ScalaHosting Plans and Pricing
While ScalaHosting specializes in Managed Cloud VPS Hosting, they also offer lower cost WordPress Hosting plans, as well as their Entry WP Cloud Hosting plan—which is what we are reviewing here.
Pricing for WordPress hosting starts at $2.95 mo. for a single site plan and $5.95 mo. for unlimited website hosting. The Entry WP Cloud plan allows you to experience dedicated resources, higher speed and security, along with more premium features in a cloud hosting environment. With a multi-year plan, you can currently lock in a low price of $14.95 mo.
ScalaHosting Features
The ScalaHosting Entry WP Cloud plan includes some very impressive features such as:
- Isolated Cloud Environment
- Unlimited Website Hosting
- Unlimited Databases
- Unlimited Email Accounts
- 50GB NVMe SSD
- Automatic and Manual Data Backups
- Website Cloning
- Website Staging
- Free Domain for First Year
- Dedicated IP
- SShield Real-Time Cyber Security
- SPanel Dashboard
- SWordPress Account Interface
- Priority Support
ScalaHosting Control Panel (SPanel)
The ScalaHosting user control panel, or SPanel as its named, is fairly straight-forward and intuitive to use. In your welcome email, you’ll receive a link to create your SPanel account. However, if you don’t have the email handy, you can login to ScalaHosting and customer support will help you set it up—as was the case for me. SPanel functions very much like cPanel. I found it very easy to use—maybe even a little bit better than cPanel.
ScalaHosting Website Propagation
Creating a WordPress site with ScalaHosting is easy and propagation time was excellent. To create your WordPress website, first create your account. You’ll then have three options. You can perform a traditional WordPress installation, install WordPress with the Spectra website builder to make things easier and quicker, or you can create an empty account if you want to use a different web application.
If you’re using an existing domain (e.g. at GoDaddy, etc.), update your NameServers and install the free SSL on you domain. Once your new domain ip propagates (in my case it was almost immediate), you’re good to go!
ScalaHosting WordPress Management (SWordPress Manager)
With the ScalaHosting WordPress Manager or SWordPress as its named, you can log into your WordPress Admin, or you can even manage items such as themes and plugins directly. You can also view your LiteSpeed performance.
ScalaHosting Website Speed and Performance
ScalaHosting has done a really good job combining their dedicated and optimized VPS environment along with OpenLiteSpeed and other technology enhancements to produce fast, high performing websites.
In our testing and experience using ScalaHosting, website speed and performance was excellent. Core Web Vitals were also very impressive.
Below are some of our sample speed test results from GTmetrix.
ScalaHosting Data Backup
ScalaHosting includes automatic data backups as well as the ability to easily create manual backups whenever you need to. I especially like how you can specifically choose what data you want backed up, how it should be stored, and in what format it should be created in.
The downside here is that by default, the automated daily backups are overwritten each time. If you want more data retention, you’ll have to pay for additional services.
ScalaHosting Security (SShield Security System)
The security features included with ScalaHosting were also impressive.
And, for even more protection, you get a toggle switch option on your WordPress Manager to activate a security lock that limits access to your directories and files to prevent hackers from infecting your website. Just remember that you can’t install themes or plugins while the security lock is on, so you’ll have to disable it when you want to customize your site, then switch it back on afterward.
ScalaHosting Website Staging
Website staging is very easy to perform from your WordPress Manager.
Initially, I did run into some issues when pushing my staging changes back to the live site. Formatting was messed up or pages and items were not available. I contacted support and they were able to help me out.
I’m happy to report that website staging now appears to be working correctly.
My initial contact with live chat support did not result in a resolution. I was eventually able to resolve the issue by creating a support ticket. The issue was escalated to Level 3 support where it was reported back to me that a bug had been fixed.
ScalaHosting Customer Support
While overall I would give customer support a thumbs up, Level 1 chat support could be just a bit more consistent. My first contact with support was very quick. Response time excellent. My Second attempted contact was unsuccessful. Waited a long time online and no one responded. This does appear to be an isolated incident, as I’ve since been able to successfully connect with support whenever needed.
