Scala Hosting Worth Every Penny

To make this review accurate I bought the Scala Hosting cheapest “Mini” plan which costs $0.99  trial month. One of the Scala hosting technicians gave me interesting information on how Scala hosting is operating. 

Scala Hosting started in 2003 in Afganistan. This hosting has affordable prices and what caught my eye is the 90k monthly visits per month for only $3,95 with 36 months plan. Because I never gonna get that amount of traffic on a website that I’ve used for testing purposes so I asked the support of Scala Hosting if there is any catch and this was their answer:

Shared vs WordPress hosting:

Kiril B.

The plans are almost identical.

Both are coming with a standard cPanel control panel.

The hosting account is managed but like a shared hosting account. It is not the same as a managed cloud VPS with sPanel.

A huge amount of traffic for small prices:

Kiril B.

Those numbers are just an average estimate. In some cases, we have websites with much more than 90k visits per month and it isn’t an issue whatsoever, as those websites are very well optimized and use very little resources.

On the other hand, there are also some websites that are very poorly optimized where even just a few visits could cause a very resource usage, so it mostly depends on the websites and the people behind them.

Then I asked what is the difference between poorly optimized vs well-optimized site is it something like 3MB vs 0.5MB and the answer was:

Kiril B.

It depends a lot, but 0.5 MB site vs 3 MB site shouldn’t have a high difference. What I was talking about is more drastic differences like a website being 1 MB in size and a second one being over 15 MB, as we have such cases.

We do not check how many visitors specifically a website has, we only check how much resources an account uses overall.

Again, keep in mind that those are just average estimated visits. We have ran those tests with simple HTML websites with little content so they can differ a lot depending on the website.

From what he said above even if you have a poorly optimized website you can expect 60 000 visits monthly which is way higher than WP Engine‘s 25 000 visits monthly with the cheapest $35/mo plan, which is surprising.

MySQL query limit:

Kiril B.

Scala Hosting has no MySQL query limit.

The only issue may come if the account is generating too much load on the server.

You can have up to 30 connections per user at the same.

Like all the other hostings, Scala isn’t perfect and sometimes has short downtimes but from my test, the 99.9% uptime seems precise. Scala passed my test when I installed, for instance, Avada and import big demo with content like Avada Classic Shop. Many hostings struggled with this test as MySQL query limit exceeded and I couldn’t import the demo. WP Engine, HostGator and SiteGround passed this test easily while I had some problems with A2 hosting (once imported fully, once MySQL query limit exceeded, the website went unresponsive for about half min and went back) maybe was a busy time, the hosting that keeps failing this test was iPage and I do have to contact their support to reset the MySQL query limit in order to import the demo in two runs part by part, when the MySQL query limit occurred database goes blank and new WordPress installation wizard starts.  Keep in mind that I’m using only the cheapest plans of these hostings and iPage cost only $23 annually.

Speed

Scala Hosting is speed is on par with HostGator which is pretty good. From my test, WP Engine and SiteGround were a little bit faster but Scala was close. Considering the price of the Scala hosting speed is great. The biggest part in website speed plays the optimization itself, here tutorial for WordPress speed optimization.

Another surprising thing about Scala Hosting is that they utilize 100 to 200 accounts per server which is on par with WP Engine but for much less price.

Cloud hosting

Every single hosting company is taking cloud plans differently. I’ve asked Scala hosting technician what’s the catch why the price is so much lower compared to SiteGround cloud hosting plans.

This was his answer:

Kiril B.

There is no catch. We are two separate companies with different pricing policies.

SSL

Every plan includes an easy one-click installation of Let’s Encrypt SSL.

Datacenter question:

Kiril B.

We are using two data centre – One in Sofia, Bulgaria, Europe and one in Dallas, Texas, USA.

The data center in Dallas is owned by Tierpoint. The one in Sofia, Bulgaria – by Telepoint.

The plans that surprise me the most are the Unmanaged SSD Cloud VPS plans.

On the question of how they share the servers I’ve got a surprising answer:

Kiril B.

The unmanaged server comes with an initial OS installation.

Afterward, the customer is fully responsible for installing any software, monitoring it, and making sure that it functions properly.

Any assistance on our end for unmanaged services is paid aditionally.

The server would by managed by you so you can install or reinstall it at your convenience.

The allocated resources are completely separate and independent.

Check Scala hosting here.