Greetings everyone. Alan here, your hosting expert with a review of a web hosting company called Scalahosting. This very site is actually running on their infrastructure. I will start off the review by saying that thus far I’m very happy with them. I am most of all happy with their excellent support. I don’t think I’ve had such excellent support from a web hosting company before. I’ve tried quite a few of them so I should know.
I heard about them in a kind of roundabout fashion. I was doing some googling for an alternative to cPanel because honestly I am tired of overpaying for a product that doesn’t seem like it’s worth the money they’re asking for. The constant licensing increase with cPanel has me a bit ticked off (as I’m sure a lot of you out there too). So as I was googling cPanel alternatives I came across SPanel, which is an in-house custom control panel built by the folks at Scalahosting. It has a familiar look if you’re coming from the cPanel world. SPanel is meant to be a comfortable alternative to cPanel and it maintains a lot of the same look and feel along with also bringing all the same functionality. One big difference that I noticed is that SPanel puts a LOT lower strain on your server resources. SPanel is the default control panel on all their hosting offerings. Their reseller program does give you a choice between cPanel and SPanel though. But enough about Spanel. Let’s get into the meat of the review and start off with a list of all the hosting services they offer:
Shared Hosting:
They offer 4 shared hosting packages at the moment.
Mini – $2.95 /month on a 36 month term
- Shared CPU & RAM
- Standard Security
- 10GB Fixed NVMe SSD
- 1 Website
- Unmetered Bandwidth
- Free SSL Certificates
- Free 1-click Installer
- Unlimited Emails & DBs
- Daily Offsite Backups
Start – $5.95 /month on a 36 month term
- Shared CPU & RAM
- Standard Security
- 50GB Fixed NVMe SSD
- Unlimited Websites
- Unmetered Bandwidth
- Free SSL Certificates
- Free 1-click Installer
- Unlimited Emails & DBs
- Daily Offsite Backups
- Free Domain
- Real-time Malware Protection
Advanced – $9.95 /month on a 36 month term
- Shared CPU & RAM
- Standard Security
- 100GB Fixed NVMe SSD
- Unlimited Websites
- Unmetered Bandwidth
- Free SSL Certificates
- Free 1-click Installer
- Unlimited Emails & DBs
- Daily Offsite Backups
- Free Domain
- Real-time Malware Protection
- Priority Support (skip queue)
Entry Cloud (High Speed & Security)
- Guaranteed CPU & RAM
- High Security
- 50GB Upgradeable NVMe SSD
- Unlimited Websites
- Unmetered Bandwidth
- Free SSL Certificates
- Free 1-click Installer
- Unlimited Emails & DBs
- Daily Offsite Backups
- Free Domain
- Real-time Malware Protection
- Dedicated IP Address
- Priority Support (skip queue)
- Blacklist Monitoring
- Improved Inbox Delivery
- OpenLiteSpeed Caching
- Scalable Storage
- Sub-users and Collaborators
- Branding & Whitelabel
The great thing about all their shared hosting offering is that all your data will be on a NVMe drive for ultra fast data read/write which will translate into faster page load times for your sites. If I understand things correctly only their Entry Cloud hosting package support OpenLiteSpeed web server, the other packages likely use Apache. The Entry Cloud gives you dedicated CPU and RAM resources, hence the “entry cloud” name – basically it’s the stepping stone to their higher end VPS server offering which we will get to next.
Managed Cloud VPS
The managed cloud VPS offering is what I would recommend if you need serious server horsepower to host either a LOT of sites of sites with high traffic load. You cannot get away with hosting a busy website or platform on a shared hosting plan. As with their shared hosting they have 4 different tiers of managed cloud servers, but one neat thing is you can always build your own custom setup because they have a custom VPS build tool.
Build #1
- UNMETERED Bandwidth
Build #2
- UNMETERED Bandwidth
Build #3
- UNMETERED Bandwidth
Build #4
- UNMETERED Bandwidth
No matter what package you choose you will get 100% dedicated resources. These are not shared VPS servers! Price wise I find their prices to be pretty competitive. I’m sure you could find cheaper prices elsewhere but often you get what you pay for. I’ve had some terrible experiences when I was lured by lower prices. I won’t go into all the nitty gritty of the features that your managed VPS server gives you but suffice it to say they’ve got all your needs covered – trust me, I’ve checked. All the features that you may have come to expect from various cPanel VPS servers are all here – ie one click Script installers, free SSL certificates, etc.
Go to the Scalahosting website and from the top menu choosing Hosting, and then Managed Cloud VPS to find out all the details regarding what features your managed VPS offers.
If you are all about that WordPress life, then their WordPress hosting packages are what you need to look at. There is not much of a difference as far as specifications between their Shared hosting and the WordPress Hosting packages, but where their WordPress hosting differs slightly is that all their WordPress hosting packages allow you to use the OpenLiteSpeed web server and it seems this is true even for the cheapest package. The cool thing about OpenLiteSpeed is that not only that it’s a lightning feast web server but if you run this web server you gain access to the LSCache.
Check this graph out:
I run OpenLiteSpeed on my server with the LiteSpeedCache plugin for WordPress and its blazingly fast.
Now to discuss their network and datacenters.
Network and Data Centers:
They have their own data center infrastructure in 3 worldwide locations. USA New York, USA Dallas, and Europe (Sofia, Bulgaria)
I don’t know if you’re interested in all the geeky details, but if you are like me and you are I recommend you checkout Scalahosting’s website and scroll all the way to the bottom and click on Network and Data Centers.
I should of course mention that you can choose your preferred data center during the new customer sign-up process. I choose New York because I’m located in Canada and that is the closest data center to both me and my target audience.
When you get signed up as a customer you’ll be greeted by their Client Area which is pretty slick and contains all the stuff you need and nothing you don’t.
I think I will wrap up this review for now but I plan to write another follow up post in the future with a more long term review. So far I’m very happy with my hosting experience at Scalahosting.
For more details or to check them out please checkout the Scalahosting website.
Happy hosting to you all!
Cheers,
Alan