On another issue, live chat support was not able to resolve the issue. I had to open a support ticket. Eventually, the ticket was escalated to Level 3 support, where I’m happy to report it was resolved (see above).
Overall, I would rate customer support at ScalaHosting to be good. However, Level 1 support could be improved slightly for more consistency. On the other hand, I found Level 3 Support to be excellent. Below is a screenshot of my ticket.
Interview with ScalaHosting CEO Chris Rusev
Recently, I had the pleasure of chatting with ScalaHosting CEO Chris Rusev to learn even more about the company. Here is a portion of that interview:
Web Hosting Cat: What are the main goals of the mission and vision for ScalaHosting?
Chris Rusev: Our main mission is democratizing the web hosting industry by making managed cloud hosting accessible to everyone, including students, developers, and SME businesses. Currently, more than 60% of all websites globally still rely on shared hosting – an ancient technology that has only one advantage – it’s cheap. However, everything else is a drawback. Sharing a server with hundreds of strangers introduces numerous risks. If even a single user experiences a traffic spike or suffers a security breach, all other users on the same server will face slow speeds and potential security issues. Additionally, hosting companies today heavily oversell resources in the budget segment due to intense competition, making shared hosting even less reliable.
WHC: What would you say are the biggest advantages ScalaHosting offers versus the competition?
CR: Our in-house developed SPanel is undoubtedly the biggest advantage we currently have. It makes the management of a cloud VPS easy, and similar to a cPanel shared hosting experience. Most importantly, we develop SPanel based not on what we want but on what the user wants. Also, SPanel is the only hosting control panel that can turn every self-managed cloud service, e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, etc., into fully managed thanks to the 24/7 live technical support via chat and ticket. Many SMEs struggle with the complexities of services like AWS and Google Cloud, which require extensive sysadmin and IT knowledge. SPanel addresses this challenge with its unique “fully managed” feature, bridging the gap and empowering users to leverage high-performance cloud services effortlessly. This game-changing functionality could revolutionize the cloud industry by making high-performing services, like AWS and Google Cloud, more accessible and usable for a broader audience.
We can offer high-performance hosting services thanks to the synergy between our hardware and software. Since we own both the data center infrastructure and SPanel, we can design them to communicate with each other in the most efficient way – similar to what Apple does.
WHC: What are your recommendations for choosing either a Managed Cloud VPS hosting plan versus one of the WordPress plans?
CR: We actually have a managed cloud VPS plan on our WP product page – the Entry Cloud. The last is our best-selling solution these days. The Entry Cloud is not listed on our managed VPS pages because we consider it a hybrid solution where most of the shared hosting specifics, like the low price, unlimited accounts, bandwidth, etc., are kept, but the VPS benefits like guaranteed resources, unique IP, super-fast loading speeds and more are kept. Other than that, if the choice is between a managed VPS and a WP shared plan, the last I’d only recommend to small websites, e.g. small blogs, business card websites, etc, and to website owners whose main consideration is the cost.
WHC: What will we see from ScalaHosting in the future?
CR: In a couple of months, we will introduce containerized (Dockers) SPanel functionality, which take this game to a new level. Combining this with our unique Multi-Cluster technology will help us cover all types of hosting users, from the smallest B2C businesses to the largest enterprises.
Recommendation – Should You Choose ScalaHosting?
ScalaHosting is a solid choice for experienced website owners and agencies looking for high-performing, high-availability websites for their business or clients. Overall, I was definitely very satisfied with their hosting services. The SPanel interface was easy to use. Features included with their Entry WP Cloud Hosting plan were impressive. Website propagation time was excellent, as was their website speed and performance.
I would like to see more data retention included with their automated data backups. As I mentioned above, while you can perform manual backups whenever needed, the daily automatic backups are overwritten each time by default. So, if you need more data retention (e.g. 14 days, 30 days), you’ll have to pay an additional fee.
However, if you’re looking for Managed Cloud Hosting, and prefer working within a VPS environment, then ScalaHosting is definitely worth trying out.
