Scala Hosting Review

Scala Hosting was founded 13 years ago and has over 50,000+ clients worldwide.

Scala Hosting’s shared hosting is a semi-reliable choice for new or lower-traffic websites. While their servers’ loading time is solid, their uptime is unfortunately below average, which is their biggest downside.

Setting aside the uptime, you get feature-packed hosting plans that don’t break the bank, a straightforward way of testing their service out, and an excellent 24/7 support system.

Let’s take a closer look at what makes Scala Hosting’s shared hosting tick and what’s good or bad about their hosting service.

General Info & Hosting Overview

Pros of Using Scala Hosting

Scala Hosting offers an excellent variety of useful perks that play well into getting started with a new website or migrating an existing one. On top of that, their servers’ speed is reliable, and trying their service out is refreshingly smooth and flexible.

Let’s take a look at some of the strongest aspects of Scala Hosting’s shared hosting service.

1. Decent Loading Time

One of the main aspects to look at when choosing a website hosting service is its performance. Particularly noteworthy is the response time of the server when your visitors are coming to your site. There’s a clear link between the bounce rate and the page’s speed statistics in the modern world.

Scala Hosting’s last 6-month average load time is 528 ms.

Compared with the industry-leading website hosts (especially with A2 Hosting), this result is definitely not the best we’ve seen but is still decent.

2. Remote Daily Backups

Your website’s backups are highly important when you don’t just keep a static website. When you regularly change your website, there can be times when you need to revert to an older version for any reason.

Scala Hosting offers a great solution to ease your mind by keeping remote daily backups of your data for the last 7 days. You can usually get site backups for additional fees or have to do them yourself, but it’s refreshing to see it’s taken care of by this hosting service.

3. Responsive and Knowledgeable Customer Support

Scala Hosting’s customer support is available 24/7 through live chat and a ticket system. They also have a knowledge base where you can find answers to some of the basics about their service.

Scala Hosting advertises that they’ll answer any inquiries in 30 seconds over the live chat and 15 minutes through the ticket system. The great thing is that they keep this promise as we were greeted immediately after reaching out, and our follow-up questions were answered promptly.

Overall, the support experience was great and straightforward.

4. Free Domain and Site Migration

When you first sign up with Scala Hosting for more than a year, then you get a free domain name as a bonus perk. This freebie only covers the .com, .net, .org, .info, and .eu domain extensions, which are the most popular ones nevertheless.

While the free domain name is common with the other service providers, Scala Hosting steps up its game by giving you free site migrations. This means that they provide a seamless transition of all of your websites to their servers. However, be wary that their cheapest plan only hosts one website, so if you have multiple sites you want to migrate to Scala Hosting, then opt for a higher-tier plan.

Both of these perks come as valuable customer experience and take the hassle out of switching or signing up with a website hosting service.

5. Free SSL and CDN

Modern websites can’t properly function without a security protocol as even Google notifies their users if they’re about to enter a website without an SSL certificate.

Scala Hosting has made it simple for you by throwing in a free SSL certificate with Let’s Encrypt SSL. You can choose other SSL certificates during checkout, but this one is on the house with every plan.

To further improve visitors’ experience, they also give you a free Cloudflare CDN with every plan. This means that your website’s data is cached for returning visitors allowing for a smoother and faster response from your website.

6. 1-Click WordPress Install and Unlimited Email Accounts

WordPress is the most popular tool for creating your website. Scala Hosting has made it simple to install WordPress to your site with only one click. If you’re new to building websites or have created a few before using WordPress, you will enjoy the additional smoothness this perk gives you.

This feature also includes automatic updates, staging, cloning, and additional tools that make your life easier using WordPress.

In addition to 1-click WordPress Install, Scala Hosting also offers free unlimited email accounts with each of their shared hosting plans. Even though it’s not a rare sight in the hosting industry anymore, it still beats Bluehost for example, who only offers five email accounts with their cheapest plan.

7. 30-day Money-Back Guarantee

Scala Hosting does not offer a free trial, but you can safely test out their hosting service as you get a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you’re unsatisfied with their service after the first month, you can cancel your subscription with a no-questions-asked policy and get a full refund.

You also can try out their service for one month at a discounted price of $0.99/month. After that period, you either stick with them and choose a longer hosting plan or opt-out of their service.

These features give you an excellent opportunity to figure out if Scala Hosting’s service is for you. They’ve made the trial process super simple for their new customers.

8. Easy-to-Use Control Panel

Scala Hosting client area is easy to use and logical. From there you can access and change your billing information, domains, services, and even contact support if necessary.

Like many other hosts, Scala Hosting too uses cPanel as a control panel and you can find it under “Actions” on the left side of the client area. Their cPanel is very easy to use and you should find your way around there quickly, especially since you can also use the search bar to find all the necessary features for hosting.

Cons of Using Scala Hosting

With so many great features and a solid speed, i’s a pity that they have some limitations to their cheapest plan, but the price range for a higher-tier plan (starting from $5.95/mo) without these limitations isn’t a big price bump. Choosing the hosting plan mainly comes down to if you have only one site or multiple sites and the traffic level you expect. And also, there’s the uptime…

Let’s look at some of the downsides closer.

1. Poor Uptime of 99.89%

Scala Hosting’s uptime was an average of 99.89% during the past year (with four hours of downtime). That’s not good. Especially considering that your business’ profit is very much influenced by your site actually being available for the visitors.

Here’s the last 6-month average uptime of Scala Hosting’s servers:

• August 2022: 99.98%
• July 2022: 100%
• June 2022: 100%
• May 2022: 99.98%
• April 2022: 99.96%
• March 2022: 99.46%

2. Only One Website with the Cheapest Plan

If you’re looking for the cheapest deal, then Scala Hosting’s price levels are very competitive. However, when going for their cheapest offered plan, you have the limitation of hosting only one website.

You can bypass this limitation by upgrading your plan to a higher-tier one with some extra cost, which isn’t that expensive. For example, the price difference between the cheapest and the next tier plan is $2/month when going with a 3-year commitment.

It may seem like it’s not a lot, but it all depends on your budget, which is individual for every project.

3. Visitor Thresholds with Cheaper Plans

When picking a website hosting plan with Scala Hosting, bear in mind how much traffic you expect to your website each month. With each of the shared hosting plans, there are different CPU power levels that a specific plan gives you.

In simpler terms, they’ve estimated the level of traffic their plans can accommodate, starting from 30,000 visitors a month with the cheapest plan. In case your website exceeds the maximum visitor amount, your site’s performance may degrade. While you can plan for this ahead of time, it isn’t very flexible, especially for new websites.

However, you can always upgrade your plan to get more out of the servers to receive more traffic.

Scala Hosting Pricing, Hosting Plans & Quick Facts

Quick Facts

• Domain: Free 1st year, renewals start at $12.65/year.
• Ease of Signup: A straightforward process spread across a few steps.
• Money-Back: 30-day money-back guarantee. No free trial.
• Payment Methods: Credit Card, PayPal, bank transfer.
• Hidden Fees and Clauses: Renewal rates are higher than introductory rates but other than that, no hidden fees.
• Upsells: A few during the signup process but not very intrusive.
• Account Activation: Quick account activation.
• Control Panel and Dashboard: cPanel.
• Installation of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): 1-Click installation for over 100+ applications.

Do We Recommend Scala Hosting?

Yes and no.

Scala Hosting’s shared hosting features are great and they have solid loading times.

On the downside, they have some cheaper plan limitations and they are overall a bit too average to compete with some other hosts in the same price range. And most importantly, Scala Hosting’s uptime is way too below-average.

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