributed to the provider blocking Sucuri Load Time Tester. In other words, those failed tests are not so much evidence of failure as they are a failure to get evidence.

Global performance could be greatly improved by using a CDN. In fact, I really recommend that you set up access to one on your site – ScalaHosting includes support for the free version of Cloudflare CDN, for example. However, we test all our hosts out-of-the-box in order to give you the most accurate possible idea of how a host will perform if you don’t happen to be a system administrator.

UptimeRobot

ScalaHosting has a 99.9% uptime guarantee and even offers compensation in the form of credits if your uptime ever drops below that. Just to reiterate, ScalaHosting will pay you if your site drops below the uptime guarantee.

To fully test this bold offer, I ran my site through UptimeRobot, which, as you might have guessed from the name, constantly monitors a website’s uptime. As much as I would’ve liked those hosting credits, I can report that ScalaHosting maintained 100% uptime throughout the entire testing period.

Very Efficient Support, but Not Thorough Enough

ScalaHosting offers a lot of channels for customer support. You can reach billing and technical support 24/7 through live chat (and I mean actual live chat, not one of those automated robots put on this earth to annoy you personally), email, and ticket. If you want to contact sales, you can also do so via phone Monday through Friday from 4:30 AM to 7 PM EDT.

To test the quality of its support, I contacted the support team through every possible channel with different questions of varying degrees of technicality. First, I sent out an email asking for general tips for improving my site’s performance, as well as asking why my site appeared as “not secured” on ScalaHosting’s client base.

I received an answer in under 20 minutes. It wasn’t very comprehensive, especially regarding the optimization tips. While “install a CDN” might not be that detailed a response, it did help me resolve my issue.

Next, I contacted live chat. Once again, I opened by asking for tips on how to optimize my site. My support representative shared a link to the knowledge base and closed the conversation almost immediately. I tried contacting live chat again to ask about ScalaHosting’s RAM and processing technology. The representative told me that the question was too technical for him and to contact support through a ticket. So I did.

The answer was very short and to the point, but at least it didn’t leave me hoping for more.

Finally, I tried contacting sales through their phone number. Though I tried calling at two different hours on two different days, no one picked up the phone either time. At least they didn’t leave me on the line for long, as an automated voice told me almost immediately that the sales team was unavailable before hanging up.

Overall, I have no complaints regarding the support team’s swiftness or the number of available support channels. However, while brevity is the soul of wit, I could’ve stood to have less witty interactions with support if it meant addressing my doubts further.

Slightly Pricier Than Average, but Worth Its Value

Most hosting providers charge a discounted fee for the first payment term, and then up the price afterward. While ScalaHosting isn’t any different, the leap from the discounted fee to the price after renewal isn’t as steep as the average. In short, ScalaHosting is a little more expensive than the market average for shared hosting before the first renewal, and pretty much on par afterward.

That changes if you decide to go for something more advanced than shared hosting, as ScalaHosting offers some of the lowest rates for cloud and managed VPS hosting. Not only that, but it also includes an unconditional money-back guarantee for unused resources on all of its cloud and VPS plans. That means that if you decide to terminate your contract early, you’ll get reimbursed for any resources left unused.

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If you decide that one of ScalaHosting’s cloud or VPS plans is right for you, I recommend selecting the longest available billing cycle, as it will get you the best value per month. And, once again, there’s very little risk, as you can ask for a refund of all unused resources at any time.

Finally, ScalaHosting also offers a more traditional 30-day money-back guarantee, which means that you have a month to test if the service is right for you, completely risk-free.