How to Choose a Good Web Hosting Provider?
There are so many hosting providers out there so it’s extremely difficult to find a good provider especially if you don’t have a lot of experience dealing with web hosts. Do you need recommendations? Well, we did the hard work for you testing many different web hosts and we came up with Scala Hosting. Scala Hosting offers managed Cloud Hosting with scalability, high speed and security. They will also migrate any number of websites for you over to Scala Hosting for free.
So how do we choose the best hosting provider? There are 3 things that you should look at.
1. Reviews
Look up the company on reputable review sites like Trustpilot. Trustpilot has fraud detection software which detects and removes fake reviews. Customers are much more likely to leave negative reviews if they had a bad experience so if a web host has mostly good reviews, then it’s a good sign. We recommend choosing web hosts with at least a review score of 4.5/5 on a reputable review site.
2. 24/7 Support
The next thing to look at is whether the web hosting company has 24/7 support. What if your website goes down on a Sunday at 5AM? This is why 24/7 support is so important. A lot of web hosts have 24/7 support and this is normally advertised on their website as one of its main advantages but it’s important to actually test the support before buying. They will either be available via live chat, email, phone or support ticket so ask them some pre-sales questions at different times of the day and weekends to make sure you get timely responses 24/7.
3. Performance
Performance is probably one of the most important things in a web host. You want a web host with good uptime and speed but how do you know if a web hosting company offers high performing servers? Let’s go back to point number 1 and 2. Look at the reviews and if there is no mention of slow servers and bad uptime, then that is a good sign. People will always complain in the reviews if they face these problems. You should also check reviews which have tested the speed and uptime of the web host.
Going to point 2, ask their sales team. Of course if you ask them about their speed and uptime, they are going to tell you it’s very good so don’t ask them that. Instead ask them what hardware their servers are using. Find out about the RAM and CPU that their servers are using.
Reviews
Scala Hosting has an average review score of 4.9/5 on Trustpilot which is an extremely impressive score. Even the founder of Joomla, Brian Teeman endorses Scala Hosting. Don’t believe us? Check for yourself. Click here to access their website and watch the video of Brian Teeman.
24/7 Support
They offer 24/7 support and claim that their live chat response time is within 30 seconds and their ticket response time is 15 minutes. Every time we used their live chat, we did get a response within 30 seconds and they normally start looking at your tickets within 5-10 minutes of you submitting it. Sometimes they take longer than 15 minutes to respond but that is because they need time to fix the issue. The quality of the support is very good and they managed to fix all the issues we had.
Performance
We asked them what CPU they are using and they told us that they use the Intel Xeon Gold 6444Y processors. These are CPUs released in 2023 which are very good CPUs. Generally speaking, the newer the CPUs the better they are. They also use enterprise grade NVME SSD storage and offer unlimited bandwidth.
We tested a WordPress website on their Managed Cloud VPS and it loaded in 639ms (tested using pingdom.com) which is a very good speed. They offer various web servers like Apache, Nginx, Litespeed Enterprise and OpenLiteSpeed. Litespeed Enterprise requires a paid Litespeed license but the other web servers are totally free.
We recommend going with LiteSpeed Enterprise or OpenLiteSpeed as it is the fastest web server available. For our tests, we went with the OpenLiteSpeed web server along with LiteSpeed cache. Both are available for free and provide the best speeds and performance. Scala Hosting’s support will help you install OpenLiteSpeed for you and the LiteSpeed cache WordPress plugin is available for free. However, Nginx and LiteSpeed support is only available on their VPS plans.
We used Scala Hosting for over 1 year and had 100% uptime. Scala hosting uses cloud servers and keeps 3 copies of your data on 3 nodes so if there is a hardware failure, your VPS hosting will automatically migrate to a healthy node.This is why they can achieve such great uptime.
So what other features does Scala Hosting provide?
Data Centers
Scala Hosting offers 3 datacenter locations; USA Dallas, USA New York and Sofia, Bulgaria. They also offer managed AWS VPS plans from data centers in many different locations including, Japan, South Korea, Australia, United Kingdom, Singapore and Canada. Of course, these are just some of the locations you can choose from, there are actually many more.
Hosting Plans
Scala Hosting offers several hosting plans including shared hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), WordPress Hosting, Email Hosting and Managed Cluster Hosting.
Their shared, wordpress and email hosting starts from just $2.95 if you opt for their 12 months or months plan. This is an introductory offer so the renewal price will be slightly higher but considering the quality of the host, the price is worth it.
In our opinion, their best hosting plan is their Managed VPS plans because they provide dedicated resources so you will not be sharing your CPU or RAM with anyone else. You can also easily upgrade your plan and add more CPU cores, RAM or NVME SSD storage. Extra CPU cores cost $10 each, RAM $3 each and 10GB storage costs $2 each. You can add up to 24 CPU Cores, 128GB of RAM and 2000GB of disk space. After you upgrade your plan, all you need to do is restart the server and you can start using your new resources. No migration is required so scaling your VPS server is extremely simple.
If you need more than the above resources, they also offer a managed cluster solution which is used by several organizations such as the “Commissions of elections of the Philippines”. The cluster solution can scale to hundreds of servers so you do not need to worry about scalability.
SPanel
Scala Hosting has created their own control panel called SPanel. SPanel is designed to be a more user-friendly and resource-efficient alternative to cPanel. The inclusion of SPanel at no extra cost is a significant advantage for users looking for a powerful yet cost-effective control panel. SPanel provides all the features you would need like file manager, email management, backups, cron jobs, database manager, SSL certificates and much more.
Security
Scala Hosting takes security seriously, offering a range of features to keep websites secure. Their SShield Security Protection provides real-time monitoring and protection against malware and cyberattacks. With an impressive 99.998% effectiveness rate, SShield is a crucial asset for users looking to safeguard their website. Additionally, Scala Hosting offers free SSL certificates and regular security updates to ensure ongoing protection.
Why not try Scala Hosting, they offer an anytime unconditional money-back guarantee. Is it really unconditional? Well, we never used it because we never had to.
